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Below are groups and resources (books, articles, websites, etc.) related to this topic. Click on an item’s title to go its resource page with author, publisher, description/abstract and other details, a link to the full text if available, as well as links to related topics in the Subject Index. You can also browse the Title, Author, Subject, Chronological, Dewey, LoC, and Format indexes, or use the Search box on the left. Particularly recommended items are flagged with a red logo:
2010-2019 Publications
2019
- Adversarial Interoperability
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A round-up of the EFF's writing on 'adverserial interoperabillity' which is necessary for creating a decentralized internet free from corporate monopolies.
- All Massacres Will Become 'Alleged Massacres' If We Don't Pay Attention
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The greatest enemy of all journalists – and all politicians – is the failure of institutional, historical memory.
- Alliance statement: Solidarity with the popular uprising in Sudan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Statement of allliance by the Aliiance of Middle Eastern Socialists for the ongoing uprising in Sudan which erupted on December 19th, 2018.
- Amazon Is Coaching Cops on How to Obtain Surveillance Footage Without a Warrant
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Amazon's home surveillance company Ring is coaching police on how to use their technology which simultaneously provides a source of advertising for Amazon.
- Amazon vs. the Socialists in Seattle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In what may turn out to be a preview of the U.S. presidential election, with the ruling class hellbent on stopping Bernie Sanders at all costs, big business in Seattle is carrying out an unprecedented assault of corporate PAC money against socialist and progressive candidates in this year’s elections.
- Amazon's Ring Planned Neighborhood 'Watch Lists' Built on Facial Recognition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Amazon's plan to create proactive "watch lists" based on supposed suspicious activity - including facial recognition software - seen by their Ring cameras should alarm anyone who cares about privacy.
- American Visitors to the Gestapo Museum Draw Their Own Conclusions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An exploration of the ethics of drawing comparisons from present-day injustices to Nazi atrocities.
- Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Conspiracy theories in general tend to be crude and simplistic, more often than not reflecting the nature of the people who indulge them. But when the conspiracy theory is mingled with antisemitism – as with the Rothschild rot – it represents a particular failure of the imagination, a particularly null and void exercise in dehumanisation.
- Angela Davis: Relevant as Ever After Thirty Years
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at how Angela Davis's work in Women, Culture, and Politics (1989) applies today.
- Another Empire's Boot Stomps on Ireland
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A civilian airport in Ireland is being used as a hub by the US military.
- The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Interview with Paul Holborow, organising secretary of the Anti Nazi League in 1977-1980.
- Anti-Muslim Bigotry and Far-Right Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Far-right ideology is fuelled by such a large mishmash of ideas that censoring anti-Muslim rhetoric is futile for stopping attacks.
- Antisemitism Claims have One Goal: To Stop Jeremy Corbyn Winning Power
The Jewish community’s alienation from Labour has been years in the making Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A supposed antisemitism crisis in Britain's Labour party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader has erupted back into the headlines.
- Apocalypse of Our Times
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of Gerald Horne's "Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism," a look at the 17th century origins of the slave trade.
- Are Israel's spies stealing your data?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Many Israeli spies go into careers in surveillance software bringing techniques that are used to violate the privacy of Palestinians into everyday commercial software.
- Argentina's Indigenous People Fight for Land Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Indigenous people in Argentina live with the constant threat of eviction on land to which they own no title. Much of their predicament is due to colonial laws and attitudes that persist even though constitutional changes now recognize Indigenous land rights as an urgent issue. Deforestation due to expanding agriculture exacerbates this conflict.
- As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, the Party's Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic and Pro-War Than Republicans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 As President Trump announces plans to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan Democrats have seemingly adopted a pro-war stance in greater numbers than Republicans.
- As Long as Grass Grows
The Indigenous Struggle for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 A call to action on behalf of indigenous environmental justice that is deeply grounded in the histories and legacies of settler colonialism and the nonnative environmental movement. Understanding this past, the author believes, is fundamental to reshaping the future.
- Assange revolutionized journalism, and the elite will never forgive him
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Julian Assange's treatment by governments and mainstream media shows how he is a threat to the former and shames the latter.
- Assange's Indictment Treats Journalism as a Crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The charges against Assange send a message to journalists that they are in danger for doing their jobs. The UK can and should deny extradition of Assange to the US.
- Australian investigative journalist exposes Guardian/New York Times betrayal of Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Sources reveal new first-hand information exposing the extent of the betrayal of Julian Assange by the Guardian and the New York Times and refute lies both publications have used to smear the WikiLeaks founder.
- Australian investigative journalist exposes Guardian/New York Times betrayal of Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Australian journalist Mark Davis HAS revealed new first-hand information exposing the extent of the betrayal of Julian Assange by the Guardian and the New York Times, and refuting the lies both publications have used to smear the WikiLeaks founder.
- Bank Report Reveals Where Ruling Class Lives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The 2019 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report provides a glimpse at the inequality that the neoliberal era has produced, who has benefitted and those who have been left behind.
- BDS: Repression and Progress
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Short piece about recent BDS actions and attempts to censor pro-Palestinian protest.
- Behind the popular revolt in Sudan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Interview with journalist and former Sudanese Communist Party activist Rashid Saeed Yagoub. Amgad Fareid Eltayeb outlines the situation and background to the revolt in Sudan. Also, a solidarity statement issued by the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists.
- Berlin Tax Office withdraws charitable status from Nazi victims' organisation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Berlin Tax Office has withdrawn the charitable status of one of the largest and most long-established anti-fascist associations in Germany jeopardizing its abillity to continue its work.
- Betraying the Kurds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Many debates about Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria ignore the overall illegitmacy of military-political intervention.
- Beyond Corporate Power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 By concentrating on corporate power we can end up looking to the state for solutions. But the only way to achieve even the moderate reforms necessary is through revolutionary mass movements.
- Black Liberation Struggle: The Key to American Socialist Revolution
Part Two Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Everybody is familiar with Marx's famous saying, in Capital, Vol. 1 (1867), that "labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." This was more than a moral appeal against slavery. It was a statement of fact: Marx recognized that so long as half the country was dominated by slavery, workers would never be able to fight for even basic trade-union rights. The Civil War paved the way for the growth of American capitalism and the labor movement.
- The Boeing Way: Blaming Dead Pilots
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The House Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation held a hearing about the recent crashes of Boeing 737 MAXs. The Representatives (many of whom received campaign contributions from Boeing) actively tried to shift blame from the company and place it on the dead pilots.
- Bolivia's universal healthcare is model for the world, says UN
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Bolivia has implemented universal healthcare to provide free care to its poorest citizens. Although controversial with the country's doctors the program is lauded by the UN.
- Brazilian dam disaster 'is part of a pattern'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A team of Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) academics is marking the international day of action for rivers by hanging out the dirty laundry of a very dirty company.
- Breach of Ethics
Leaked Chats Between Brazilian Judge and Prosecutor Who Imprisoned Lula Reveal Prohibited Collaboration and Doubts Over Evidence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Leaked documents show that Sergio Moro, a judge at the time, collaborated heavily with investigators in Operation Car Wash, a serious breach of judicial impartiality. Even critics of Lula who consider him corrupt doubt the veracity of aspects of the investigation.
- Breaking the Impasse
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of Cracks in the Wall by Ben White, a hopeful book about weakening pro-Zionism in public consensus.
- Breaking the Left's Gay Taboo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A review of Allen Young's "Left, Gay and Green: a Writer's Life" that includes much historical context and the reviewer's personal history.
- Breaking the Silence: Inside the Israeli Right's Campaign to Silence an anti-Occupation Group
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Breaking the Silence, an Israeli anti-occupation group that collects testimonies of Israeli soldiers operating in Palestinian territories has been targeted by moles and other attacks.
- Brexit Divides the British Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Short commentary on three leftist perspectives on Brexit. The articles discussed are linked in the main piece.
- A Brief History of US Concentration Camps
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An overview of ethnic cleansing and civilian concentration camps in the US starting with the Trail of Tears.
- Britain's Chief Rabbi is Helping to Stoke antisemitism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not only misrepresented the known facts about Labour and its supposed antisemitism crisis. He has not only interfered in an overtly, politically partisan manner in the December 12, 2019 election campaign by suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn -- against all evidence -- is an antisemite.
- Britain's Witchfinders are Ready to Burn Jeremy Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The suspension of MP Chris Williamson for alleged anti-semitism is part of a smear campaign against Corbyn. It is also a by-product of all criticism of Israel being labelled anti-semitism.
- British MPs won't get to see 'WitchHunt' in the House of Commons - the very place it needs to be shown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A screening of a documentary - made by Jewish Labour party members - about charges of anti-semitism in the British Labour Party has been cancelled.
- Broiler chickens: The defining species of the Anthropocene?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Broiler chickens may be distinct and ubiquitous enough as a human-modified species that their fossil record could justify calling our era the Anthropocene.
- Building resistance to Canada's destructive mining industry
Review of Joan Kuyek's book Unearthing Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In her book Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community from the Mining Industry, long-time activist Joan Kuyek brilliantly shares lessons from decades of fighting environmental and community disruption by Canada’s mining corporations.
- The Burning of Highlander Center: a Fascist-like Attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Highlander Research and Education Center was burned to the ground in New Market, Tennessee in an act of arson by the white power movement.
- California Burning, PG&E Bankrupt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A synopsis of PG&E's history of negligence and corruption which has caused wildfire disasters. The company tries to escape consequences but others are demanding change.
- A Call to Action
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Positive review - with caveats - of a book about how we can transform society.
- Calling Assange a Narcissist Misses the Point
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Personal attacks on Assange are used to discredit his work publicizing war crimes and the truth behind pro-war propaganda.
- Camp Bucca, Abu Ghraib, and the Rise of Extremism in Iraq
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Suffering caused through our wars including conditions inside US military camps, in Iraq, led to the extremism of Al-Baghdadi and his ISIS followers.
- Canada Adopts America First Foreign Policy US State Dept Boasted in 2017
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A declassified cable from the US embassy in Ottawa titled "Canada Adopts 'America First' Foreign Policy" notes that the Canadian government would be "Prioritizing U.S. Relations, ASAP."
- Capitalism and Disability: Selected writings by Marta Russell
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 This book comprises a collection of groundbreaking writings by Marta Russell on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism.
- Catalonia 'separatists' bad, HK 'pro-democracy protesters' good: Orwell's 1984 becomes user's manual for Western 'free media'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 When supporters of Catalan leaders jailed for organizing a democratic vote advance on Barcelona airport, media make a fuss over 'separatists' causing chaos. When the same tactic is used in Hong Kong, it's a 'pro-democracy' protest. In George Orwell’s 1984, The War Ministry was renamed the Ministry of Peace. Truth was Lies, Hate was Love. But author Lewis Carroll got there first.
- Catherine Rottenberg's Neoliberal Feminism
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An interview with Catherine Rottenberg, author of The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018).
- Chicago Charter Teachers Strike, Win
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Reporting on the unprecedented and successful strike of charter school teachers in Chicago.
- The Chickens Come Home to Roost ... in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 American meddling in the Middle East since 9/11 may finally be reaching a crisis as the process produces irreconcilable conflicts with allies.
- The Christian Genocide During the Ottoman Empire Sounds a Dark Warning for the Future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review and discussion of The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities 1894-1924 by Benny Morris and Dror Zeevi.
- Class War on New Ground
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of Kim Moody's New Terrain, a book looking at how capitalism has changed and how left wing organizing must adapt.
- Climate Advocates Underestimate Power of Fossil Fueled Misinformation Campaigns, Say Top Researchers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The "climate countermovement" direct massive resources towards denying the reality of climate change. Climate advocates need to address their opposition's tactics to be able to combat this misinformation.
- Climate Change: A Socialist Solution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A lot has been written, including by myself, on why capitalism, by its very nature, cannot tackle or stop climate change. The purpose of this article is not to repeat those arguments but to make the positive case for socialism as necessary to deal with this existential crisis for humanity.
- A Collective Ignorance of Ecosystems
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Loss of genetic diversity is one consequence of the Industrial Forestry Paradigm that dominates the U.S. timber industry and all public agencies from the state forestry agencies to the federal agencies like the Forest Service.
- Collusion in Plain Sight
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The media should use the same language for Trump's pandering to corporations and failure to publicly condemn white supremacist violence as they do for his supposed collaboration with Russia.
- Colorblind Law -- NOT
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Positive review of Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. It looks at the history of how states circumvented federal desegregation laws.
- Communist Dictatorship in Our Midst
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A kind of undercurrent of thought about workplace democracy has bubbled beneath the surface of public discourse of our current "crisis of democracy." Beneath the surface: one can hardly identify any serious public discourse these days on the anti-democratic nature of most work under Neo-liberal conditions.
- Congo's Patrice Lumumba: The Winds of Reaction in Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A brief history of Patrice Lumumba who was briefly Prime Minister of an independent Congo.
- 'Cotton has now become a headache'
A chemical-intensive Bt cotton monoculture is spreading through Odisha’s Rayagada district – harming health, deepening debt, irreversibly er Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Kunari's account reflects a dependence brought about by cotton cultivation that is taking root across the ecologically sensitive highland tracts of Odisha's Rayagada district, with deep implications for its rich store of biodiversity, farmers' distress and food security (See Sowing the seeds of climate crisis in Odisha).
- Court Throws out Energy Transfer's 'Racketeering' Claims Against Dakota Access Pipeline Opponents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An energy company that tried to bring RICO charges against Greenpeace and other people opposing their pipeline have had their case thrown out.
- Creative + Strategic = Effective Movements for Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Some positive, creative ideas on non-violent actions to make social change.
- Cuba's urban farming shows way to avoid hunger
Urban farming, Cuban-style, is being hailed as an example of how to feed ourselves when climate change threatens serious food shortages. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 When countries run short of food, they need to find solutions fast, and one answer can be urban farming. That was the remedy Cuba seized with both hands 30 years ago when it was confronted with the dilemma of an end to its vital food imports.
- D is for a Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 American government is much like show business: empty entertainment with smoke and mirrors hiding the string-pullers behind the scenes.
- Dam it all: More than half of the world's long rivers are blocked by infrastucture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 But with the increasing demand for more water, energy generation, and flood management, the construction of dams, levees, reservoirs, and other river-obstructive infrastructures is becoming ubiquitous.
- Dams and the Green New Deal: Why the Silence?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest question that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become the backup for energy if it proves impossible to get off of fossil fuels fast enough.
- Dances of Disinformation: the Partisan Politics of the Integrity Initiative
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Integrity Initiative - a supposedly non-partisan agency aiming at dismantling state sponsored misinformation - was exposed as funded by a UK government agency to undermine the opposition. This brings into question the plausibility of an impartial or apolitical playing field.
- De-Dollarizing the American Financial Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A long interview with economist Michael Hudson about Trump's plan to lower interest rates.
- Dearest Arundhati Roy: Shahidul Alam reflects on his time in prison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Bangladeshi photographer was charged with criticising his country on Facebook and spent more than 100 days behind bars. Now freed, he replies to the Indian novelist who wrote to him in jail.
- Death, Misery and Bloodshed in Yemen
"Strike with Creativity" proclaims Raytheon. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Writing about his visit to the world's largest weapons bazaar, held in London during October, Arron Merat describes reading this slogan emblazoned above Raytheon’s stall: "Strike with Creativity." Raytheon manufactures Paveway laser-guided bombs, fragments of which have been found in the wreckage of schools, hospitals, and markets across Yemen.
- The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 A history of national debt and the international power structures it supports. Calls for the repudiation of illegitimate debt.
- Declassified Documents Now Reveal There Were Two CIA Torture Programs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Declassified documents expose new info about the CIA's detention and interrogation operations. This article looks at their history going back to MKUltra in the 1950s.
- Deconstructed Special: The Noam Chomsky Interview
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 On this week’s Deconstructed, Chomsky sits down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, the 2020 Democratic field, and why he opposed Trump's Syria troop withdrawal.
- Deep Fakes: Will AI Swing the 2020 Election?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The ability of AI to create credible-looking fake videos could pose a threat to candidates at election time but gullibility was a problem before computer technology.
- Defense for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Transcript of a speech in defense of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.
- The Destruction of Freedom: Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange And The Corporate Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The corporate media's hostility towards Assange, Manning and WikiLeaks - obvious by lack of coverage or overt antagonism - shows it is tool of the state and big business.
- Did John Bolton Light the Fuse of the UK-Iranian Tanker Crisis?
Evidence suggests he pressured the Brits to seize an Iranian ship. Why? More war. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The details of the UK's seizure of the Grace 1 point to involvement by John Bolton and the Trump administration to put pressure on Iran.
- Disablement, Oppression, and Political Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 It is often claimed that disabled persons are invisible, disregarded by mainstream society, and irrelevant to the workings of society. This analysis has attempted to explain that the "unemployables" have been deliberately shut out of the labour force due to a capitalist economy that so far has dictated their exclusion by measure of economic calculations that favor the business class. It further posits that disabled persons are further oppressed in capitalist societies by having been purposely shifted onto social welfare or segregated into institutions for similar reasons – to keep workers who could not be profitably employed out of the mainstream workforce but also to exert social control over the entire labour supply.
- Disagreeing Reasonably in a Complex World
A review of The Case Against Free Speech Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Free speech is not a naturally occurring object. It's an idea, a notion, an aspiration, an approach to politics, always involving a theory about what it means to be human in a particular society at a particular time.
- Disciplined for Acting with Integrity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The smear campaign against two profs at University of Michigan participating in BDS harks back to McCarthyist attempts to silence the left at that same institution.
- The Discovery and Rediscovery of Metabolic Rift
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Ian Angus discusses the scientific developments that led Marx to develop metabolic rift theory, and a new generation to rediscover it in our time.
- Distorting 'Democracy' in Venezuela Coverage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Round up of some of the many media outlets that call Guaidó's coup attempt in Venezuela a democratic movement and refer to democratically elected president Maduro as a dictator.
- Do we fetishize indigenous people?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Although well-intentioned, Western representations of and interactions with Indigenous people can undermine their humanity.
- Domestic violence was an issue with no name
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In the 1960s and ’70s, domestic violence was an issue with no name.
Countless women endured violence in their own homes, but it was not acknowledged as an issue in the public realm. It was a shameful secret, quietly accepted as a part of life for women. When a woman was abused, there was nowhere to go. A woman’s place was in the home, even if home could kill her. Against this grim backdrop, different groups of women across the country worked to open Canada’s first women’s shelters.
- Don't Believe the Hype: Paying for Medicare for All Is Simple
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Debunking recent arguments that Medicare for All will require reducing spending in other areas.
- Doubling Down: The Military, Big Bankers and Big Oil Are Not In Climate Denial, They Are in Control and Plan to Keep It That Way
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The two most important narratives imposed on us are climate change as a "threat to national security" and as a "business opportunity" - the twin rationales for military and corporate power. They want to focus us on how to manage the crisis, profit from it, or adapt to it, instead of opposing it.
- Dung beetles 'reduce human pathogens risk'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Farmers remove habitats that encourage natural wildlife for food-safety reasons, however, these habitats encourage biodiversity which could reduce the risk of pathogens in food.
- Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness. Family Farmers and the Battle for the Future of Food
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise's Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests.
- Education in the Service of Assimilation: The Founding Vision of Residential Schools in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at some scholarly histories of residiential schools that put paid to Canada's kinder, gentler reputation.
- Eight miners die from toxic gases in Peru’s northern highlands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Eight miners died after poisonous gases escaped in an informal gold mine in northern Peru. Informal mines are operated without licenses or safety standards by companies that can easily bypass regulations.
- The Emergence of Ecosocialism
Collected Essays by Joel Kovel Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019
- Empires Are a Secret until They Start Falling
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Alfred McCoy says that it is only when empires are in decline that people begin to recognize they live in an empire and start to talk about it. While discussion of empire hasn't broken into the corporate media, it is certainly happening in the independent media. A concerted effort by a popular movement could bring it to the fore, just as Occupy changed the political dialogue about wealth inequality and the power of money. People in the US need to face some stark realities when it comes to declining US global power.
- Emulating the circle of life
We need to rethink efficiency in our food system. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Developing food systems that simulate the processes found in nature can make food production more sustainable.
- Engels on the importance of Hegel to Marxism
Letter to Conrad Schmidt Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Neo-Kantian by persuasion, Schmidt nevertheless asked Engels what the philosophical underpinnings of Marxs thought were. Engels already had put out a book on the topic, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy (1885), but apparently the implications of this work were not clear enough.
- Epifanio Camacho: a Militant Farmworker Brushed Out of History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Biographical info on Epifanio Camacho, a labor activist who fought alongside the less militant Cesar Chavez. He has been largely forgotten by history.
- Eric Hobsbawm: Historical cosmonaut
David Kynaston on a 'national treasure' whose politics provoked endless bitterness Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of 'A Life In History' a biography of Eric Hobsbawm by Richard J. Evans.
- Europe's Political Turmoil -- Part II
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Could the rise of the far right across Europe actually lead to establishing fascist regimes? Overemphasis on this fear may divert attention from where it is needed.
- Everyone Washington Supports, by Definition, Is a Moderate Centrist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Many right-wing movements and leaders are described as moderate or even left-leaning by politicians and corporate media. In these cases the terms no longer have a political definition but is a way to convey approval.
- The Evidence We Were Never Meant to See About the Douma Gas Attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A report that conflicts with claims that two cylinders containing chemicals were dropped from an aircraft was suppressed by the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons. This erodes public trust in the institution and is distressing given the recent history of using dubious existence of deadly weapons to justify wars.
- Exposure of Another Pro-War Lie Doesn't Make Media More Skeptical of Pro-War Claims
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The story of pro-Maduro forces burning trucks bringing aid to Venezuela has now been reported as false, even by corporate media. The bigger story of how and why this lie was propogated gets left behind.
- Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology
CounterSpin interview with Shankar Narayan on facial recognition Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Lightly edited transcript of an interview regarding face recognition technology and how it will impact people who are already over-policed.
- Facebook had human contractors 'reviewing' users' Messenger voice chats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Facebook has given contractors access to people's private voice chats for transcription purposes.
- Facebook Wants You to Know if You’re Getting Your News From the Wrong Government
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Media outlets owned by a company with ties to the Russian government are forced to disclose their affiliation on Facebook. Media outlets owned or funded by the US government are not held to the same standard.
- The Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge and Approved Ideas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The university environment should be the last place where dangerous ideas, and views, are stifled and stomped upon. In actual fact, we are seeing the reverse; from students unions to middle- and upper-managerial parasites and administrators, the contrarian idea must be boxed, the controversial speaker silenced and sent beyond the pale.
- failing to see the deeper causes of social tragedies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In both cases, the roots of the tragedies are manifold. But in both cases we seem more interested in laying instant blame than in excavating the wider causes that might help us prevent such catastrophes happening again.
- Faith, Hope and Persistence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 When we look at what is happening in our world, it can be difficult to believe that there are grounds for hope, let alone faith. And yet we – we humans – continue to live and act in ways that testify to our hopes, and to our faith in the possibility of a better future.
- Faith, Hope and Persistence - Vietnamese text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- The Fake News Nazi - Corbyn, Williamson And The Anti-Semitism Scandal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Analysis of Corbyn's press shows accusations of anti-semitism against him only started when he became a political threat.
- Fake News Tsunami - Trump's 'Collusion' And Corbyn As 'Dangerous Hero'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Analysis of recent news coverage that paints Corbyn as an anti-semite compared to that of the Trump campaign's supposed ties with the Russian government.
- Families "Are Scared To Death" After A Massive ICE Operation Swept Up Hundreds Of People
About 680 suspected undocumented workers were arrested in Mississippi in one of the largest worksite operations ever conducted by ICE agents Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A massive arrest of undocumented workers in Mississippi had people scrambling to care for kids whose parents were detained and traumatized the community.
- Far-Right Identity Politics and the Task for the Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 To oppose far-right ideology, the left must fight the violence and austerity they promote but also acknowledge the appeal of universal values of populist movements.
- The Faux Generosity of the Super-Wealthy: Why Bill Gates is a Menace to Society
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 While the media may be full of stories singing Gates' praises, presenting him as a good billionaire (as opposed to the current president), the reality is that one man with that amount of power, be it political (like Trump) or economic (like Gates and Bezos) has a highly corrosive effect on democracy and society more generally.
- The FBI in Ecuador
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of a book detailing the FBI's actions in Latin America throughout the 20th century.
- The FBI's police state operation against Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The allegations that Trump is a Russian agent lack credibility. The FBI's invesitigation seems more like the agency is attempting to overthrow an elected government - a threat the FBI has posed in the past.
- Fé, Esperança e Persistência
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- Fearless Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Self-government, or 'municipalism', is changing politics all over the world. This is a guide to winning back our towns and cities from below with real radical policies happening now; practical organizing strategies and tools; and profiles of 50 pioneering municipalist platforms from around the world.
- Fighting Against Racism - And For a Better Paycheck - On the Docks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Dockworker labour solidarity. Heavily references two books: 'Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area' by Peter Cole and 'Choke Points' essays edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness.
- Film Charts Failed Experiment Inviting Palestinian Teens to Become Kibbutzniks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A new documentary brings to light an episode almost completely erased from Israel’s official history - and one that reveals how Israel's apartheid character was established from its birth.
- Fire Brigades Union study exposes decades of deregulation and cost cutting that led to Grenfell Tower inferno—Part 1
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has published a damning report demonstrating that years of austerity measures, privatisation and deregulation led to the entirely avoidable fire at Grenfell Tower in June 2017, which claimed 72 lives.
- A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 A history of West Africa from the 17th century onwards. Draws on written histories as well as archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters.
- For Owners of Amazon’s Ring Security Cameras, Strangers May Have Been Watching Too
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Amazon's Ring security cameras have a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around -and perhaps inside- their house.
- Former UAW vice president pleads guilty to conspiracy in bribery scheme
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Norwood Jewell, former vice president of the United Auto Workers pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate labor laws. There could be even higher ranking officials charged, highlighting the conflicting interests of union bosses vs workers.
- France: Yellow Jackets and labour movement at a crossroads - Social and political questions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A brief look at the Yellow Vests in 2018. Though they may have their problems they provide a possiblity of change outside the electoral system.
- "Free Trade" Is Today's Imperialism by the 1 Percent
Building alternatives to free trade must become an essential component of a more progressive US foreign policy. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Principles of "free" trade allow global North corporations to continue the colonial policies that made them their wealth. Alternatives to free trade need to shift power and wealth to the global South to create fairness and progress.
- Freedom, Valor, Love: On Snowden's Permanent Record
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Edward Snowden's life reveals it's not just "the computer guy" (or other non-male folks) at tech's helms, but the general U.S. public that bears witness to corporatized data surveillance state violations, or the data industrial complex. This secretive sprawling network is the invasive rule today; it involves regular media outlets, telecommunications, social media platforms, Internet service providers, and government agencies.
- French Democracy Dead or Alive?
The Gilets Jaunes in 2019 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An overview of the Yellow Vests: their methods, demands, media coverage and summary of major events from November 2018 to January 2019.
- Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019
- From Academic to Assembly Line Worker: My Life of Precarity in Middle America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A non-tenured academic's story of trying to make ends meet in Indiana.
- From Nazi Germany to Ottoman Turkey, Genocides Begin in the Wilderness, Far From Prying Eyes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Recent research shows that the Armenian genocide began before its usually accepted date in 1915. This is consistent with other genocides which start away from the metropolises with only minimal instructions from higher government.
- From Nukes to Occupy: The Rise and Fall of the Non-Violent Direct Action Movement in the United States, 1976 – 2012
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The non-violent direct action movement originated in the anti-nuclear power movement of the late 1970s / early 1980s. Inspired by the German anti-nuclear movement, activists organized occupations of construction sites for nuclear reactors, aiming to insure no new plants were built. The processes, organizational structure, and culture adopted by these activists differed sharply from the movements of the sixties and early seventies.
- From Pre-K On, US Schools Privilege the Already Privileged
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The college bribery admissions scandal is only the extreme end of the inequality in the education system. Public policies, such as school funding based on property values, disadvantage children in low-income communities starting as early as pre-K.
- From the Green Revolution to GMOs: Toxic Agriculture Is the Problem Not the Solution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The pesticide industry lobbies governments to allow chemicals that have long been known to be harmful.
- From the Middle East to Northern Ireland, Western States are All Too Happy to Avoid Culpability for War Crimes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Forgiving war crimes when they are committed by their own side is a practice of the Nazis that many western governements seem to be taking up.
- Further Reading on the Russian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Several book recomendations with some comments on each.
- Gabor Maté on the misuse of anti-Semitism and why fewer Jews identify with Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Talking today about antisemitism, particularly posing it as a problem on the left.
- Miriam Garfinkle
Connexipedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Miriam Garfinkle was a Canadian physician and social justice activist.
- Gaza Fights for Freedom
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2019 Filmed during the height of the Great March Of Return protests, it features exclusive footage of demonstrations where 200 unarmed civilians have been killed by Israeli snipers since March 30, 2018.
- The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Focusing on the the Ngäbe–Buglé in Panama, a look at the Indigenous people who have their way of life is destroyed by capitalism.
- The Global Movement Against Gentrification
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Accounts of worldwide efforts to promote municipal engagement and organize locally for justice are given in the book Fearless Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement.
- GM Closures -- What's Next?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Plant closures by GM in the US, Canada and internationally threaten workers and communities. Can unions fight to stop this destructive practice?
- Google Bans Press TV
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Social media companies are banning media outlets in the name of alleged 'hate speech' but the companies' contacts and their targets make them instruments of government censorship.
- The Grand Illusion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 As the ecological crisis deepens, nearing the infamous Tipping Point – taking us closer to planetary catastrophe – we are being led to believe that an imminent "greening" of the world economy will deliver us from a very dark future. Somehow, against all logic, we have adopted a collective faith in the willingness of ruling governments and corporations to do the right thing.
- Grand Jury Efforts: Jailing Chelsea Manning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The role of Grand Juries in the persecution of Chelsea Manning and a summary of their history.
- Gray Whales Are Dying: Starving to Death Because of Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at the plight of sea mammals and the state of marine science education.
- Green construction and worker safety
Green construction yields promising results for the future of our planet. But new technologies come with new safety risks for workers. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Eco-friendly construction exposes workers to new methods and materials which do not have the standard safety practices of those that are more established.
- Greenwashing the Climate Catastrophe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Many solutions to climate change such as the Green New Deal do not address the real threat to the planet: capitalism. They in fact are a smokescreen under which to conduct business as usual.
- Nancy Gruber, 1930-2018
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Obituary of radical activist Nancy Gruber.
- A Guided Tour of AI and the Murky Ethical Issues It Raises
In "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans," Melanie Mitchell explores the workings and ethics of AI. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Mitchell's goal is to give a thorough (and I mean thorough) account not only of the ethical issues artificial intelligence raises today (and tomorrow), but of how the various branches of AI that the Dartmouth group pursued actually work. She is a good writer with broad knowledge of the topic (unsurprising, since she has a Ph.D. in computer science), and a canny mindfulness of both the merits and problems of AI.
- Guiding principles for an Ecosocialist Green New Deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Statement of the Ecosocialist Working Group of the DSA on their demands for a Green New Deal that combats climate change and inequality.
- Guilt of Anti-semitism Now Needs No Evidence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party make an effective smear in a corporate-contolled media that focuses on individual personalities.
- 'The happy days are now just nostalgia'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Along with the temperatures, the Brokpa say, the entire weather pattern has become increasingly unpredictable in the past two decades in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh, which border the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Bhutan and Myanmar.
- Marta Harnecker, the Fighter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Obituary for Marta Harnecker, sociologist, political scientist, and activist from Chile.
- Harvesting the Blood of America's Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In today’s wretched economy, where around 130 million Americans admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare, buying and selling blood is of the few booming industries America has left.
- A health care algorithm affecting millions is biased against black patients
A startling example of algorithmic bias Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A health care algorithm makes black patients substantially less likely than their white counterparts to receive important medical treatment. The major flaw, which affects millions of patients, was revealed in research published in the journal Science.
- Hebron - the heart of the occupation
Justice for Palestine is central to the left. The situation in Hebron is a good example why. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The history and current situation in Hebron.
- The hijab: "preventing common impositions"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Children are not the property of their parents. They are individuals with rights and bodily integrity. And just because their parents believe in child veiling or FGM and male circumcision doesn't mean they should be automatically entitled to impose their views on their children, especially when these views are harmful.
- Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project
An interview with the author of The Free State of Jones Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times in August 2019, presents American history in a purely racial lens and blames all "white people" for the enslavement of 4 million black people as chattel property.
- History Is Happening: WikiLeaks, the Global Fourth Estate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An article based on and in discussions with Nozomi Hayase's book 'WikiLeaks, the Global Fourth Estate: History Is Happening'.
- A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of a book of the Indonesian massacres contains lengthy excerpts and summary of the history.
- Hitting nature where it hurts: Iran feels the pernicious effects of US sanctions on biodiversity conservation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Iran is home to a rich and complex array of biodiversity. Efforts to protect its biodiversity have been challenged by decades of economic sanctions and political isolation.
- Hollywood's 'Captain Marvel' Blockbuster Is Blatant US Military Propaganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Captain Marvel is the latest in a long line of movies made with the cooperation and approval of the US military.
- Holocaust to Resistance
My journey Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 A memoir by Suzanne Berliner Weiss, a holocaust survivor born in France, who came to North America and was active in radical causes in the United States and Canada.
- The Homeless 8-Year-Old Chess Champion and Other Horrific 'Uplifting' Stories
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Stories in US media of people overcoming adversity are only inspiring if you ignore the unjust systems that create their oppression.
- Hong Kong's opposition unites with Washington hardliners to 'preserve the US's own political and economic interests'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The U.S. Senate unanimously passed the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act on November 19, 2019, without any opposition. Despite loudly proclaiming to protect "human rights" and "democracy," a closer look at this legislation reveals the imperial agenda underlying Washington’s actions in Hong Kong.
- How a Christian Nonprofit Helped a Controversial Minnesota Mining Company Buy Gear for Local Police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A Christian non-profit called Shield616 that donates gear to police forces has received donations from mining companies. This sparks concerns of a conflict of interest among residents that are protesting these mines.
- How and Why The Intercept Is Reporting on a Vast Trove of Materials About Brazil’s Operation Car Wash and Justice Minister Sergio Moro
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A summary of the Intercepts investigation into Operation Car Wash based on a trove of private communication they have received and are making available to the public.
- How can the U.S. dare lecturing China about Rights of the Muslims?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 For some time, I have been warning the world that the West, and the United States in particular, are helping to radicalize the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province and outside.
- How Capitalist Globalization Forecloses on Health Systems
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Discussion of the multi-author collection "Health Care under the Knife." The book criticizes many aspects of medicine under capitalism but falls short of promoting radical alternatives.
- "How Could They?" Why Some Americans Were Drawn to the Communist Party in the 1940s
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 We did not become Communists because of any adoration of Stalin. We wanted a better world, one in peace, and we admired the giant achievements of the Soviet people in overcoming illiteracy and building a giant industrial base which proved so vital in defeating the Nazis. We also admired an economy which suffered no joblessness while nearly the entire world groaned under the Great Depression.
- 'How Dare You!' The Climate Crisis And The Public Demand For Real Action
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Reality clashed with the BBC version of false consensus in a remarkable edition of HardTalk last month. Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, was starkly honest about humanity’s extreme predicament in the face of climate breakdown and refused to buckle under host Stephen Sackur’s incredulous questioning.
- How Evil Wins: the Hypocritical Double Standards of Political Outrage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The injustices carried out under Trump are not new and people who believe they are or that partisan politics will fix things are being fooled.
- How Much Do Humans Pollute? A Breakdown of Industrial, Vehicular and Household C02 Emissions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Modified excerpt from author's new book, Privatized Planet: "Free Trade" as a Weapon Against Democracy, Healthcare and the Environment.
- How the Murders of Journalists in the Middle East Are Brushed Aside
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Though higher-profile than most, Jamal Khashoggi was far from the first Arab journalist to be murdered in the Middle East. In his case, just like most others, cover-ups disguised as investigations may placate public outcry.
- How protesters are 'deanonymising' Russia's riot police
Online tools identify policemen who violently dispersed protesters in Moscow Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Tools such as reverse-image search are being used to identify police who violently broke up a protest in Moscow. The legality of releasing this information and the threats some people are making with it is discussed.
- How SDS Imploded: an Inside Account
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at how Students for a Democratic Society imploded 50 years ago and how it is similar to the behaviour of political parties in the US today.
- How Slick Consulting Firms Get Us on Drugs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at some of the techniques drug companies use to get doctors to prescribe their products.
- How the Hand of Israeli Spy Tech Reaches Deep into our Lives
Israeli software used on Palestinians is producing new cyber weapons that are rapidly being incorporated into global digital platforms Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Digital age weapons developed by Israel to oppress Palestinians are rapidly being repurposed for much wider applications – against Western populations who have long taken their freedoms for granted.
- How the U.S. Military Feeds at the Terror Trough
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A meandering take on the US's perpetual wars around the world.
- How the World Works
The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 In How the World Works, Cockshott connects scientific, economic, and societal strands to produce a sweeping and detailed work of historical analysis.
- How Urban Planners Promote Gentrification
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A review of Samuel Stein's book "Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State" which looks at how private interests and government promote gentrification.
- How would a revolutionary government protect the environment?
There is an enormous unused human potential waiting to be drawn into the job of saving the ecosphere. How can it be mobilized? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at how a revolutionary government would combat climate change. Includes a lengthy excerpt from the pamphlet The Green Tax Fraud by Dick Nichols.
- The Hydroponic Threat to Organic Food
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The US Department of Agriculture is approving methods as "Certified Organic" which are contrary to the principles of organic, sustainable agriculture. This is done mostly to comply with the demands of large agribusiness companies.
- I Accuse!
Herewith a proof beyond reasonable doubt that ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda whitewashed Israel Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 This finely-honed indictment by a writer widely acknowledged for his forensic skills is directed at Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. It sets out how she defiled her office by refusing to investigate credible allegations of Israeli criminality.
- "I have been there before" - For Sri Lankan Christians like me, the Easter attacks revived old
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A personal narrative about the complicated politics of language, ethnicity, and religion in Sri Lanka in the wake of the Easter bombings.
- 'I lost four sons': In Kashmir, women suffer brunt of conflict
Women's Day is a grim reminder of atrocities and hardships faced by the women of the region in decades-long conflict. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Women in Kashmir suffer the loss of their sons, husbands, and fathers in ongoing conflict.
- Noel Ignatiev, 1940-2019
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Yesterday I learned that my friend and comrade Noel Ignatiev passed away. He’d been in poor health for some time, diagnosed with a rare form of gastrointestinal cancer that made it difficult for him to swallow properly or digest, but it still caught me off guard.
- Illusion or Advance? Ecosocialists debate the 'Green New Deal'
Activists from System Change Not Climate Change discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Green New Deal proposal. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Activists from 'System Change Not Climate Change' discuss the strengths and weaknesses of 'Green New Deal' proposals, and how the left should respond.
- Imagination and Nuclear Weapons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Imagining the horror of nuclear war is not enough to prevent it. Governments with nuclear weapons must be forced to disarm.
- Impeachment, Brought to You by the CIA
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Despite occasional warm gas passed in a leftish direction, establishment Democrats never had any intention of allowing a left political program to move forward. After four decades of asserting that they 'believe' climate science, the moment has arrived when the only political path forward is to take on their donors.
- In Brazil, thousands of people are still living under the threat of bursting mining dams
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais is home to several large dams many of which have burst causing death and environment damage. There is evidence that some of these disasters were predictable.
- In Defense of Julian Assange
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 A wide range of distinguished contributors, many of them in original pieces, here set out the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the importance of their work, and the dangers for us all in the persecution they face. In Defense of Julian Assange is a vivid, vital intervention into one of the most important political issues of our day.
- In defense of To Kill a Mockingbird: The 1962 film about racism in theaters this week
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Attempts to remove To Kill a Mockingbird from curricula are misguided and ignore the artistic and courageous ambitions of the book and film.
- In Praise of Direct Action (and More)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The speed with which air traffic controllers' work stoppage put an end to the government shutdown shows the power of direct action especially when it threatens capitalist profit.
- In Protest Against Police Raping Spree, Women Burn Their Station in Mexico City.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A first person account of protests in Mexico City in response to reports of rape by police officers which have been dismissed by the administration.
- In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals
Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford's Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An in-depth review of Linda Ford's "Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart" (2018). The author draws on his personal experience as a journalist and organizer.
- Indigenous People, the First Victims of Brazil's New Far-Right Government
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Anti-Indigenous sentiment in Brazil is emboldened by Bolsonaro's regime. This is leading to greater efforts by the government and agribusiness to seize Indigenous Lands.
- Indo-Pak Nuclear Confrontation: First Use Policy and the Race Towards Armageddon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 There are several indications that India's ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) are obsessed with the perverse urge to wipe out Pakistan with nuclear weapons by unleashing a first or a second strike.
- Indonesia: 41 dead, 546 assaulted, 51 shot in agrarian conflicts under Jokowi’s watch
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An explosion of agrarian conflicts between 2014 and 2018 has resulted in many casualties including 41 people killed, 546 people assaulted and 51 people shot since President Joko Widodo came to office.
- Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- The Intercept Shuts Down Access to Snowden Trove
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 First Look Media, owner of The Intercept, is shutting down access to Snowden’s leaked NSA documents. Their reporters still have copies of all the documents and are looking to find a new outlet for them.
- An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times' 1619 Project
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it's going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways.
- The Irish Language and Marxist Materialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A review of Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin's book "Language From Below: the Irish language, ideology and power in 20th century Ireland" which looks at the role language and nationalism has played in Irish liberation movements.
- The "Irrepressible Conflict:" Slavery, the Civil War and America's Second Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The purpose of this lecture series, hosted by the Socialist Equality Party, is to address the falsifications of the New York Times' "1619 Project" and undertake a historical materialist analysis of American history, and in this lecture, the Civil War.
- Is the Pentagon Behind the Rise in Lyme Disease?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A conversation with Kris Newby author of Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.
- Israel Again Bombs Gaza - But Is It "In Response"?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In this case it is undoubtedly the Palestinian side that is responding to Israeli violence. But even if Palestinians would fire missiles without an immediate cause it would be within the full rights of the Palestinian people. In its 1982 Resolution 37/43 the General Assembly of the United Nations reaffirmed:
"the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle;"
The UN GA resolution is standing international law. The Palestinian people have the right to resist against the occupation force. In practice as well as legally Israel is a colonial entity that occupies Palestinian land, especially in Gaza and the West Bank. Any armed struggle by Palestinians against the occupation, provoked or not, is thus morally and legally justified.
But do not expect that any 'western' mainstream media will ever point that out.
- Israel: Are democracy and despotic racism compatible?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A criticism of Zionism as a "melding of an elitist pseudo-democracy with racist despotism."
- Israeli intervention in US elections overwhelms anything Russia has done, claims Chomsky
The 89-year-old said the media was largely ignoring vital issues such as climate change Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Chomsky on the brazen interference of Israel in US politics to which supposed Russian meddling in the US election pales in comparison.
- Israel's latest attempt to erase Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Efforts by teams from the Israeli defense ministry to remove sensitive documents from Israeli archives must be understood in a new political climate and are not simply an attempt to spare Israeli governments embarrassment, as some have suggested.
- Israel's relentless violence on Gaza met by global silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A ceasefire has been reached in Gaza after Israel launched a wave of airstrikes that killed 34 Palestinians, including eight members of one family. Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada discusses Israel's latest bombings, which come after more than one year of weekly, deadly Israeli attacks on non-violent Palestinian demonstrators.
- It Is True That Corruption Caused The 737 MAX Accidents. But It Was Not Foreign.
The New York Times blamed the foreign pilots for the crashes of two 737 MAX airplanes. It now takes a shot at the foreign airlines Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 So someone from Indonesia's air safety agency took another job in the industry. Three years later he changed back into a government role. That shows that Indonesia is a corrupt country and that Lion Air is the most corrupt, says a former pilot with an ax to grind.
- ‘It Was a Remarkably Successful Grassroots Campaign to Target Amazon’s Credibility’
CounterSpin interview with Neil deMause on Amazon's retreat from New York Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Transcript of interview with Neil deMause about NY's bid for Amazon HQ. Included downloadable MP3 of interview.
- It's No Wonder the Military likes Violent Video Games, They Can Help Train Civilians to Become Warriors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Most studies show no correlation between video games and violence but the adoption of computer simulations by the military and their similarity to video games should give us pause about their ethical impact on society.
- It's Raining Sand in Rayalaseema
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In the Rayalaseema region in India, changing agriculture has reduced biodiversity, depleting the soil and leading to aridity and sandstorms.
- The Journalists Do The Shouting
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Today’s meaningful art is samizdat stickers on wireline poles and spray-canned corporate advertising. Corporate media is no longer considered a sure source of credible reporting.
- Journalists Speak Up for Julian Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Journalists and journalistic organizations around the globe, express their grave concern for Julian Assange's wellbeing, for his continued detention and for the draconian espionage charges.
- Juan Guaidó: The Man Who Would Be President of Venezuela Doesn't Have a Constitutional Leg to Stand On
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The US coup in Venezuela uses constitutional arguments to give legitimacy to Guaido's presidency. This article details how this argument is false.
- Judge: Providing Water to Dying Immigrants in Desert is a Crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Activists who leave water near the US-Mexico border have been found guilty of various charges. Others in similar situations are still awaiting trial.
- Judicial Secrecy: Where Justice Goes to Die
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The trend of courts imposing gag orders and press bans on judicial proceedings is a hallmark of police states and a threat to freedom and justice.
- Karl Kautsky as Architect of the October Revolution
Part 1: Before the War: The Bolsheviks Applaud Kautsky's Tactics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Lenin remained true to the tactical ideas of Karl Kautsky after the latter had abandoned them.
- Karl Kautsky as Architect of the October Revolution
Part 2: 1917: The Bolsheviks Apply Kautsky’s Tactics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Bolsheviks came into 1917 with two pieces of Kautsky advice firmly under their belts: enlist the peasantry as a revolutionary ally, and do not deviate from militant anti-agreementism.
- Kashmiris launch calendar to remember disappeared loves ones
At least 8,000 people have disappeared since 1989 according to human rights groups, leaving relatives in no-man's land Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Women whose husbands were disappeared have spent decades wondering what happened to them and fighting for justice. They and a group representing families of disappeared persons have published a calendar commemerating 12 victims.
- Kautsky, Lenin, and the transition to socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Counterposing Karl Kautsky's perspective of a "democratic road to socialism" as against a supposed Leninist "insurrectionary strategy" presents a false framework for the debate.
- Killing for Credibility: A Look Back at the 1999 NATO Air War on Serbia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A detailed look back at NATO's 1999 war on Yugoslavia.
- Komiks from the Underground: the Radicalism of Gilbert Shelton
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A review and history of "Radical America Komiks," a reprint collection of underground comics from 1969.
- Lawless Trump-Canada Connections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Canada recently seized and sold $30 million worth of Iranian properties in Ottawa and Toronto, a gross hypocrisy explains Yves Engler in light of oversights of more flagrant US and Israel terror victims. But the behaviour of Canada Foreign Affairs in joining the lawless US war of sanctions, embargos and military threats against Iran goes deeper than hypocrisy.
- Leaked: USA's Feb 2018 Plan for Coup in Venezuela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Publication of a military document outlining the military, diplomatic, and propaganda policies to overthrow the Maduro governnment.
- A Left for Itself
Left-Wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 David Swift argues that the left is dominated by what he terms hobbyists and performative radicals.
- Legal Weed Is Great, But Black and Brown Communities Can't Be Left Behind
Marijuana legalization must bring both equity and justice for those most impacted by the War on Drugs. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Marginalized populations that were hardest hit by the War on Drugs should be at the forefront of legalization legislation as well as recipients of the tax revenue from legalized marijuana.
- Lessons from Canada: On Women's Libraries and Liberation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A report on a talk Bec Wonders gave at the For Women Scotland event held on May 14, 2019, detailing her experiences as co-founder of Vancouver Women's Library and the value of knowledge produced by second wave feminists.
- Lessons of Nashville: The working class and the defense of immigrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A recent story about residents of a Nashville neighborhood rallying to protect their neighbors from ICE agents shows the power of class solidarity in the face of attempts at racial division.
- A Lethal Industrial Farm Fungus is Spreading Among Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Agricultural fungicides are creating strains of drug-resistant fungi.
- Let's Make Sure the Nazis Killed in Vain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 I don't know how many times I've heard that if we don't stand by Israel, the victims of the Nazi Judeocide will have died in vain. I knew something was wrong with that claim, but for the longest time I couldn't put my finger on it. Now I think I can.
- A Liberal Elite Still Luring Us Towards the Abyss
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A recent manifesto decrying "populism and nationalism" see today's problems as coming from the abandonment of liberal ideals when they are in fact caused by extreme adherence to them.
- Liberals' 'humanitarian' open arms is not a solution to migrant crisis; radical economic changes are needed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Calls by Liberals to 'open our hearts' to immigrants from poor countries are about maintaining the status quo in the capitalist world. The solution is a radical change in the global economic system which encourages migration.
- The Lies About Assange Must Stop Now
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Newspapers and other media in the United States and Britain have recently declared a passion for freedom of speech, especially their right to publish freely. They are worried by the "Assange effect".
- Life Itself is an Art
The life and work of Erich Fromm Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- Like Israeli settlers, white mass shooters are a manifestation of their society
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A caution against calls from the left to label white mass shooters as terrorists. Calling them terrorists does not address the fact that they carry out the objectives of their settler-colonial states.
- Local fishermen: caught between the pros and cons of traceability
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Consumers concerned about the environmental impact of fishing are demanding more transparency and accountablity from the industry. Ironically, the resulting regulations are prohibitive to the small scale fishermen that are the most sustainable part of the industry.
- Localism's Contradictions in Hong Kong
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Localism, as a recent political phenomenon in the Hong Kong political landscape, stresses Hong Kong’s political and cultural autonomy as distinct from that of China, while older pan-democratic organizations tend to stress this continuity between democratic struggles in Hong Kong and China. Localism has politicized the younger generations in many ways – but is localism a coherent political ideology, and how does it square with an anti-capitalist, mass-led political practice?
- The London Climate Protests - Raising The Alarm
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Analysis of media coverage of the climate crisis looks at how many outlets try to discredit 'alarmist' activists. However a sense of panics is rational and needed to avoid catastrophe.
- The Long Goodbye of Antiwar Protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 There is a lack of real opposition - both by other governments and the public - to US-led regime changes.
- Lots of Scurrying But No Revolution in Sight
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Disappointed review of a collecton of essays of women and climate change, mostly in support of reforming the status quo.
- Lyme Disease and Biowarfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Historical look at the connection between Lyme disease and US government-produced bioweapons by a journalist who has been researching it for decades.
- Magnificent FIght: the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 In Magnificent Fight, Dennis Lewycky lays out the history of this iconic event, which remains the biggest and longest strike in Canadian history. He analyzes the social, political and economic conditions leading up to the strike.
- Mainstream Media Bias on 2020 Democratic Race Already in High Gear
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Mainstream media pundits undermine the chances of progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders despite the defeat of centrist politicians by the right.
- Making Money Off of Green Debt: Cory Morningstar Finds Corporate Wolves Behind Environmental Sheep
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Building through the privatization-friendly Reagan-Bush era of the 1980s, ramping up significantly with Bill Clinton's signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s, and solidified through the de facto repeal of the post-Great Depression separation between investment and commercial banks at the end of Clinton’s scandal-plagued final term in office at the turn of the millenium, the United States went through a very noticeable shift in how its economy functioned.
- The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup Leader
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A detailed account of US-backed groups that positioned Juan Guaidó to declare himself president of Venezuela.
- Manufacturing the Enemy: The Media War Against Cuba
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Mainstream media in the United States for the past 60 years has converged with the neo-colonial foreign policy objectives of the state to create a misinformed, biased narrative against the Cuban revolution. Using extensive examples, including pre-revolutionary historic coverage, journalist Keith Bolender reveals how the national press has established an anti-Cuba chronicle in adherence to Washington's unrelenting regime change policies.
- Marx for Today: A Socialist-Feminist Reading
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In-depth look at the relationship between feminism and Marxism.
- Marx on Children (and on Forgiving Christianity)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An exploration of Marx's and Christianity's views on children.
- Masterless Men: Poor whites and slavery in the Antebellum south by Keri Leigh Merritt - Book review
"1619" and the myth of white unity under slavery Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A critique of the New York Times' "1619" initiative, marking the 400th anniversary of the disembarkation of the first African slaves in what was to become the United States.
- David McReynolds, 1928-2018
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Obituary and memoir of leftist activist David McReynolds.
- Media Rally Around 'Forever War' in Afghanistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A round up of some of the alarmist reporting on supposed withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
- Meet Europe's Left Nationalists -'A momentous turn against free movement in Europe'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The rise of leaders like Sahra Wagenknecht and Jean-Luc Mélenchon marks a momentous turn against free movement in Europe-at the expense of immigrants.
- Memory, History, and a Pillar of Salt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A personal memoir about art and history in the early days of AIDS and ACT UP.
- The Menace of Right "Populism"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Editorial about Trump and right-wing regimes world-wide and the opportunities for left-wing organizing.
- The Militarization of Empathy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Surprise reunions between returning soldiers and their families are a major spectacle in US media. But these heartwarming scenes serve as a distraction from the activities of the soldiers while they are overseas.
- A million species 'threatened with extinction'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A summary of a dire climate report on the decline in global biodiversity.
- MLK in Memphis, 1968
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at MLK's actions and speeches in Memphis and their relevance today.
- Money, Power and Turf: Winning the Middle East Media War at Any Cost
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 It is hardly surprising to see Middle Eastern countries at the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index, as the worst violators of freedom of the press. But equally alarming is the complete polarization of public opinion as a result of self-serving media and, bankrolled by rich Arab countries, whose only goal is to serve their specific, often sinister, agendas.
- Money Talks, Bullshit Walks on Cable News
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 None of the big companies buying advertising time on CNN and MSNBC have any interest in the progressive taxation and restored union organizing and collective bargaining rights that Sanders advocates.
- The Most Enduring Media Cover Up
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Clearing the FOG hosts Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese interviewed Alison Weir, journalist and founder of If Americans Knew, a website that provides factual information about the Israeli State and Palestine.
- Moving past climate denial
Deniers feel that the impacts of climate breakdown don't matter, but the solutions pose an imminent threat, new research shows. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher and political science professor argues that it's more productive to show climate change skeptics that solutions are beneficial to them rather than trying to make them believe in the science of climate change.
- Murder on the Mekong: why exiled Thai dissidents are abducted and killed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In Thailand, people who violate lèse-majesté law - which prevents any criticism of the monarchy - can find themselves with a bounty on them and end up living in exile. Some dissidents have been murdered or disappeared.
- My Friend Was Murdered for Trying to Save the Amazon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Paulino paid with his life for trying save his tribe's forest, the Arariboia Indigenous Territory, in the north-east Amazon.
- My Response to the PBS Series: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A criticism of the PBS series on Reconstruction which presents slavery as a 'southern problem,' ignoring its ties to capital and class.
- Myanmar's Other Reporters
The world cheered when two Reuters journalists were freed from prison. But who’s watching out for the rest? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Detailed analysis of the state of freedom of speech and the press in Burma/Myanmar.
- Nationalism, Patriotism, Hate Crimes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at the (mis)use of the word "nationalism" to describe Trump and white supremacists.
- NATO's Crises
The 2% goal as defence illiteracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 NATO's London Summit on December 3 and 4, 2019 displays the deep political crisis of the 70-year-old alliance: Only a dinner and a short meeting, no statement to be issued, quarrels among the leading military members, accusations, substantial differences on Syria and many other issues, the deepest-ever Transatlantic conflict and the usual issues of burden-sharing.
- The Need for a Compelling Anti-Capitalist Narrative
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 To inspire people with possibility socialists need to create a vision of the world they want to create instead of just showing how bad capitalism is.
- Neoliberalism: Free Market Fundamentalism or Corporate Power?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The idea of "free market fundamentalism (FMF)" omits the fact that neoliberalism requires state intervention to run, so criticism of neoliberalsm based on FMF is ahistorical and self-defeating.
- Neoliberalism Has Met Its Match In China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Unless China starts playing by neoliberal rules Trump's economic war with them will lead the US to a race to the bottom or isolation from international markets.
- The Never-Ending Curse of Coal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Last week Murray Energy, one of the largest coal mining corporations in the nation, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That makes it the fifth coal company to do so in the last year.
- The new Jewish left
In Canada, young Jews are fighting antisemitism while opposing the Israeli occupation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Young Jewish people in North America are fighting antisemitism while opposing Israel's occupation of Palestine.
- The New Politics of Disablement: The Contribution of Mike Oliver
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Obituary for Mike Oliver, one of the founders of the social model of disability. Includes historical information, his legacy, and suggested reading.
- New York Times Admits it Sent Story to Government for Approval
The American paper of record just provided a major example of the symbiotic relationship between U.S. corporate media and the government Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The NY Times' seeking approval for a recent story is part of a history of the mainstream media's collaboration with the US government.
- New Zealand - Open letter: Betraying women and free thought in the name of Christchurch massacres
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An open letter questioning shows of solidarity with Muslims after the Christchurch massacre, specifically non-Muslim women wearing head coverings and a Canadian university that disinvited an ex-Muslim atheist speaker.
- The New Zealand Shootings, a Microcosm of Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The New Zealand Shootings and other mass murders use the same justification as governments that carry out campaigns against the same targets on a larger scale.
- Newly Released FOIA Documents Shed Light on Border Patrol’s Seemingly Limitless Authority
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 More than 1,000 pages of previously unseen Customs and Border Protection training documents, shed light on the details of the Amercian Border Patrol’s seemingly limitless authority.
- Nicaragua: The Other Revolution Betrayed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at the current neoliberal regime in Nicaragua and how the Sandinista government failed to deliver on the promise of the 1979 Revolution.
- The 9% Lie: Industrial Food and Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 They now warn us that we have to drastically reduce global emissions – by at least 45 percent – over the next decade. Otherwise, we'll pass the point of no return – defined as reaching 450 ppm or more of CO2 in the atmosphere sometime between 2030 and 2050 – when our climate crisis will morph into a climate catastrophe.
- The Nine Worst Lawfare Injustices in the US and What They Tell Us About Ourselves
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 "Lawfare" is when the law is weoponized and directed against a group of people declared to be an enemy. This is a brief history with nine examples.
- 1919: The Year the World Was on Fire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A sprawling take on international revolutionary events of 1919 using Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood, and John Reed as focal points.
- Nitrogen Crisis: A neglected threat to Earth's life support systems
Part One of a discussion of the disruption of the global nitrogen cycle by an economic system that values profits more than life itself. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The rift in the nitrogen cycle is a major threat to the stability of the Earth System. This and subsequent articles will discuss how the natural cycle works and how it has been disrupted in the Anthropocene.
- No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Between 1869 and 1877 the government of Canada negotiated Treaties One through Seven with the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. Many historians argue that the negotiations suffered from cultural misunderstandings between the treaty commissioners and Indigenous chiefs, but newly uncovered eyewitness accounts show that the Canadian government had a strategic plan to deceive over the "surrender clause" and land sharing. According to Sheldon Krasowski's research, Canada understood that the Cree, Anishnabeg, Saulteaux, Assiniboine, Siksika, Piikani, Kainaa, Stoney and Tsuu T’ina nations wanted to share the land with newcomers -- with conditions -- but were misled over governance, reserved lands, and resource sharing. Exposing the government chicanery at the heart of the negotiations, No Surrender demonstrates that the land remains Indigenous.
- A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat the US Coup Attempt in Venezuela
To the People of Venezuela Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An open letter to the people of Venezuela regarding the US coup and with support for how they can resist.
- 'Not a Good Answer': Privacy Advocates Reject Democratic Proposal for 'Technological Wall' With Expanded Border Surveillance
'More surveillance' has become the default answer to far too many difficult policy questions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Digital rights advocates called on Democratic lawmakers to expand their fight against the wall into a fight for all human and constitutional rights-instead of suggesting alternative "border security" proposals that would infringe on civil liberties.
- Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way Gorgon Stare Did
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An interview with an expert on drones about a new camera technology that drastically improves wide-area sureillance capabilities.
- Notorious Portuguese political prison becomes museum of resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A historical fortress Peniche used to hold dissidents under Portugal's dictatorship is being turned into a museum to remind people of the life under fascism.
- Nuclear Lies and Broken Promises
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told an economic meeting in the city of Sivas this September that Turkey was considering building nuclear weapons, he was responding to a broken promise. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the government of Iran of lying about its nuclear program, he was concealing one of the greatest subterfuges in the history of nuclear weapons.
- Numsa strike against sexual harassment is a 'powerful moment in labour history'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A union of metal workers in South Africa staged a strike underground in harsh conditions to support a coworker whose sexual harassment complaint had been dismissed by management.
- Offering Choice But Delivering Tyranny: the Corporate Capture of Agriculture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Proponents of genetically modified seeds say they are opening up 'choice' to farmers and consumers but end up giving monopolies to powerful corporations with proprietary agricultural tools and methods. This lessens environmental and dietary health and diversity.
- Old Mother Forest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A poignant look at the ecosystem of a rainforest from a conservationist in India.
- On Equating BDS With Anti-Semitism: a Letter to the Members of the German Government
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An open letter to the German government by a Jew arguing against a motion equating BDS with anti-Semitism.
- On the Coast of Oaxaca, Afro and Indigenous Tribes Fight for Water Autonomy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In southern Mexico, a multi-ethnic network of towns has halted the construction of a mega-dam. Now they are organizing to manage their own natural resources and revitalize their culture as native water protectors.
- On the degradation of political debate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Today, political debates have become vacuous and insipid because politicians have become contemptuous of the electorate. Voters, many believe, are ignorant, swayed more by emotion than by reason, happy to accept lies and drawn to politicians with easy answers.
- On the Democratic Character of Socialist Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Great social movements redefine legality and human rights, setting in motion a process of change that becomes irresistible. Socialists utilize electoral opportunities while recognizing that they are far from the whole story. A workers’ government committed to socialism will probably be achieved as the democratic ratification of a program that has already gained majority support through discussion and mobilization among the population at large.
- On the Front Lines of the Climate Change Movement: Mike Roselle Draws a Line
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An excerpt from the book The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. An account of environmental activists fighting massive industries to save the environment.
- An Open Letter to Chelsea Manning: A Free Woman in An American Prison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A message of courage and strength addressed to Chelsea Manning.
- Operation Condor 2.0: After Bolivia coup, Trump dubs Nicaragua 'national security threat' and targets Mexico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 One successful coup against a democratically elected socialist president is not enough, it seems. Immediately after overseeing a far-right military coup in Bolivia on November 10, the Trump administration set its sights once again on Nicaragua, whose democratically elected Sandinista government defeated a violent right-wing coup attempt in 2018.
- Orbán: Strong Man, Authoritarian Ideology
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of a book about Viktor Orbán's political career.
- The Orwell quotes right-wingers never mention
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A brief look at George Orwell's revolutionary, left-wing views to counter the superficial references to "thought police" or "big brother" used in right-wing circles.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 27, 2019
What Next? Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2019 Millions of us, in many different countries, came out in late September to demand action on the climate crisis. Around the world, in diverse ways, we are working to keep up the pressure. Time is short, and the tasks are huge. In the midst of our activism and organizing, we need to keep asking ourselves some important questions: What are our goals? And what should we do to reach our goals?
- Our Movement, Our Lives
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of a history of the Black Lives Matter movement, both nationally and locally.
- Our Veggie Gardens Won't Feed us in a Real Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Small scale farming that can actually provide for people requires more knowledge and resources than people think.
- 'Palestinian Rights Has Become an Incredibly Mainstream Issue'
CounterSpin interview with Josh Ruebner on BDS bans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Interview with Josh Ruebner about anti-BDS legislation. With downloadable MP3 of interview.
- Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Although Soave may not personally agree with their motivations and goals, he takes their ideas seriously, approaching his interviews with a mixture of respect and healthy skepticism. The result is a faithful cross-section of today's radical youth, which will appeal to libertarians, conservatives, centrist liberals, and anyone who is alarmed by the trampling of free speech and due process in the name of social justice.
- Paris police use pepper spray against seated climate change protesters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Police in Paris have been filmed pepper-spraying peaceful protestors. This is part of Macron's crackdown on the "yellow vest" movement in which several protestors have been seriously injured.
- Party for the Revolution
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of Crowds and Party by Jodi Dean, a philosophical look at the crowd and the individual in revolutionary action.
- Pathological Deceit: The NYT Inverts Reality on Venezuela's Cuban Doctors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Claims that the Maduro government is using Cuban doctors to coerce voters by refusing care to the opposition are based on very dubious evidence.
- The Peking University Marxist Society and Student Activists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Their report on the living and working conditions of university staff approaches Mao's suggestion that 'knowledge of any kind is inseparable from direct experience' when it states that 'it is only through practice that you can produce genuine knowledge.'
- The People Emerge: The Storming of the Bastille
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A history of the storming of the Bastille emphasizing the revolutionary history that is glossed over in patriotic celebrations.
- The Perils of Embedded Journalism: 'Afghan Papers' Wouldn't Be Needed If We Had a Real Independent News Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 If the Post and other major news media outlets had been pursuing the truth over the years about these all the wars, and the so-called "War" on Terror, instead of leaving the hard work of exposing all the lies to the likes of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and journalist/whistleblower publisher Julian Assange, we'd already know about the venality and culpability of our government.
- Permanent Record
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019
- The Persecuted
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Fundamentalist Christians maintaining that they are persecuted may not make sense given the prevalence of sympathetic and Christian-owned media and businesses. Listening to a sermon reveals they see the inability to impose their views in society as persecution.
- Perspectives for the coming revolution in America: Race, class and the fight for socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The title for this meeting is "Perspectives for the Coming Revolution in America." It begins with the understanding, broadly felt by a growing section of workers and youth throughout the world, that we live in a revolutionary period.
- Pete Seeger Was A Movement Musician
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A memorial to Pete Seeger on what would have been his 100th birthday.
- Peter Graham and Ian McKay, Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto.
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Works on the Canadian New Left are now sprouting plentifully and certainly a work on the country's major city is welcome. This one is encyclopedic, and Graham and McKay deserve thanks for their inclusive rendition of the youthful radical movements in Toronto from 1958 to 1985. The book is generous in its treatment of most of them, though it offers, as it should, analysis of why some groups achieved more in the short term than others while still others left a lasting legacy, for example, in preserving natural areas or working-class neighbourhoods that corporate interests wanted to bulldoze.
- Peterloo (film review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of a movie about the massacre at a popular revolt in St Peter's Field in Manchester, U.K in 1819.
- The Peterloo massacre and Shelley (1)
Part 1: The aftermath of the massacre and the responses Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The escalation of repression by the ruling class that followed, resulting in a greater suppression of civil liberties, was met with meetings of thousands and the widespread circulation of accounts of the massacre. There was a determination to learn from the massacre and not allow it to be forgotten or misrepresented.
- The Peterloo Massacre and Shelley (2)
Part 2: Shelley's politics and his Peterloo poems Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Peterloo poems adopt various popular forms and styles. Addressing a popular audience with his attempt at a revolutionary understanding suggests a sympathetic response to the emergence of the working class as a political force, and the poems are acute on economic relations.
- A Plague of Rats: How Years of Austerity Prompted Many Britons to Vote for Brexit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Many Britons in poor areas voted for Brexit even though they benefited financially from the EU. Though often blamed on fear of immigration it is also a result of discontent brought on by severe austerity and privatization.
- The Plastic Industry's Fight to Keep Polluting the World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An in-depth look at the failure of recycling intiatives and the plastics industry's PR efforts that put the onus on small scale efforts to reduce waste while they fight any initiatives that curb production at the industry level.
- A Play with No End
What the Gilets Jaunes really want Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 When I caught up with the Gilets Jaunes on March 2, near the Jardin du Ranelagh, they were moving in such a mass through the streets that all traffic had come to a halt. The residents of Passy, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Paris, stood agape and apart and afraid.
- "Please Step Away from the Socialism": The Red Scare Dems at MSNBC
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The anti-socialist scaremongering at MSNBC should put paid to the idea that they have any leftist bias.
- Politics in the Pub Mark Davis
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2019 The current attempt to use the UK courts to drag Assange into the clutches of a foreign intelligence agency for his revelations is not just an abuse of the extradition process but a fundamental threat to journalism.
- The politics of identity, left and right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 One of the consequences of the bifurcated debate is historical amnesia about the origins of identity politics. Most people imagine that its roots are on the left. In fact, they lie on the reactionary right, in the counter-Enlightenment of the late 18th century. It wasn’t then called the politics of identity. It was called racism. It is, however, in the concept of race -- the insistence that humans are divided into a number of essential groups, and that one’s group identity determines one’s moral and social place in the world -- that we find the original politics of identity, out of which ideas of white superiority emerged.
- The PR Campaign to Hide the Real Cause of those Sky-High Surprise Medical Bills
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Since 2010, an increasing number of hospitals have outsourced their emergency rooms, radiology, anesthesiology, and other specialized services to physician staffing firms. Patients who need these critical services may inadvertently receive care from a doctor outside of their insurance network and find that they owe thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars in surprise medical bills.
- Press Freedom is Under Threat in the Land of its Birth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The US was not among the conulates protesting controversial new extradition bill in Hong Kong. They can't with a straight face object to Hong Kong passing an act that endorses extradition for political crimes while Washington is pursuing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
- Press Freedom is Under Threat in the Land of its Birth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The author draws parallels between the US and Hong Kong's treatment of freedom and individual rights.
- The Prisoner Says No to Big Brother
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A tribute to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Includes details of some of the corruption they have exposed.
- Progressive Ideas Matter to Voters. So Why Do Democrats Fixate on the Identity of the Messenger?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 There is a larger rhetorical trend toward divorcing voter preferences from ideology to focusing on identity. Wittingly or not, the effect is to undermine the obvious power of progressive ideas.
- Protesting the "slave law" in Hungary: The erosion of illiberal hegemony?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Popular protests have arisen in Hungary to oppose exploitive changes to the labor code. The government opposition has supported the protests but this could result in weakening the protests' legitimacy as a movement.
- The Public Library: Antidote to Everyday American Banality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A celebration of the local library that includes conversations with librarians and patrons.
- Publicised Cruelty: Scott Morrison Visits Christmas Island
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Australia is reopening the immigration detention centre on Christmas Island. The prime minister made a public tour of the facilities.
- Quo Vadis, Lebanon?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Some Lebanese call what is happening on the streets of Beirut, Tripoli and other cities, an "October Revolution", but in reality, this uprising has very little to do with the iconic Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
- Race, Class, and the Left with Adolph Reed Jr.
Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2019 Audio interview with Adolph Reed Jr.
- Race, Identity and the Political Economy of Hate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at statistics casts doubt on the supposed rise of white nationalist groups and violence.
- Radical Ambition
The New Left in Toronto Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 The story of Toronto's New Left from its initial stirrings in the late 1950s to its 'long, ambiguous goodbye in the early 1980s.
- The Radical Roots of Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Interview with Laura Weinrib author of "The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Compromise."
- Raging Against the Algorithm: Google and Persuasive Technology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Fears of Google's algorithms detrimental effect on society may be well-founded but the proposed solutions are problematic.
- Reading Manifestos: Restricting Brenton Tarrant's The Great Replacement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Attempts to censor the Christchurch shooter's manifesto hinders attempts to understand and counteract their motives. Arguments for censorship, such as enabling copycats, are based on controversial evidence.
- Recalling the Hundreds of Thousands of Civilian Victims of America's Endless 'War on Terror'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 According to very conservative estimates, as reported by the "Costs of War" project of Brown University’s Watson Institute on International and Public Affairs, nearly 250,000 civilians have been killed during the 8 years since September 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in wars or attacks that were instigated by the United States.
- Reclaiming control of Indonesia's oceans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Indonesian activists are building a global movement to resist the financialisation and privatisation of the world's oceans.
- Recording Reveals Oil Industry Execs Laughing at Trump Access
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A 2017 recording of Independent Petroleum Association of America executives reveals them revelling in their access to high levels of government. Since then many environmental protections have been rescinded.
- Red-Green Alliance: A Green Earth With Peace And Room For Us All
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Red-Green Alliance advocates a strong international labour organization with muscles to raise global demands for workers. It means a labour organization where it is possible to remain organized, even when traveling across borders, and where people working in the same company, or in the same sector across borders, can be organized together, and raise common demands.
- Red Round Globe Hot Burning
A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019
- Reflections on coherence and comradeship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A lengthy personal meditation on strategic challenges facing left organizing.
- Reform or revolution? A response to three intriguing questions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The article by Steve Downs Three questions of political strategy poses three intriguing questions: Does "democratic road to socialism" = "parliamentary road to socialism"? Does "insurrection" = "revolution"? Does "rupture" = "revolution"? Steve found these questions helpful in understanding the contending views in Solidarity and DSA over reform or revolution.
- Refugees Are in the Channel Thanks to the Actions of the West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The outcome of Western military and economic interventions in the Middle East and North Africa have caused the outflow of refugees from zones of conflict.
- Remembering America's First (and Longest) Forgotten War on Tribal Islamists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Here are the relevant points when it comes to the Moro War (which will sound grimly familiar in a twenty-first-century forever-war context): the United States military shouldn’t have been there in the first place; the war was ultimately an operational and strategic failure, made more so by American hubris; and it should be seen, in retrospect, as (using a term General David Petraeus applied to our present Afghan War) the nation's first "generational struggle."
- Remembering Mitch Podolak
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- ‘Renouncing Violence’ Is a Demand Made Almost Exclusively of Muslims
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Media analysis shows that calls to renounce violence are directed at Muslims or other victims of Western occupation.
- Repeat after me, protests in Venezuela good, protests in France bad!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Anti-government protests in Venezuela and France are treated differently because of the interests the respective presidents - and their opposition - represent.
- Republican Estate Tax Repeal: An Effort to Avoid Ever Being Taxed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 While Sen. Bernie Sanders proposes an important increase in the estate tax, Republicans are gearing for its complete repeal. Morris Pearl of the group Patriotic Millionaires, talks about how the Republicans’ plan would help the rich from ever being taxed.
- Resignations rock US civil rights institute after it strips Angela Davis of award over pro-BDS views
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Three members quit the board of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute after its controversial decision to first grant, then to rescind an award for iconic activist Angela Davis, following objections to her anti-Israel statements.
- Resistance Matters
The Radical Vision of an Antipsychiatry Activist Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Don Weitz writes "Antipsychiatry organizing saved my life once, and has always given it meaning. This book is an invitation to join me and other psychiatric survivors (and our allies) in exposing psychiatry’s coercive, life-destroying practices and utter lack of scientific validity; and creating and promoting life-affirming alternatives."
- Rethinking Dominant Approaches to Climate change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Market-based attempts to curb climate change are inadequate since they further enable its root cause, capitalism.
- Review: Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness (2019)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A detailed review, focusing mainly on gun violence, of Jonathan Metzl's book Dying of Whiteness.
- A Revolutionary Detroit Memoir
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of autobiographical memoir of a white, working-class, Catholic woman who became involved in Black activisim.
- Revolutionary reels: Soviet propaganda film and the Russian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 However, the Bolsheviks would revolutionize Russian cinema as leaders recognized the potential of film propaganda as a way to influence the political and social attitudes of the people. Vladimir Lenin clearly understood the power of film, as he stated, "Of all the arts, for us, cinema is most important."
- Revolutionary theory, academia and Marxist political parties
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 According to Lenin, revolutionary work has four parts: theoretical work, propaganda, agitation and organization.
- A rich diversity: Underground channels and stream of US Trotskyism, 1928-1965
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- Rich Getting Richer Via Tax Policies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Marginal income tax rates plunged starting in the 1980s, hitting their modern-day lows under President George W. Bush. After rising modestly during the Obama Administration, they fell again under President Trump. Rate cuts generate only part of the current bonanza. Tax breaks passed by various Congresses account for the rest, hugely increasing the billions that flow to the haves.
- Rigging the Science of GMO Ecotoxicity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Scientific article about dangers of GMO plants and techniques used by developers to disguise harms to get GMOs through testing.
- The Rigors of Organizing: On the Road with the German Climate Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Ende Gelände, is a broad coalition of German climate resistance organizers. Members are touring the US sharing info about their tactics.
- Rivers in crisis: water theft and corruption in the Darling River system
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A water crisis in New South Wales has resulted in millions of fish dying and a shortage of water in communities. Politicians blame drought while other blame corruption and the actions of big irrigators.
- Rivers of Dust: The Future of Water and the Middle East
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Syria and Iraq are at odds with Turkey over the Tigris-Euphrates. Egypt's relations with Sudan and Ethiopia over the Nile are tense. Jordan and the Palestinians accuse Israel of plundering river water to irrigate the Negev Desert and hogging most of the three aquifers that underlie the occupied West Bank. According to satellites that monitor climate, the Tigris-Euphrates basin, embracing Turkey, Syria, Iraq and western Iran, is losing water faster than any other area in the world, with the exception of Northern India.
- Robot Trolls on Amazon: How Fake Reviews Could Undermine Progressive Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In the pursuit of profit, corporations appear to be using bots to undermine competitors on Amazon, as they do on Twitter and Facebook. This could have detrimental effects on progressive authors and filmmakers who, in the absence of major corporate backing, need the support of reviewers -- at least on Amazon -- in order to boost their marketability.
- A Robust Doctrine: Break the Taboo on Odious Debts and their Repudiation
The Challenges for the European Left regarding Debt and the Banks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An interview with Éric Toussaint, the author of The Debt System. A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation. He discusses debt, illegetimate debt and the instances in history when debts were repudiated.
- Rooting rebellion in nature
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Reflections on the legacy of philosopher and ‘geologian’ Thomas Berry, ten years after his death.
- Rosa Luxemburg and the actuality of revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 She was brilliant, insightful, with considerable knowledge and practical experience. She said and wrote things that are worth comprehending, actively considering, and testing out as we try to understand and change the world around us.
- RT's ban from media freedom conference shows British irony is alive and well
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 RT has been banned from a conference on media freedom for reportedly 'spreading disinformation.' They find this accusation and its source an ironic juxtoposition.
- Russia and the Democrats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Democratic Party's insistence of Russian meddling in the election show how out of touch and unfit their leadership is.
- Russiagate and the Dry Rot in American Journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The idea that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election is used by both liberals and the right to maintain the status quo. Comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson show how staid mainstream news has become.
- Russiagate is Dead! Long Live Russiagate!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Looking at the fiasco of Russiagate, it's instigators, who profits from it and the issues that it distracts from.
- Russiagate media smears against Corbyn brought to you by US and UK military-intelligence apparatus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The popular socialist leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, could be on the verge of becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom. And the mere possibility is terrifying British intelligence services and the US government.
- The Same Media That Opposed Democracy in South Africa Now Warn Against It in Israel/Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Coverage of South African apartheid in US news in the 1980s compared with coverage of Israel/Palestine today reveals similar racist bias.
- Sard's Permanent War Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A long biographical essay on Edward Sard who founded the theory of "permanent war economy."
- The secrets of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Close analysis of 1984, including biographical details of Orwell, defending it as a work of leftist literature.
- The Seizure of an Iranian Tanker and the Lethal Toll of Sanctions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Sanctions against Syria are having a disastrous effect on the population. Comparisons to Iraq during the 1990s by someone who was there show the historic failure and potential further consequences of sanctions.
- 'Sexy tricks': How journalists demonize Venezuela's socialist government, in their own words
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The United States has labeled Venezuela's government a "dictatorship" and part of a "troika of tyranny," and has sponsored multiple coup attempts there, including one in November. The corporate media has dutifully ignored the US role in the country's economic woes, laying the blame squarely at the feet of Maduro, omitting crucial political context on Venezuela's economic crisis while keeping up a constant flow of content presenting the country as a socialist hellhole.
- The Shaving Kit - Manufacturing The Julian Assange Witch-Hunt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A survey of mainstream media coverage of Assange's arrest that makes him an object of ridicule. Much attention is given to the beard he had at the time.
- Shedding Light on Forced Child Pregnancy and Motherhood in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Published: 2018 Research and campaigns by women's rights advocates are beginning to focus on the problem of Latin American girls who are forced to bear the children of their rapists, with the lifelong implications that entails and without the protection of public policies guaranteeing their human rights.
- Shots All Around: How Four Roses Bourbon Workers Won Their Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Four Roses Bourbon Worked successfully striked over a two-tier contract proposal that would have given worse benefits to new hires.
- Slavery and the American Revolution: A Response to the New York Times 1619 Project
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In its insistence that race -- which has no basis in science -- is the determinative category of both the present and past, the 1619 Project shares the most basic premise of the white supremacists and fascists that are being set into motion by the Trump administration.
- 'Slaves of the sea'
The long-forgotten Jaladas community and their need for policy inclusion Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Due to socio-econimical, political, and geographical reasons, the Jaladas community has been negelected and they are vulnerable. Relevant sectoral policies enacted by the government of Bangladesh would address these issues.
- Social Media Regulation: Speak of the Devil and in Walks Zuck
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Social media giants such as Facebook support government regulation as a means to secure their monopolies.
- Socially Polarised, Politically Paralysed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An essay on the peculiar character of contemporary social polarisation illstrated through the discussion of Brexit.
- Solidarity, Survival and Sabotage: Reconstructing the History of the Blackouts Tormenting Venezuela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A detailed timeline of events during the recent blackout in Venezuela.
- The Solution to the Country's Debt and Deficit Problem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 For most people, the country's national debt and annual deficit are not major concerns. However, for a substantial portion of the policy types who make, write, and talk about economic and budget policy, debt and deficits are really big deals. And, the fact that our budget deficit and debt are both large by historic standards, and growing rapidly, is an especially big deal.
- Sowing the seeds of climate crisis in Odisha
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In Rayagada, Bt cotton acreage has risen by 5,200 per cent in 16 years. The result: this biodiversity hotspot, rich in indigenous millets, rice varieties and forest foods, is seeing an alarming ecological shift.
- Spokane vs. the Border Patrol: How Immigration Agents Stake Out a City Bus Station
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Amid the Trump administration's immigration enforcement crackdown, the Border Patrol has stepped up raids on Greyhound buses nationwide, combatting what the agency claims is a "growing threat" of "alien smuggling and drug trafficking organizations to move people, narcotics, and contraband to interior destinations."
- Sri Lanka Easter Sunday Massacre: Reflection Of Long Time Silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A personal story about extreme ideologies that infiltrated Islamic societies.
- Stanford Study Says Renewable Power Eliminates Argument for Using Carbon Capture with Fossil Fuels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A study in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environmental Science, concludes that carbon capture technologies are inefficient at pulling out carbon, from a climate perspective, and often increase local air pollution from the power required to run them, which exacerbates public health issues. Replacing a coal plant with wind turbines, on the other hand, always decreases local air pollution and doesn't come with the associated cost of running a carbon capture system, says Jacobson.
- Statement Condemning US Removal of Democratically-Elected Evo Morales
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Following months of destabilization, on November 10, 2019, the legitimate, constitutional, democratically-elected President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, was driven at gunpoint out of office and the country by the US and its allies, among them Bolivian fascists and several members of the Organization of American States (OAS), including Canada. This latest aggression follows centuries of colonial, imperialist, and neo-colonial conquest and plunder of the Indigenous-majority population of Bolivia.
- Still Lonely on the Right
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A review of 3 books about Black Republicans.
- The Strange Career of the Second Amendment -- Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Detailed analysis of the Second Amendment and different perceptions of gun rights in US history.
- The Strange Career of the Second Amendment, Part II
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A further look at the history of the Second Amendment. Focuses on late 19th and 20th c and disparity of the laws in regard to race.
- The Strange Workings of Identity and Adolph Reed Jr.'s Thought
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 One of the cornerstones of the socialist approach to identity is the insistence that identities are not naturally occurring but are, rather, the products of history. The controversy surrounding Reed’s work offers an opportunity to try to clarify our understanding of identity.
- "Strategic Extremism": How Republicans and Establishment Democrats Use Identity Politics to Divide and Rule
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Since morality is easy to use as a tool to manipulate voters, Republican's wooing of the alt-right is an effective strategy in a close election. To counter this the left must focus on real issues that challenge corporate power.
- Study Reveals How UK Intelligence Works with Media to Smear Jeremy Corbyn
New research from Matt Kennard has shown how the British intelligence establishment works with the UK media to smear Jeremy Corbyn. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Academic studies of the Corbyn coverage have also shown that corporate media have shown a profound hostility to him and his project. One report from the London School of Economics included an entire section called "Delegitimization through Ridicule, Scorn, and Personal Attacks."
- The Stupidity of Smart Devices and Smart Cities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Smart phones, smart bombs, and, it follows, Smart Cities (capitalising such terms implies false authority), do not exist in that sense, whatever their cheer squad emissaries in High Tech land claim. They are merely a masterfully daft celebration of tactically deployed cults: there is a fad, a trend, and therefore, it must be smart, a model option to pursue.
- Suicide Watch on Planet Earth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The burning of Notre Dame cathedral, while tragic, is nothing compared to the damage to our planet brought by climate change.
- Sundarbans: 'Not a blade of grass grew...'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 People in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, for long living on the edge, are now facing climate change – recurring cyclones, erratic rain, growing salinity, rising heat, depleting mangroves and more.
- Swedish Sex Pistol Aimed at Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 By asserting the extraterritorial jurisdiction of American law to demand the extradition of another country’s (Australia) citizen from a third country (Great Britain) for activities that took place entirely outside the US, the present indictment is, as Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists, points out: “a direct threat to journalists everywhere in the world….Under this rubric, anyone anywhere in the world who publishes information that the U.S. government deems to be classified could be prosecuted for espionage.”
- A Tale of Two Citations: Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Michael Harrington's "The Other America"
Contrasting Lessons for Activists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Looking at the forgotten, more radical aspects of Carson's "Silent Spring." Compares it with other, less radical works that were more easily co-opted by governments looking to appease new social and environmental movements.
- A Tale of Two Toilets: Profiting from Necessity?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 As indoor plumbing arrived in the U.S. in the 1840s and Dr. John Snow’s treatise on sewage-contaminated water causing cholera came out in 1855, the current global toilet situation cannot be attributed to lack of knowledge, technology, or resources.
- Talking Trash: Unfortunate Truths About Recycling
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A deep dive into the mechanics of recycling and why it isn't a panacea for our environmental problems.
- Tamil Nadu's seaweed harvesters in rough seas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An unusual activity of the fisherwomen of Bharathinagar in Tamil Nadu keeps them more in the water than on boats. But climate change and overexploitation of marine resources are eroding their livelihoods.
- Taxed, throttled or thrown in jail: Africa's new internet paradigm
The costs of speaking out online are rising rapidly Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Many governments in Africa, threatened by the democracy of internet communication, are stifling it by imposing taxes and fees, throttling internet service itself and even arresting bloggers.
- Taxing Financial Transactions Is More Strategic Than Taxing High Wealth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- Technocracy now: The US is working to turn Lebanons anti-corruption protests against Hezbollah
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The movement was spurred by the levying of regressive taxes and the persistence of a corrupt neoliberal order that has mismanaged the economy and hollowed out the public sector while enriching a handful of elites amid a looming economic collapse. Though the protests remain focused on class issues and corruption, the US is increasingly determined to co-opt the movement for its own goals.
- 10 Ways that the Climate Crisis and Militarism are Intertwined
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The environmental justice movement that is surging globally is intentionally intersectional, showing how global warming is connected to issues such as race, poverty, migration and public health. One area intimately linked to the climate crisis that gets little attention, however, is militarism.
- Thank Russia for Winning World War II
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Our Soviet allies barely held on alone for three years against Hitler, yet conventional wisdom is that we won the war because we equipped Soviets to die for us. This is propaganda – the USSR bore more than 90% of its own wartime industrial burden.
- Thank Russia for Winning World War II
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- That Couldn't Be True: Restorying and Reconciliation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 To achieve reconciliation with Indigenous people Canada must let go of the myth of itself as a benevolent force in the world.
- 'They Had Already Decided They Wanted to Invade Iraq'
CounterSpin interviews with Robert Dreyfuss and Diana Duarte on media and the Iraq War Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 MP3s and transcripts of two interviews about justifications for the Iraq war. One focused on intelligence on WMDs and the other on women's rights.
- This London Firm Helps the Wealthy Hide Assets - or Steal Them. Luckily We Have 15 Years of Their Client Communications
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A London firm that helps the rich hide or steal money has had 15 years' worth of communications leaked. These are being made available to hopefully help return stolen money.
- This School District Threatened To Take Kids Away From Parents Over Lunch Debt. Then It Refused a Businessman's Offer to Pay Those Debts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A Pennsylvania school district sent letters to parents who owed lunch money informing them that they could lose custody of their children due to their lunch money debt.
- Thousands of Goldminers Invade Yanomami Territory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Goldminers have invaded Yanomami lands in northern Brazil, probably emboldened by Bolsonaro's war against Indigenous rights. They have brought disease to uncontacted peoples and are poisoning the environment.
- Three Lessons for the Left from the Mueller Inquiry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Important lessons for the progressive left to consider now that it is clear the inquiry by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russiagate is never going to uncover collusion between Donald Trump's camp and the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election.
- Three Questions of Political Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 As I read contributions to The Call and Jacobin, and from Solidarity members, I wonder if that doesn't explain some of the disagreements about "reform or revolution" that have come up between some Solidarity members and some members of DSA’s Bread and Roses caucus. Framing these disagreements as a set of questions has helped me better understand the contending views.
- To Adapt to the Escalating Climate Crisis, Mere Reform Will Not Be Enough
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 As I've watched young people around the world take part in the climate actions of the last month, I've gotten the sense that I'm watching a spectacle which has been orchestrated to create the illusion that we're still in an earlier, more stable time for the planet's climate. Legitimate as the passion and commitment of this generation of teen climate activists is, their efforts are being packaged by the political and media establishment in a way that encourages denial about our true situation.
- To Be or Not to Be a Jewish State, That is the Question
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Israel's champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the "Jewish People" everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country.
- To Readers, $X Billion Just Means 'a Whole Lot of Money'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A call for media to put numbers in context, e.g., food stamps cost of $70 billion a year is just 0.4 percent of the budget.
- To Silence a Poet, and a Nation: What Stella Nyanzi's Conviction Means for Uganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Dr. Stella Nyanzi has been convicted under internet obscenity laws for criticizing Uganda's president. The style of her writing may be as much an issue as the criticism itself.
- Tom Paine, Christianity, and Modern Psychiatry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Much of modern psychiatry is based on unscientific theories even many practitioners of its find problematic. Since Thomas Paine knew Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), considered the "father of American psychiatry," this article draws parallels between Paine's criticisms of religion with those of psychiatry today.
- Top Bolivian coup plotters trained by US military's School of the Americas, served as attachés in FBI police programs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The United States played a key role in the military coup in Bolivia, and in a direct way that has scarcely been acknowledged in accounts of the events that forced the country's elected president, Evo Morales, to resign on November 10, 2019.
- Trade Deals Are About Increasing Protectionist Barriers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Past trade deals were about making it easier to trade manufactured goods, making it as easy as possible for corporations to take advantage of low-cost labor in the developing world. This has the predicted and actual effect of putting downward pressure on the wages of less-educated workers.
- The Transnational Network That Nobody is Talking About
IntelBrief Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist (RWE) movement. Recruits from the U.S., Norway, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Sweden, and Australia, among others, have reportedly traveled to train with the Azov Battalion. The global nature of these groups is just one of several similarities between RWEs and Salafi-jihadists.
- Trudeau government gives dangerous new powers to Canada's political cops
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has published a massive collection of documents that reveal that CSIS is gathering information on peaceful protest groups. This coincides with new legislation from the Trudeau government that gives CSIS increased powers to conduct surveillance.
- Trump's Brilliant Strategy to Dismember U.S. Dollar Hegemony
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The US's ability to use finance as international leverage is weakening as American nationalism becomes more blatant and alienates allies.
- Trump's Trade Threats are Really Cold War 2.0
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Trump's attempts to bully China economically may backfire and alienate the US from trade partners.
- The TSA's Role as Journalist Harasser and Media 'Watchdog'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An American journalist whose work opposes the US government is openly marked for extra screening and inspections when travelling.
- Turkey in 2019: An Assessment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at the current state of the Erdogan regime in Turkey as well as the hopes and challenges of what the left can accomplish.
- The 2019 UN Vote Against the US Blockade of Cuba
Trump's Washington Remains Cornered Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 On November 7, 2019, for the 28th year in a row, the entire United Nations General Assembly, gathered in one room, voted overwhelmingly against "the Economic, Commercial, and Financial Embargo Imposed on Cuba by the United States." The final tally was 187 in favor, 3 opposed (Brazil, Israel, US), 2 abstentions (Colombia, Ukraine), 1 not voting (Moldova).
- Uber Has Always Been a Criminal Organization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Uber's whole business model was premised on criminality -- the willful, systematic flouting of local taxi regulations, based on a wager that the company could retroactively absolve itself by getting the laws changed via big-money lobbying. With that kind of mission, it's not surprising its executives had blood on their hands long before they started taking Saudi blood money.
- Ukraine, the New Cold War and the Politics of Impeachment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The question not being asked is why it was politically, legally or morally justified for the U.S.-- the Obama administration, to 1) use NGOs and the CIA 2) to join with real and virulent Ukrainian Nazis to 3) oust the Democratically elected president of Ukraine 4) in order to install a puppet regime that answers to the national security state? Passionate assertions that Donald Trump is corrupt face the question back: what part of this entire operation isn't corrupt?
- Ukraine on Fire: The Real Story
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2019
- Ukraine's Nazis: Who are they, why are they so influential — and why have media ignored them?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A recent festival in Kiev proudly displayed Nazi symbols and even advertised 'White Pride' – yet received almost no attention from Western media, who still steadfastly pretend there are no Nazis in Ukraine, neo- or otherwise.
- Ukrainian neo-Nazis flock to the Hong Kong protest movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Neo-Nazis from Ukraine have flown to Hong Kong to participate in the anti-Chinese insurgency, which has been widely praised by Western corporate media and portrayed as a peaceful pro-democracy movement. Since March 2019, Hong Kong has been the site of often-violent protests and riots that have run the city’s economy into the ground.
- UN aviation body blocks critics online
The UN’s aviation body is blocking climate critics on Twitter, accusing them of 'fake news' and 'spam'. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The International Civil Aviation Organization is blocking people who interact with them on Twitter. They claim their critics' arguments are not 'fact-based.'
- Uncle Sam was Born Lethal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The white European "settlers" of North America wiped out millions of the continent's original inhabitants. They populated their southern colonies and states with Black slaves they mercilessly tortured, raped, maimed, and murdered in forced labour camps that provided the critical raw material for the rise of American capitalism long before Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler rose to power.
- Unconditional support for Israel is unconditional support for injustice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Like tens of thousands of Jews worldwide, we oppose Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and its regime of violence, intimidation and incarceration aimed at the Palestinian population of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. We challenge those who offer unconditional support for Israel to ask themselves if they would support the same violations of human rights and international law anywhere else in the world. We affirm that our criticism of Israel comes from an embrace of both Jewish and universal humanitarian values and has no relation whatsoever to antisemitism.
- Unconditional support for Israel is unconditional support for injustice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Like tens of thousands of Jews worldwide, we oppose Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and its regime of violence, intimidation and incarceration aimed at the Palestinian population of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. We challenge those who offer unconditional support for Israel to ask themselves if they would support the same violations of human rights and international law anywhere else in the world. We affirm that our criticism of Israel comes from an embrace of both Jewish and universal humanitarian values and has no relation whatsoever to antisemitism.
- Undermining the watercycle
A critical appraisal of the mining industry's contributions to the global water crisis. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The mining industry is often overlooked as a cause of the global water crisis. This article examines recent history of mining disasters and how the industry PR greenwashes its image.
- Unearthing Justice
How to Protect Your Community from the Mining Industry Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Brimming with case studies, anecdotes, resources, and illustrations, Unearthing Justice exposes the mining process and its externalized impacts on the environment, Indigenous Peoples, communities, workers, and governments. But, most importantly, the book shows how people are fighting back.
- Unfree Media – State Stenography And Shameful Silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A recent viral clip of Jeremy Corbyn featured vital truths about the corporate media that ought to be at the forefront of public consciousness in the approach to the UK General Election on December 12, 2020.
- United States - DSA Two Years Later: Where Are We At? Where Are We Headed?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had had a massive surge in membership in the last two years. Here is a look at the history of socialism in the US and the DSA's current prospects for enacting real change.
- US Media Ignore -- and Applaud -- Economic War on Venezuela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 US reporting on Venezuela fails to mention the effect economic sanctions have in Venezuela defying the work of experts in the area.
- U.S. Newspapers Are More Than Twice As Likely to Cite Israeli Sources in Headlines Than Palestinian Ones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A study of 50 years of news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict from five major American publications shows that they are biased towards the Israeli side.
- U.S. Senate's First Bill, in the Midst of the Shutdown, Is a Bipartisan Defense of the Israeli Government From Boycotts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 This Senate's first bill of 2019 considers giving state and local governments the power to punish companies that boycott Israel. These laws have been found to be unconstitutional but still have bipartisan support.
- The 'Unpeople' of South Korea
Idiocy and Violence of Immigration Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Who are the ‘unpeople’ of South Korea? They are an majority of illegal migrants who lack basic rights and security and believed to deserve it according to the laws and principles under which Korean society operates.
- Updating Some U.S. Political Prisoners January 2019
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An update on political prisoners in the United States.
- US Capitalism Was Born in the Destruction of the Commons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Interview with Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh about Federici's book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.
- The US coup in Venezuela: New attempt to eradicate the Chavista Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The coup in Venezuela is the latest in a long history of US attempts to undermine and overthrow progressive governments in Latin America. American progressives must do more to stop this aggression.
- US Cyber Attack on Russia's Power Grid is an 'Act of War' (According to the US)
What about Venezuela's hacked power grid? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The New York Times reports that the US has hacked Russia's power grid. Reporting on the issue has failed to mention any call for consequences or the fact that the US has already been accused of doing the same to Venezuela.
- US Democrats Cultivated the Barbarism of Isis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media's framing of Donald Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria. One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.
- US Foists 'Humanitarian Aid' on Venezuela, Helps Create a Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The US-backed Saudi Arabia war on Yemen is causing the worst humanitarian crisis of the modern era. The lack of concern from politicians should belie this justification for U.S. intervention in other countries.
- US Foreign Policy Exposed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Some recent events and information leaks have forced even the mainstream media to break the usual veneer over US foreign policy.
- US Government Knew Climate Risks in 1970s, National Petroleum Council Documents Show
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Newly discovered documents show that the fossil fuel industry has know since the 1970s the effect that CO2 emissions would have on the environment.
- US Media Keep Saying Iran is "In Violation" of a Nuclear Agreement the US Withdrew From
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 US Media portray Iran as having violated the US-Iran nuclear agreement. That's because the Trump administration, acting on its own, foolishlypulled out unilaterally from that agreement, and has been imposing sanctions on Iran, all of which has been in violation of the agreement, and which, by violating its terms, effectively terminates the agreement.
- US Negotiations: Masters of Defeats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A summary of several US attempts at diplomacy that have failed due to their unwillingness to make any concessions to the other party.
- US and Puppet Guaido Implicated in Terrorism Plot Against Venezuela PLOT
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 New evidence has been uncovered regarding terror campaign planned by the US and the Venezuelan opposition.
- US Regime Change Blueprint Proposed Venezuelan Electricity Blackouts as 'Watershed Event' for 'Galvanizing Public Unrest'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A 2010 memo from Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) seems to be playing out as planned in 2019.
- US State Department Publishes, then deletes sadistic Venezuela hit list boasting of economic ruin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A fact sheet put out by the US State Department listing its "accomplishments" in Venezuela reads more like a confession of atrocities. The document was later withdrawn.
- US Trotskyism 1928-1965 Part I: Emergence
Left Opposition in the United States Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 The first in a documentary trilogy of U.S. Trotskyism, this volume spans 1928 to 1940, surveying labour struggles, contributions to the study of history and Marxist theory, and confrontations and convergences among left currents.
- US Trotskyism 1928–1965 Part II: Endurance
The Coming American Revolution. Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 3 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 The second in a documentary trilogy of U.S. Trotskyism, this volume spans 1941 to 1956, surveying the Second World War, the post-war strike wave, ongoing struggles against racism, and more.
- US Trotskyism 1928–1965 Part III: Resurgence
Uneven and Combined Development. Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 The third in a documentary trilogy of U.S. Trotskyism, this volume spans 1954 to 1965, surveying the Cold War era, the Black liberation struggle, the "third wave" of feminism, and more.
- U.S.: We Will Break Your Legs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The US has threatened to deny visas to any ICC personnel investigating possible war crimes by U.S. forces. This should make clear the hypocrisy when the the US cites human rights violations as an excuse to invade other countries.
- U.S.A : How Federal Workers Could Fight the Shutdown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Federal workers have dealt with low pay, degraded working conditions, and repeated employer lockouts. If they want to improve their conditions, they'll have to organize.
- The UTLA Victory in Context
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at the bigger picture surrounding the LA teacher's strike as part of the national upsurge that began with the 2012 strike of the Chicago Teachers Union.
- Venezuela Blitz - Part 1: Tyrants Don’t Have Free Elections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Thorough summary of support for the Venezuela coup in US and UK media with many excerpts.
- Venezuela Blitz - Part 2: Press Freedom, Sanctions And Oil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Analysis of corporate coverage of Venezuela reveals: reporting on the supposed lack of free press, and rarely mentioning the US's interest in their oil and effect of sanctions on the country.
- Venezuela Coup Leader's Oil Plans Revealed: Guaidó Hopes to Privatize State-Controlled Industry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Juan Guaidó and his economic advisers have a plan to privatize the country's petroleum industry. This privatization scheme will be difficult to implement, however, since he is not in power.
- Venezuela Coverage Takes Us Back to Golden Age of Lying About Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Corporate media has many stories about food and medicine shortages in Venezuela. These lies and others are debunked by someone who lives there.
- Venezuela: The U.S.'s 68th Regime Change Disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The US's sanctions and political interference in Venezuela are part of a long history of foreign meddling that brings strife to the affected country.
- Venezuela: Is President Maduro 'illegitimate'? 10 facts to counter the lies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Concise rebuttal of talking points used by those trying to bring about a coup in Venezuela.
- Venezuelan economist: 'Hyperinflation is a powerful imperialist weapon'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Interview with Venezuelan an economist about how hyperinflation is being used as a weapon against the country.
- A Very Incomplete List of Sinister Things Vladimir Putin/Russia/'the Russians' Have Been Accused of Doing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A list as the title describes (with links).
- The Violent History of the Venezuelan Opposition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Mainstream media paint Venezuelan opposition as peaceful heroes and President Maduro as a villain. Details about opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez show this to be blatant propaganda.
- The War in Eastern Ukraine May be Coming to an End but Do Any Americans Care?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The Ukraine War remains largely unknown to the American public even though the United States has had a great stake in it.
- The War on Venezuela is Built on Lies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Maduro, like Chavez before him, is a fairly elected leader with support from the people. Talk of his 'illegitmacy' is propaganda in service of the coup.
- The War That Never Ends
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 North Korean denuclearization is unlikely without concessions (such as sanctions relief) from the US side. How likely is the Trump administration to make such a deal?
- Washington's Dr. Strangeloves: Is plunging Russia into darkness really a good idea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 US cyber attacks on Russia's power grid, reportedly done without the president's knowledge, are part of a historic pattern of US/Russian relations being sabotaged US defense and intelligence agencies.
- Washington's Biggest Fairy Tale: 'Truth Will Out'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The idea that the truth will eventually be exposed may be comforting to people that think we live in a transparent democracy. But this investigative journalist discusses how hard it is to get information from the government.
- Water as a Form of Social Control
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Whether in Palestine or Detroit, restricting access to water is a tactic used to deprive populations of personal and social agency with dire consequences to health.
- Water resources - 'The river is dying': the vast ecological cost of Brazil's mining disasters
Water resources are tapped with often reckless abandon and poor regulation. And it looks set to go on under new president. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Brazil's worst mining disaster in decades has prompted calls to create stronger regulations and enforce them with real consequences rather than small fines that often go unpaid.
- ‘We Don’t Do Propaganda’
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Dutch historian Rutger Bregman's (un-aired) appearance on Tucker Carlson sparked outrage in Carlson and an opportunity to highlight how money controls the narrative in mainstream news.
- We hacked tube ads to call out the Home Office's hostile environment
Our Future Now on how they helped the Home Office be a little more honest about its policies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Today our activist group, Our Future Now, have installed subverted adverts on London Underground trains calling out the Home Office's 'hostile environment' and its brutal and racist policies.
- 'We Need to Ban Fracking': New Analysis of 1,500 Scientific Studies Details Threat to Health and Climate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The latest analysis of studies on the effects of fracking confirms that it poses an extreme threat to the environment and local people's healt.
- We The Workers: A limited documentary about labour rights groups in China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A review of a documentary on labour conditions in China. The docementary was filmed at great risk but the motiviations and the end product are questionable.
- Wealth and the Invisibility of Human Life
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of the book "Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism" by Quinn Slobodian.
- Weaponized Social Media Is Driving the Explosion of Fascism
Social media platforms give governments, extremists, haters and propagandists the ability to excite and incite hate amplified by algorithms. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Describing how social media wages war on reality by spreading propaganda. With examples from ISIS to Alex Jones.
- Weaponizing human rights: UN chief Bachelet's Venezuela report follows US regime change script
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A report from the UN High Commissioner on the situation in Venezuela has been condemned by many sources as a political tool to justify the US's attempted regime change in that country.
- West Africa's Fine Line Between Cultural Norms and Child Trafficking
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Human traficking in West Africa is difficult to deal with as it has become entrenched in the culture of people living in extreme poverty.
- The West Failed to Learn the Most Important Lessons From the Rise and Fall of ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The attempted coup in Venezuela today is an example of imperial overreach western governments displayed in the Middle East.
- The Western Media is Key to Syria Deceptions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 An analysis of why western media has failed to practice any scepticism regarding claims that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons.
- What Black Life Actually Looks Like
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In the age of Black Lives Matter protests, many activists and academics seem unable to see the complexity of black life beyond the barricades, or outside the frame of the latest viral video killing of a black civilian.
- What George Carlin Taught Us about Media Propaganda by Omission
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In the old George Carlin joke, the TV sportscaster announces: "Here's a partial score from the West Coast – Los Angeles 6." For a brilliant comedian like Carlin -- who skewered corporate power, class structure and political/media propaganda – that's one of his more innocuous jokes. But it's sharply relevant today as corporate TV news outlets serve up a series of partial scores. Call it 'propaganda by omission.'
- What is Happening in Spain?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Spain spends much less on public social expenditures that what it should spend according to its level of economic development. It is one of the countries of the European Union 15 (the more advanced economies of the European Union) that spends the least on public services such as health care, education, public housing and child care, and on transfers, such as pensions.
- What kind of rebellion will save humanity from extinction?
The real power of mass civil disobedience is not its ability to shock the powerful into listening, but rather its potential to draw masses o Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Despite overwhelming evidence that the world has already passed certain tipping points, setting off large and unpredictable changes in the climate, why are governments still refusing to act on the scale and pace required?
- What Los Angeles Teachers Won
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A Los Angeles teacher's take on the successful strike.
- What Religion is Your Nationalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 On November 9, 2019, 27 years after mobs destroyed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Supreme Court of India, despite stating that the demolition of the mosque was against the rule of law, pronounced the lawbreakers as victors. Those who had indulged in a bloodbath to build a temple where they claim Lord Ram was born have become the owners.
- What the 'White Irish Slaves' Meme Tells Us About Identity Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In setting out to rebut narratives of 'Irish Slaves' the left has often downplayed the history of Irish oppression.
- What the Media Won't Tell You About the Venezuelan Coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Calling Venezuela's election illegitimate is false and is also a familiar tactic for US interference in a country's government.
- What's the alternative to factory farms?
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Mixed review of a collection of essays about industrial agriculture. Most of the papers point out the destructiveness of animal agriculture but neglect the wider issue of capitialism.
- What's the True Unemployment Rate in the US?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The real unemployment rate is probably somewhere between 10%-12%. The 3.7% is the U-3 rate, per the labor dept. But that’s the rate only for full time employed. What the labour depatment calls the U-6 includes what it calls discouraged workers (those who haven’t looked for work in the past 4 weeks). Then there's what's called the 'missing labour force' - i.e. those who have'’t looked in the past year. They're not calculated in the 3.7% U-3 unemployment rate number either. Why? Because you have to be 'out of work and actively looking for work' to be counted as unemployed and therefore part of the 3.7% rate.
- When the IWW Took on the Copper Kings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of the movie "Bisbee ‘17" about a strike and subsequent deportation of the workers of an Arizona mining town.
- When Welfare Checks Turn Deadly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The disabled and mental ill encur growing risks and dangers when interacting with police as their actions are often interrupted as hostile or dangerous. Such misinterruption often result in a fatal encounter with law enforcement.
- When Your Boss Locks You Out for Nearly 6 Months and Cuts Off Your Healthcare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 When energy company National Grid locked out its workers during contract negotiations, workers workers had to struggle with loss of income and health insurance. Workers as well as legislators see this as an unfair bargaining tactic.
- Where Have You Gone Abbie Hoffman?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A collection of excerpts of people writing about Abbie Hoffman on the 30th anniversary of his death.
- 'Where was the Lord?': On Jefferson Davis' birthday, 9 slave testimonies
The voices of five men and four women, once held in human bondage, interviewed in Alabama in 1937. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Testimonies of several victims of slavery collected in the 1930s tell of separation from family, overwork, and abuse.
- While the World Watches Trump, It’s Missing What’s Really Going On
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The superficial antics of Trump and other world leaders are making front page news while investigative reporting on real issues is pushed to the margins.
- White Women and White Power
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Review of two books about white supremacy. Especially focused on the role of white women in white power movements.
- Who Inflicts the Most Gun Violence in America? The U.S. Government and Its Police Force
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Statistical analyses of gun violence in America consistently fail to account for the number of victimes of police killings. The militization of policiing has led to a greater number of victims, particularly among young black men and the mentally ill.
- Who Is Responsible?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A short update on attempts to gain justice for Indigenous genocide in Guatemala in the 1980s.
- Who Would Believe It? Annals of the New Left Era
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A review of "You Say You Want a Revolution" a collection of memoirs of the Progressive Labor Party.
- Whose history? Why the People's History Museum is vital
In recent months, high-profile figures have claimed museums should be ‘neutral’ spaces. Thank goodness, then, for the People’s History Museu Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Peoples History Museum also acts as a space for learning and offers a site for new debates to emerge, regularly allocating space for community exhibitions and contemporary political discussion. It also exhibits documents from recent events and contemporary unions, as it continues to build its collections.
- Whose "Security" -- and for What?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Editorial about how accepted "security" discourse obscures the real structural and systemic crises today.
- Why Activists Fail
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Describes why activists have historically failed to make a real difference - they don't know how the world works. Describes how the world works and explains some components of nonviolent strategy for change.
- Why Ann Coulter Has Power: U.S. Politics are Authoritarian by Design
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A description of undemocratic processes in the US government - the Electoral College, gerrymandering, etc. - and how these allow a small minority to decide the leadership of the country.
- Why Are These Facts So Stubbornly Forbidden?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The author gives several examples of people refusing to change their beliefs even when confronted with facts.
- Why Aren't the Democrats Talking About Ending Patent Financed Drug Research?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Presenting a case for replacing government-granted patent monopoly financing of pharmaceutical research to make drugs available at free market prices.
- Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy
Behind the urgency of climate action is the understanding that everything is connected; behind white supremacy is an ideology of separation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Climate action and climate change denial are antithetical to each other as the former is based on interconnectivity and collective action while the latter seeks exclusion and separation.
- Why Left Wing Populism Is Not Enough
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Mainly a critique of Chantal Mouffe's book 'For a Left Populism,' discusses the shortcomings of a poplulism that downplays the role of class.
- Why the 1953 cancellation of German debt won’t be reproduced for Greece and Developing Countries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Detailed look at the differences between cancellation of Germany's debt and that of developing countries today.
- Why the Anthropocene is not 'climate change' - and why that matters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Reducing our current predicament to combatting climate change, or even narrower, reducing CO2 emissions fails to show the big picture of how humans have changed the planet. To contend with the Anthropocene we need to get rid of one-dimensional thinking of climate change.
- Why The 'Ok Boomer' phenomenon is short-sighted
Millennials and Generation Zers have more in common with struggling boomers than wealthy elites our own age Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The "Ok Boomer" meme, which many young people are using online as a rebuttal against supposedly out-of-touch baby boomers, taps into frustrations disproportionately experienced by millennials and Generation Zers -- particularly in Canada's most unaffordable cities. Unfortunately, however, the meme also represents a discourse that ignores the many older people experiencing poverty, discrimination and hardship.
- Why the US is Persecuting Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Governments don't like it when reporters disclose secrets that impede their preferred narrative. This article draws parallels between Assange and the work of Yemeni reporter Maad al-Zikry.
- Why the US Puppet President of Venezuela is Toast
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In the alternative universe of corporate media, which ignores the economic war being waged against Venezuela, Reuters bemoans that the “crackdown” on Guaidó’s agents has failed to receive “significant retaliation from the international community.” In reality, Venezuela has massively suffered from the US-orchestrated punishments for resisting reverting to the status of a client state.
- Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
And Other Arguments for Economic Independence Resource Type: Book First Published: 2019 Unregulated capitalism is bad for women. Socialism, if done properly, leads to economic independence, better labour conditions, better work/family balance and, yes, even better sex.
- Wiara, Nadzieja i Wytrwalosc
Faith, Hope and Persistence - Polish translation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019
- Wildly Underestimated Oilsands Emissions Latest Blow to Alberta's Dubious Climate Claims
As disaster looms, petro province lets industry call the shots. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The oilsand industry's own measurements of their carbon output fall far short of that reported by Environment Canada's and others' research. This could deal a blow to the industry's PR efforts.
- With the right-wing coup in Bolivia nearly complete, the junta is hunting down the last remaining dissidents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A brutal military junta that seized power from Bolivia's democratically elected President Evo Morales is violently repressing a working-class indigenous-led uprising, and the country is rapidly falling under its control. Soldiers in military fatigues prowl the streets, enforcing a series of choke points around the seat of power.
- Women and the far right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Many of the past gains of human and civil rights with women are at risk of being rolled back as the far right assumes power in numerous countries. Such attacks on women's reproductive rights and their places and roles in society have historical precedents in fascist movements in the past.
- Women's Oppression and Liberation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 On the role of Marxism in the feminist movement in India.
- Women's stories from the frontline of Sudan's revolution must be told
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Women are leading Sudan's revolt against religious fundamentalism. As in Egypt and Saudi Arabia they face a violent backlash.
- A World in Revolt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 We are pleased to include in this issue of Insurgent Notes a series of very detailed accounts and analyses of the gilets jaunes or yellow vests movement in France prepared by activists associated with Temps critiques. The texts are informed by a distinctive theoretical perspective (regarding capitalist reproduction and the possibility of revolution) and their sustained involvement in the yellow vests movement from its inception.
- The World Needs a Water Treaty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Climate change is making water into as valuable a commodity as oil with similar national tensions resulting.
- The World Needs a Water Treaty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 During the face-off earlier this year between India and Pakistan over a terrorist attack that killed more than 40 Indian paramilitaries in Kashmir, New Delhi made an existential threat to Islamabad. The weapon was not India’s considerable nuclear arsenal, but one still capable of inflicting ruinous destruction: water.
- Yellow fever
Populist pangs in France Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 The 'gilets jaunes' are a complex movement that has grown from a distrust of France's elites towards demands for citizen-led democracy. Their invocation of the French Revolution has provided the movement with a powerful sense of popular legitimacy but, as Gabriel Bristow argues, contains contradictions of its own.
- The Yellow Vests of France: Six Months of Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 A look at the Yellow Vest movement in France after six months. Although they avoid structures of formal organizations they are converging with several other groups.
- Yelp and the Myth of Consumer Power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 Online reviews on Yelp have had a massive effect on the service industry but this should not be perceived as giving power to consumers. In the end it is only the platfrom that profits.
- Yet Another U.S. Coup Attempt to Eradicate the Bolivarian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 History of the attempted coup in Venezuela as of January 2019.
- "Zone Defense:" a New Way To Stop ATV’s in Wilderness Areas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2019 In 2002, a new method of organizing was used by 20 organizations in a rural area of southwest Oregon to successfully confront an ATV threat in an area where no national, regional or local group had enough members to do much by itself. The nature of the campaign required numbers of people to turn out on short notice to meetings in sparsely populated areas for which little advance notice could be expected.
2018
- Academics Who Serve as Israel's Useful Idiots
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 How derisively would we have treated an academic - an expert in human rights, no less - who argued back in the 1980s that those who supported a boycott of apartheid South Africa must have been secretly anti-white or anti-Christian because they did not equally prioritise a boycott of Israel?
- ACLU sues US over separation of mother, child seeking asylum
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 American Civil Liberties Union accused the U.S. government of unlawfully separating a Congolese woman and her 7-year-old daughter by holding them in different immigration facilities 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) appart.
- Afghanistan is Collapsing. Get Out: Now!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the disastrous results of US and NATO intervention in Afghanistan, a conflict which has little to do with eliminating international terrorism.
- Africa: New evidence of ongoing corporate looting
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A World Bank report indicates a massive depletion of Africa's natural wealth by transnational corporations (TNC). There are two ways to address TNC capture of African wealth: bottom-up through direct action that blocks extraction, or top-down through significant reform.
- Africa's whistleblowers
'All I did was tell the truth' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Africa, those who denounce corruption face hardship and physical danger even when there’s a legal framework that should protect and guarantee them a fair hearing.
- African Americans and Immigrant Workers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Malik discusses job competition and tensions between Afrcian Americans and Hispanic workers, more specifically between African Amercians and undocumented workers. He illustrates this through the example of a conflict in a Chicago bakery.
- Africa's Pioneering Marxist Political Economist, Samir Amin (1931-2018)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the pioneering work of Egyptian-French Marxian economist Samir Amin, who died on August 12, 2018.
- After Alleged Election Fraud and Protests, Honduran Congress Moves to Regulate Hate Speech Online
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Honduran Congress is debating a law that seeks to regulate hate speech and "fake news" on the Internet. Honduran activists and opposition political parties say the proposal would function as a gag law aimed at silencing government critics.
- After 10 years, Hassan Diab is finally free
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Hassan Diab is freed by French authorities after what was deemed a bungled case and rush to judgment, one which zeroed in on Diab with unjust finger-pointing from B'nai Brith.
- After the Grenfell Tower Fire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the grave injustice surrounding the Grenfell Tower fire, from the way residents were treated before and after the disaster and the austerity measures that exacerbated it - such as cuts to fire departments.
- After Visiting Brazil's Lula in Prison, Noam Chomsky Warns Against "Disaster" Under Jair Bolsonaro
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An interview with Noam Chomsky about newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. Politically the election marks a dramatic shift to the right for the country which Chomsky describes as a disaster for Brazil. The article includes a link to the interview on video.
- Ahed Tamimi Offers Israelis a Lesson Worthy of Gandhi
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Sixteen-year-old Ahed Tamimi may not be what Israelis had in mind when, over many years, they criticised Palestinians for not producing a Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela.
Eventually, colonised peoples bring to the fore a figure best suited to challenge the rotten values at the core of the society oppressing them. Ahed is well qualified for the task.
- Air pollution now 'largest health crisis'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The WHO estimates that seven million premature deaths are linked to air pollution every year, of which nearly 600,000 are children who are uniquely vulnerable.
- "Al Qaeda's MASH Unit": How the Syrian American Medical Society Is Selling Regime Change and Driving the US to War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) is not merely a group of Syrian doctors tending to the wounded in war torn areas, nor is it an objective and relaibale source on chemical attacks and other atrocities. This article explains that SAMS is actually a politically enaged organization that has for years been actively seeking to overthrow the Syrian government.
- Alberta has only itself to blame for bitumen problems
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The article explains why Alberta has primarily itself to blame for the low price of its bitumen, a situation built on years of mismanagement in government and poor industry advice.
- Alberta's Problem Isn't Pipelines; It's Bad Policy Decisions
Bitumen prices are low because the province has ignored at least a decade of warnings. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A 2007 Alberta government report indicates that the provincial government has been aware for more than a decade that its oilsands policies were setting the stage for today's price crisis.
- "Alexa, Drop a Bomb": Amazon Wants in on US Warfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at US comapany Amazon and its involvement with the US military in creating an artificial 'brain' called JEDI. It demonstrates a new level of US determination for global domination, and would represent the creation of a weapon that would dramatically up the level of global military rivalry and ensure more human conflict.
- The Algiers Accords: Decades of Violations and Silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This week marks the 37th anniversary of a pledge made by the United States in 1981:
The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.
This week also marks 37 continuous years of the United States failing to uphold its pledge: the 1981 Algiers Accords.
- Alice Walker's Conspiracy Theories Aren't Just Anti-Semitic - They're Anti-Black
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 White supremacy relies on different stereotypes of Black and Jewish people. Alice Walker's adoption of anti-semitic conspiracy theories points to the need for solidarity between the Black and Jewish communities - which are not mutually exclusive.
- All Fire and Fury in Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Using Oliver Stone's 'portentious' documentary film 'Ukraine on Fire' as a basis for discussion, the article looks beyond the mainstream media and public discourse on the events and developments in the country which ultimately framed the public's view of the situation.
- All You Fascists Bound to Lose
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at Shane Burley's new book "Fascism Today: What It is and How to End It", which examines the current fascist movement and the opposition to it in the United States.
- Am I a bad feminist?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions.
- Amazon HQ2 Will Cost Taxpayers at Least $4.6 Billion, More Than Twice What the Company Claimed, New Study Shows
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In addition to the billions in local government subsidies Amazon stands to gain from Federal Opportunity Zones. Researchers who have studied opportunity zones find that these tax schemes rarely ever help cities, and often financially cripple them.
- Amazon's Initiative: Digital Assistants, Home Surveillance and Data
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at technological developments such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, which are less innovations than intrusive tools utilized by big data companies to mine personal information and condition human approaches to the way information is shared.
- American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A large number of Americans hold a deeply-held conviction that no matter what the US does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the government of the United States means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on many occasions cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always honorable, even noble. Of that the great majority of Americans are certain.And Americans genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can’t see how benevolent and self-sacrificing America has been. Even many people who take part in the anti-war movement have a hard time shaking off some of this mindset; they march to spur America -- the America they love and worship and trust -- they march to spur this noble America back onto its path of goodness.
- American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 In this provocative collection of essays, Henry Giroux warns of the consequences of doing too little as Trump and the so-called alt-right relentlessly attack critics, journalists, and target the hard-earned civil rights of women, people of color, immigrants, the working class, and low-income Americans.
- America's Troll Farm Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the American mainstream media, which is in a constant search of sensation, scandal, gossip, and above all -- profit.
- Amnesty International: Trumpeting for War… Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 One would expect a human rights organisation to be intrinsically opposed to war, but AI is a cheerleader of so-called humanitarian intervention, and even "humanitarian bombing".
- Anarchism and Kavanaugh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Richman argues that without the current State, but rather with an Anarchistic one, the U.S. public would have been spared the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination episode.
- Animating the Great Migration and After
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Brian Dolinar reviews Pioneering Cartoonists of Color by Tim Jackson.
- Anti-BDS bills expected to feature prominently at AIPAC
Annual meeting to push for measures that counter boycott Israel campaign as rights groups call bills 'unconstitutional' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 At the annual meeting of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the lobbying group's agenda is set to propose measures to counter the growing campaign to boycott Israel and its West Bank settlements. At the centre of discussion are anti-bocott bills, described by critics as laws designed to curb the not-for-profit Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement- a human rights movement that supports Palestinian rights.
- The anti-semitism paradox damaging Labour
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the damaging effect of anti-semitism for the political left, which is being exploited in a tactic to stifle class solidarity and subvert a genuinely progressive Labour leadership.
- Apple and the Guardian: Partners in a Death Spiral
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This report on Apple CEO Tim Cook's visit to a UK school to promote the company's new coding curriculum for schoolchildren could hardly be a better illustration of the way the Guardian newspaper serves as a key propagandist for aggressive global corporate capitalism, helping to create for it a façade of humanitarianism.
- Approaching Development: GMO Propaganda and Neoliberalism vs Localisation and Agroecology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the pro GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) lobby and the reasons why they are pushing GMO technology. The article looks towards agroecology as a better means of achieving genuine food sovereignty.
- Architects of Mass Slaughter
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Detailed review of two books about the Indonesian Genocide.
- Archive That, Comrade!
Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 Archive That, Comrade! explores issues of archival theory and practice that arise for any project aspiring to provide an open-access platform for political dialogue and democratic debate.
- Argentine Newspapers Recuperated by Workers' Cooperatives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An economic recession in Argentina that culminated in intense protests and the resignation of then-president Fernando de la Rua, also fostered the phenomenon of companies being recuperated by its workers as a cooperatives. In the last two years the majority of companies recuperated have been media outlets, which opens up new possibilities for journalism in the country.
- As lies on Syrian gas attack unravel, US and UK shift to claims of Russian "cyber war"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An examination of the alleged gas attack in Syria as pretext for yet another war against a Middle Eastern nation, the suppression of anti-war sentiment, and the legitimization and crackdown on democratic rights and censorship of the Internet under the banner of combating Russian cyber warfare.
- As the Obama DOJ Concluded, Prosecution of Julian Assange for Publishing Documents Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Democrats and Republicans both seem willing to curtail freedom of the press when an outlet publishes work against their interests, however, prosecuting Julian Assange/Wikileaks would create a precedent that would criminalize the core function of investigative journalism.
- Assange's internet blackout & Skripal case part of propaganda war that risks real one
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 John Pilger condemns the mainstream media for its role in acting as an uncritiical conduit for government propaganda.
- The Atomized and Siloed U.S. Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 We're increasingly siloed as organizers and protesters. The environment literally decays as we watch, and the Trump administration is hard at work dismantling what environmental regulations there are.
- The Attack on Wilderness From Environmentalists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Wildlands are being lost across the globe, and some conservation groups are assisting in that loss by proposing lesser protective status.
- Australia: Worst drought ever, but don't mention climate change!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Despite record drought conditions in Australia and the numerous climate related disasters around the globe, the Australian goverment still refuses to acknowledge human-induced climate change.
- The Authoritarians Who Silence Syria Questions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the unchallenged western media narrative on Syria and notably recent commentary by Brian Whitaker, the Guardian's former Middle East editor, who is opposed to experts in the study of propaganda setting up a panel - the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media - which aims to "provide a source of reliable, informed and timely analysis for journalists, publics and policymakers" on Syria.
- Bangladesh: Challenge of the Students Uprising - Its historical background
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The students’ movement that erupted on 29 July following the death of two students in a tragic road accident in Dhaka spread to almost all the major cities of the country. Thousands of outraged school and college students laid siege to the streets of the capital Dhaka for a week demanding road safety across the country.
- Banned in Pakistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Pakistan's decision to censor 'blasphemous' websites provides a new perspective on the attitudes of many Western liberals towards Charlie Hebdo.
- Baran & Sweezy versus Marx
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In response to the editors' question 'Where was Marx in 1968?," Daum chooses to comment briefly on one topic: the anti-Marxist influence of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capital.
- Barbara Ehrenreich Isn't Afraid to Die
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, The Certainty of Dying, and Our Illusion of Control", where she questions current cultural practices, our sense of 'self', and advocates for a broader acceptance of death's inevitability.
- Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903, by Aidan Forth - Review
Internment in the colonies served a darker purpose beyond aid efforts Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A book review of Aidan Forth's "Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903", which provides new insights and ulterior motives behind Britain's aid efforts in southern Africa.
- Barcelona's Experiment in Radical Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Issues that Barcelona en Comu is tackling come up against limitations set by Catalan and Spanish law. The city lacks authority to regulate housing, although the city has created new affordable housing, and has successfully limited the reach of Airbnb.
- The BBC Has Legal Protection to Spread Fake News: the Curious Case of ISIS, Andrew Neil and Jeremy Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the reporting of 'fake news' by the BBC, which has no legal obligation to give its audience any information about its sources and seemingly has legal protection from scrutiny.
- BDS Versus Settler-Colonialism
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of two books about pro-Palestinian political activism known as BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.) Contains detailed discussion of history and current events covered in the books.
- "Before all else a revolutionist": Marx and the Question of Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 If we begin listening to the voices of those he conversed with, we can stop seeing Marx as the source of infinite quotes and begin to view him instead as a comrade on a common path – a path that he walked before us, always in conversation, and often in dispute, with many of his contemporaries.
- Behind the epidemic of police killings in America: Class, poverty and race
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Article examines root causes and socioeconomics dimension of police violence, with particular stress on the importance of class.
- Behind the Money Curtain: A Left Take on Taxes, Spending and Modern Monetary Theory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Taxes do not fund government spending.That's a core insight of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) whose radical implications have not been understood very well by the left. Indeed, it's not well understood at all, and most people who have heard or read it somewhere breeze right past it, and fall back to the taxes-for-spending paradigm that is the sticky common wisdom of the left and right.
- 'Being treated like slaves': Why migrant exploitation exists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the labour market in modern capitalist society, and how it leads to the exploitation of migrant workers who are sometimes treated as slaves.
- The Belem Ecosocialist Declaration: An historic document
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In 2008 more than 400 activists from 37 countries endorsed this statement of ecosocialist principles and goals. Today the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration remains an important consensus statement of ecosocialist principles and goals.
- The birth of the Cuban polyclinic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 During the 1960s, Cuban medicine experienced changes as tumultuous as the civil rights and antiwar protests in the United States. While activists, workers, and students in western Europe and the United States confronted existing institutions of capitalism and imperialism, Cuba faced the even greater challenge of building a new society.
- Black History and the Class Struggle
#26 Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2018
- Black Nationalism, Black Solidarity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Malik explains examines Black Nationalism and its relationship to a Marxist analysis of nationalism of oppressed peoples.
- Black Politics After 2016
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A article on the significance of race in American politics, particularly since the 2016 election, and the symbiotic relation between antiracist politics and Democratic neoliberalism.
- Blacking Out the Yellow Vests on Cable News: Corporate Media Doing its Job
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 France is experiencing a left-leaning popular and working-class uprising consistent with the French revolutionary tradition of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity", yet the majorty of Western media have given very little investigation or serious attention to the momentous events.
- Blanket Silence: Corporate Media Ignore New Report Exposing Distorted And Misleading Coverage of Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A Media Reform Coalition report reveals that the corporate media in Britain have been producing an alarming amount of 'fake news' items, which includes a narrative that Jeremy Corbyn and Labour party are mired in an 'antisemitism crisis'. The corporate media have largely ignored the report, or any other reasoned criticism of their biased reporting.
- Blasphermy, Religious and Secular
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An essay on a European Court of Human Rights ruling and on changing forms of blasphemy law.
- Bolsonaro: a Monster Engineered by Our Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Jonathan Cook explains why the mainstream Western media prefer an extreme right-wing leader over one from the Left.
- Bolsonaro: a Monster Engineered by Our Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Jonathan Cook explains why the plutocrats and the mainstream media spokespeople much prefer a far-right populist like Jair Bolsonaro, or Donald Trump, to a populist leader of the genuine left.
- The Boomerang Effect: How Netanyahu Made Israel an American Issue, and Lost
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Trends in US opinion polls indicate that Israel is not just losing support and overall appeal among large sections of American society but also among the newer generation of American Jews, a worrying change in US public opinion for the Israeli government.
- Brazil's Largest Newspaper Quits Facebook, Accuses it of Harboring 'Fake News'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Brazilian media conglomerate Folha de S. Paulo, made the decision to rebel against Facebook by ceasing to publish content, saying the decision stems primarily from Facebook's recent change on users' news feed which aims to reduce the amount of content and favour posts by friends and family. The paper says Facebook is effectively banning professional journalism from its pages in favour of personal content and 'Fake News'.
- Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court, and the End of Legal Neutrality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings destroyed any surviving myth of legal neutrality. Shultz explains why this may be a good thing, because it is time to recognize that the Supreme Court and its Justices are not politically neutral and that neither should they be.
- A Brief History of American Torture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The recent appointment of Gina Haspel as Head of the CIA reopens a dark chapter in US history -- the "enhanced interrogation", or torture of men, women and children. It also emphasizes the fact that no American officials who sanctioned, devised, supervised or implemented torture have ever been brought to justice for these crimes against humanity.
- Bring on Solutionary Rail!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at Solutionary Rail, a people-powered campaign to electrify America's railroads and open corridors to clean and renewable energy.
- "Brutal and Sadistic": Noam Chomsky on Family Separation & the U.S. Roots of Today's Refugee Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An interview with Noam Chomsky on the refugee crisis and the Trump administration's family separation policy. The article includes a link to the video interview.
- The Business of Bullshit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Bullshit business is about the meaningless language conjured up in schools, in banks, in consultancy firms, in politics, in the media and, of course, in thousands of business schools releasing MBA-certificated managers who are then spreading the meaningless managerial buzz-word language of bullshit business around the world. Bullshit business can indeed take over organizations crowding out their core purpose – profit-maximization.
- The Button, the Wall and the Myth of Nations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 North Korean sanctions, the border wall with Mexico, and the "toxic" role of nationalism with regards to international relations and domestically in the US are discussed.
- Buy Banned Books
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The article takes a look at 'banned books' in the social media era, where the 'imagination police' dominate and a form of 'fictional aparteid' is taking place, and moreover why we have a duty to buy them.
- Bypassing Dystopia
Hope-Filled Challenges to Corporate Rule Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Joyce Nelson explores global examples of active and creative resistance to the iron grip of corporatism on our economies and imaginations.
- Call-Out Culture Is a Toxic Garbage Dumpster Fire of Trash
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the "Call-out" culture where individuals who express opinions are quickly reprimanded online with derogatory labels; a mass media social comdemnation often without any sort of due process, which ultimately spreads a fear to engage in controversy or voice opinions that are even slightly outside the tide of contemporary thinking.
- Can a Minority Overthrow the Majority?
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Feeley reviews Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean.
- Can a minority rule a majority in perpetuity?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of "Israel: Democracy or Apartheid State?" by Josh Ruebner. Subjects include the question of one or two states, and whether Israel should be considered democratic or an apartheid state are among numerous topics addressed in the book.
- Can the Working Class Change the World?
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 A look at how the working class and its allies can oppose capitalism to bring radical change.
- Canada's Deadly Diplomacy and the Plight of Political Prisoners in Honduras
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the political crisis in Honduras since the Nov. 26 election, which has led to brutal and deadly government crack-downs by military police and other state forces of Honduras. Described as state-led terrorism, it is being tacitly supported by funding from Canadian taxpayers.
- Canada's Military shapes Coverage of Deployments
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the Canadian military's influence over news coverage. The article outlines the great lengths the military goes to shape information covering its missions, including the recent deployment to Mali.
- Capitalism: A Crime Story
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 Harry Glasbeek explains how liberal law strives to reconcile capitalism with liberalism, while giving corporate capitalism privileged treatment under the law.
- Carrying capacity, technology, and ecomodernist confusion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Biologist Michael Frieman responds to an article titled "The Earth's Carrying Capacity for Human Life Is Not Fixed" by Ted Nordhaus, an executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and strong proponent of ecomodernism. Friedman counters the idea that capitalist technology is capable of solving virtually any of the environmental problems generated by humankind while still making eternal capitalist growth possible- a viewpoint based on assumptions that are fraught with problems.
- The Case that Dare Not Speak Its Name: the Conviction of Cardinal Pell
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Cardinal Pell, a high-ranking official of the Catholic Church and financial grand wizard of the Vatican, was found guilty on December 11, 2018 of historical child sexual abuses pertaining to two choir boys from the 1990s. But details remain sketchy.
- Catalunya: 'Only the People Save the People'
Against the Current vol. 192 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- Caught In The Cross Hairs - Media Lens And The Mystery Of The Wikipedia Editor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Media Lens investigates the case of "Philip Cross", a person who has made hundreds of thousands of edits to Wikipedia pages in a campain against anti-war activists, critics of British and Western foreign policy as well as Media Lens itself.
- CEMB march at Pride 2018 in London: A Victory against Islamism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain marched in Pride in London on 7 July for LGBT rights in countries under Islamic rule; in 15 states or territories, homosexuality is punishable by death. The march was a victory against Islamist forces in Britain like Mend and East London Mosque that tried and failed to stop CEMB from marching with accusations of 'Islamophobia' aimed at imposing de facto blasphemy and apostasy laws.
- Central Europe and Central America: Will there be a historical convergence?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder
Environmental Crisis and Metabolic Rift in Nineteenth-Century London Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Karl Marx's analysis of changes in British agriculture in the nineteenth-century provides the theoretical starting point for what is now known as 'metabolic rift theory'. This article considers an aspect of the theory that has not been much discussed in modern ecosocialist analysis- the environmental crisis that the accumulation of human excrement caused in urban areas, notably in London.
- Challenging Capitalism through Workers’ Control
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 From the upheavals of the early 20th century to the neo-liberal re-structurings of the late 20th century emerges the common feature of 'worker's control' -- a movement to protect jobs and communities.
- Champions Of Democracy - From Fake News To Imposed Insanity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 While social media is largely blamed for the proliferation of 'fake news', it is through social media where the corporate media commentariat are exposed. Readers are now at last able to see some rational dissent, this is the up-side to social media that the 'mainstream' cannot even discuss.
- Charges 'Without Merit' - Jeremy Corbyn, Antisemitism, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A commentary on the anit-semitism claims by the British media regarding Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party.
- Chasing Shadows: Socialism Won't Go Away Because It is Capitalism's Antithesis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The abstract forces of capitalism's dynamism create the conditions for ever more creative and novel ways to profit, which is why the Golden Age of postwar capitalism-which had a mix of capitalist and socialist economic features-evolved into the neoliberal period after the external oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. Those conditions created a transitional context to shift out of a regulated state-interventionist capitalism into the aggressive, free-market neoliberal variety lasting more than 30 years, leading us to the precipice of the present.
- Checkpoint Nation
Border agents are expanding their reach into the country's interior Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Even if you never leave the United States, you can encounter Border Patrol at the thirty-five fixed checkpoints and dozens of temporary checkpoints they operate deep in the interior. The locations of these checkpoints are not made public, but the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has developed a project to track them.
- 'City of Surveillance': Google-backed smart city sounds like a dystopian nightmare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A Google-backed project to build the interconnected, data-driven ‘city of the future’ sounds like all George Orwell’s nightmares come true, and is now in the spotlight after a privacy expert resigned from the project in protest. Toronto’s Waterfront district used to be an industrial wasteland, but Sidewalk Labs – a sister company of Google – wants to turn that wasteland into a prototype ‘city of the future,’ where data helps planners micromanage every aspect of urban life.
- Clarion Alley Confronts a Lack of Concern
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Clarion Alley's thought-provoking, provocative, clever and often political art was created by those determined to leave a record of their existence and experience and to give voice to marginalized and disenfranchised communities.
- Claude McKay's Lost Novel
Review of Amiable with Big Teeth; Against the Current vol. 192 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of Amiable with Big Teeth, a novel by the African-American revolutionary activist and writer Claude McKay.
- Climate Change Drives Up Rural Poverty in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Latin America and the Caribbean region's first meeting of Week of Agriculture and Food, held in November 2018, more than 1,000 officials and experts agreed that the fall in agricultural yields and increasing migration from the countryside are consequences of global warming.
- Climate Jobs for All
Building Block for the Green New Deal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This article discusses the federal jobs guarantee (JG) concept which is also known as "jobs for all." The advocates of JG generally include climate protection as one of many types of work beneficial to the public that might be included in a jobs guarantee program.
- Climate Jobs for All
Building Block for the Green New Deal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A federal climate jobs guarantee (CJG) is a proposed program similar to the New Deal's WPA that would prioritize jobs that protect and improve the environment. Polls show that the program has popular support and could be a major political force in 2020.
- Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 Stories of the impact of and resistance to climate change from grassroots activists around the world.
- Climate justice and migration in the media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A climate justice narrative is needed to communicate and enhance public understanding of migration induced by climate change. Key components must include human rights protection, greater equity in burdens sharing, and participation in decision-making processes.
- Climate litigation looms
Interview Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Nick Breeze interviews Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), who explains why we must stay below 1.5C, and why loss and damage compensation, and litigation, are the next big agenda items at COP24.
- Climate-Driven 'Bugpocalypse'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An alarming report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that in addition to annihilating hundreds of mammal species, the climate crisis has also sparked a global "bugpocalypse" that will only continue to accelerate in the absence of action to stop planetary warming.
- CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 C.L.R. James railed against the superficial nonsense that masquerades as 'anti-racism.'
- Cold as Ice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An excerpt from a letter written in 1897 to the editor of the British newspaper the 'Daily Chronicle'. The letter is included in "The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde", published by Harvard University Press. The letter is an appeal and commentary on the harsh and cruel treatment of children being held in English prisons.
- The Collaboration Trap
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Most of environmental/conservation groups in the West are participants in various public land collaboratives.Most participating collaborative members are made up of people who generally believe in exploiting natural landscapes for human benefit. As a generalization, there is overwhelming representation in such collaboratives by people who speak for the resource extraction industry or their sympathizers like rural county commissioners, ORV enthusiasts, and so forth.
- Communism and Self-Management
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at workers' self-management in past regimes and their relevance to current debates.
- Community forest management against illegal timber logging
Indigenous communities comply with strict rules to ensure the regeneration of the forest and protect water sources. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Guatemala is hit hard by mudslides caused by deforestation. Government-led initiatives created in consultation with Indigenous communities have been successful in preserving forests and promotiing sustainability.
- Comrade Bernard
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Bernard Goldstein's "Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund: A Memoir of Interwar Poland", a firsthand account of the struggles of the Jewish working class in Poland between the two World Wars.
- Confronting Germany's New Fascists in Berlin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the rise of facism in Germany with the recent winning of seats, now with 92 representatives in the national Bundestag, by the five-year-old Alternative for Germany (AfD). This new found platform provides the party with a voice in every debate and the first speakers after those of the government.
- Confronting the Right: An Introduction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An overview of issues related to confronting the right, including questions surrounding the labelling of free speech as hate speech.
- The Constitutional Root of Racism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at how the US Constitution enables racism by affording power to the states.
- A conversation with film historian Max Alvarez
How the #MeToo campaign echoes the McCarthyite witch hunt of the 1940s and 1950s Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Clearly, this is not as organized a political campaign as the one that took place in the 1940s and 1950s, but the climate is chillingly similar in terms of the massive capitulation and conformity in the entertainment industry.
- Cooperative farming is the only solution to the present agriculture crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the agricultural crisis in India and the economic realities the country faces in a market tilted in favour of America and Europe. Solutions include government policy based on science in the use of land and water, less reliance on pesticides and fertilizers, and a move towards cooperative farming.
- Corbyn's Labour Party is Being Made to Fail - By Design
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The embattled Labour party is reportedly soon to adopt the four additional working "examples" of anti-semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The full adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism will be a victory for Israel and its apologists in Britain, who who have been seeking to curb all meaningful criticism of Israel.
- Corporate Coercion and the Drive to Eliminate Buying with Cash
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Consumer freedom and privacy are examined as coercive commercialism quickly moves toward a cashless economy, when all consumers are forced into corporate payment systems from credit/debit cards, mobile phones and perhaps even through facial recognition technology.
- Corporate Media: the Enemy of the People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 We on the Left don't need to reflexively and absurdly jump to the defense of imperial criminals at the instigation of that (well, yes) "enemy of the people" the U.S. corporate and so-called mainstream war, news, and entertainment media.
- The corporate media's world of illusions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In fact, the Great Western Narrative has been developed and refined over centuries to preserve a tiny elite’s privileges and expand its power. The role of journalists like me was to keep feeding these illusions to readers so they would remain fearful, passive and deferential to this elite. It is not that journalists lie – or at least, not most of them – it is that they are as deeply wedded to the Great Western Narrative as everyone else.
- The Counterinsurgency Paradigm: How U.S. Politics Have Become Paramilitarized
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Bernard Harcourt argues in his recent book "The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens" that the same counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare used against post-9/11 enemies has now come to the US as the effective governing strategy.
- Courrieres Mine Disaster 1906
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The devastating mine disaster in 1906 that killed over 1,000 workers in Courrieres, France, is remembered.
- The Crisis in Corbyn's Labour Party is Over Israel, Not Anti-Semitism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 If there is indeed an anti-semitism problem in the UK's Labour party, it is not in the places where the British corporate media have been directing our attention. What can be said with even more certainty is that there is rampant hatred expressed towards Jews in the same British media that is currently decrying the supposed anti-semitism of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
- The Crisis of Social Democracy: From Norway to Europe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 With social democratic parties in Europe suffering poor election results and significant setbacks, this article puts the current crisis in historical context, and how resolution and success will depend on more radical solutions.
- Crisis of the State, Crisis of the Left
Articulating Socialism After the Anarchist Moment Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 'Augmenting the left' -- that is, finding ways to build new organizational alliances, expand practices of resistance, and culturally envision and collectively build toward a better world -- is not just a worthwhile project, but also an essential one. Human survival may depend upon it. In this regard, it must be recognized that there is also a crisis of the various post-Marxisms, especially to the extent that they tried to replace class as the central structural pivot around which different forms of oppression and counter-hegemonic emancipatory struggles condense.
- Crucifying Julian Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Juilien Assange, who exposed the dark machinations and crimes of the US government, is now under threat of being expelled from the Equadorian Embassy. The article looks at what is happening to Assange and why the the silence over his plight is a betrayal by the press.
- Cucks, Cuckolding and Campaign Management
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Talk about a bunch of sad sacks that really stink in the sack. The Trumpocalypse is ruining sex for the rest of us.
- Current Developments in Iran
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An update on the new wave of demonstrations that started December 28, 2017 in Mashhad, the second-largest city in Iran, and why dissent is different from that of 2009.
- The Curse of Energy Efficiency
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The more 'efficient' our technology, the more resources we consume in a downward spiral of catastrophe.
- Cursed Fields
What the tundra has in store for Russia's reindeer herders Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Noah Sneider visits the Yamal Peninsula in Russia where an outbreak of anthrax is killing herds of reindeer and engdangering the lives of the local people. Rising temperatures and a particularly hot summer have led scientists to conclude that climate change is the most credible explanation for its deadly return.
- The Dangerous Junk Science of Vocal Risk Assessment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Various companies and government agencies aim to use technology that measures biological features such as facial expressions or tone of voice to assess individuals, such as refugee claimants or potential employees, for 'risk'. Many critics say the science behind this is dubious and can hide cultural bias under a blanket of objectivity.
- The dawn of our liberation: The early days of the International Communist Women's Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An examination of the early days of the international Communist Women's Movement (CWM). The article focuses on three points in particular: the CWM's ideas on women's emancipation, the relationship with non-communist women's movements and the problematic relationship with male comrades.
- The deadly flood in Kerala may be only a gentle warning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Arundhati Roy comments on the disasterous flooding in the Indian state of Kerala. While acknowleding various forces lead to the disaster, Roy also places blame on government mismanagement and ignoring the needs of the state's most disadvanted people.
- The Death of a Once Great City
The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Kevin Baker takes a close look at the changes to his home city of New York over the past forty years. He notes that while some of the more undesirable aspects of New York in the 1970's have improved, such as crime, dirt, garbage- the new and more gentrified city masks significant problems, the most notable being a growing housing crisis.
- De-Briefing Academics: Unpaid Intelligence Informants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Many academics frequently engage in what government officials dub 'de-briefing'! Academics meet and discuss their field-work, data collection, research finding, observations and personal contacts over lunch at the Embassy with US government officials or in Washington with State Department officials.
- Debunking A Century of War Lies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In the modern age of democracy and volunteer armies, a pretense for war is required to rally the nation around the flag and motivate the public to fight. That is why every major conflict is now accompanied by its own particular bodyguard of lies. From false flag attacks to dehumanization of the "enemy," here are all the examples you’ll need to help debunk a century of war lies.
- Defending Afrin means defending the women's revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Since January 20, 2018 the Turkish army has been attacking the Kurdish region of Afrin in the Democratic Federation of North Syria; among the casualties are women, children and many refugees. In this message to the world a confederation of women's organisatons in Afrin call upon all women worldwide to join their struggle.
- Defending 'Our Democracy'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Despite the onsought of attacks on American democracy, groups like the teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky and the Parkland surviors through their activism are defending America's democracy.
- The Defiance that Launched Gaza's Flaming Kites Cannot be Extinguished
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Now Israel is facing a new and apparently even tougher challenge: how to stop Palestinian resistance from Gaza using flaming kites, which have set fire to lands close by in Israel. F-16 fighter jets are equipped to take on many foes but not the humble kite.
- Defining Israel as a "Jewish State"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The definition of what is a "Jewish State" and "what is a Jew" is a fundamental part of this debate. The "Jewish State" is like no other. It uses a concept of Jewish nationality which is like no other definition of nationality. It is the Jewish character of the State that is given preference to all other considerations and gives superior rights to Jews over the non-Jewish population in Israel.
- Demand for atheism rises in countries under Islamic rule
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The rise of atheism in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia is something we have been speaking about for some time now. The Iranian Baztab Now website warned of a tsunami of atheism amongst Iranian youth. The #ExMuslimBecause hashtag initiated by the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain became viral overnight with over 120,000 Tweets from 65 countries.
- Democracy and Ecological Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In view of the global ecological problems which have arisen from aggressive market driven economies, the author examines what democracy and socialism really mean, and what a more environmentally responsible Post-Capitalism society might look like.
- Despite Gaza Massacre, Israel Remains Immune From Criticism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Imagine for a moment that it was not the two million Palestinian in Gaza, who are mostly refugees from 1948, but the six million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan who had staged a march to return to the homes that they have lost in Syria since 2011. Suppose that, as they approach the Syrian border, they were fired on by the Syrian army and hundreds of them were killed or injured. The international outcry against the murderous Syrian regime in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin would have echoed around the world.
- Dialectics of Revolutionary Learning
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of the book Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge by Sara Carpenter and Shahrzad Mojab.
- Dinner with Marx in the House of the Swan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 When Jacques Pauwels enters a bistro in Brussels' Grand-Place, he finds himself under the watchful eye of an illustrious former patron - Karl Marx. As he dines, a great number of stories cross his mind. The historian, author of 'The Great Class War 1914-1918', tells us how this tourist hotspot was once a hotbed of revolutionaries, and how Marx's stay in Brussels played a role in his writings.
- Disabled People in UK Lead Fight Against Austerity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In July 20,2018, John Clarke represented the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) at the International Deaf and Disabled People’s Solidarity Summit, in Stratford, east London that had been convened by one of our key allies in the UK, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC). This powerful gathering was an important moment in the building of a resistance by disabled people as part of a broader international struggle against the forces of neoliberal austerity.
- Disabling Barriers
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of a collection on disability rights.
- Disagreement is not hatred
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An essay on the transgender debate which argues that debate ends when we label views we simply disagree with as 'hatred''.
- Disinformation: In the Philippines, political trolling is an industry - this is how it works
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In the Philippines, influential personalities and online 'trolls' are credited with winning Rodrigo Duterte the presidency in 2016. This article examines the chief architects of disinformation who continue to vociferously share 'fake news' and silence dissenters.
- Diverting Class War Into Generational War, Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Dean Baker provieds a counter argument to a New York Times article titled "65 or Older? Here's What We Owe Our Kids" by Glenn Kramon, which directs blame at Social Security and Medicare for the current struggles of the younger generation.
- Does the Bitcoin frenzy make any sense at all?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The author explains how the strange story of a "crypto-currency" reveals the underlying irrationality of a system that is designed to work for the rich only.
- Don't Fall for the Chemical Weapons Convention Justification
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the interventionalist arguments in support of Western air and missile attacks in Syria, and the false claim that the attack was justified under international law because it was a response to the use of banned chemical weapons.
- The Doomsday Machine and Nuclear Winter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The portion of an interview with Daniel Ellsberg, an American activist and former United States military analyst, who comments on thermonuclear war and its outcome.
- Doubts about 'Novichoks'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Briefing notes developed from ongoing research and investigation into the use of chemical and biological weapons during the 2011-present war in Syria conducted by members of the "Working Group on Syria, Media and Propaganda".
- Drinking Poblems
A Kansas town confronts a tap-water crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the health crisis in Pretty Prairie, Kansas, where Nitrate from farms has polluted the water supply for three decades. Elizabeth Royte takes a look at the town's history and social climate in order to understand why the problem was left for so long.
- Dunlop Factory (South Africa): The workers who won't snitch
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Metalworker union Numsa files legal arguments in the Constitutional Court on on behalf of Dunlop factory workers from Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, after workers were dismissed because they did not snitch on fellow workers during a protected strike.
- Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 Analysis of the 1930s Dust Bowl as the result of capitalism and US imperialism. Also looks at what we can learn from it for today's climate crisis.
- Ecological Sustainability, Inequality and Social Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Raju Das connect sustainability to metabolism, reproduction, and value of labour power.
- The Economics Behind the Skripal Poisoning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The question is why are they doing this with Russia? Why are they imposing sanctions and mounting a great publicity campaign?
- Ecuadorean Villagers May Still Triumph Over Chevron
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Michael Krauss, a lawyer who teaches "ethics" at a law school named after the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, recently posted a blog on the Forbes website entitled "The Ecuador Saga Continues: Steven Donziger now owes Chevron more than $800,000" (Forbes 3/14/2018). Kraus says that Chevron has basically triumphed over evil...
- Editorial Statement: Introducing Insurgent Notes on Marx in 1968
Insurgent Notes vol. 17 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The editors introduce the focus of this issue: How present or absent was the thought of Karl Marx in 1968?
- Eight reasons why the latest Syria chemical weapons attack allegations are almost certainly complete nonsense
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A discussion on the chemical attack in Douma, Syria, and why the allegations are likely false.
- Eight Things I learned About Palestine While Touring Eight Western Nations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The main theme of all my talks in various cultural, academic and media platforms was the pressing need to refocus the discussion on Palestine on the struggle, aspirations and history of the Palestinian people. But, interacting with hundreds of people and being exposed to multiple media environments in both mainstream and alternative media, I also learned much about the changing political mood on Palestine in the western world.
- "Embodied Materialism" and Ecosocialism
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Detailed chapter-by-chapter review of Ariel Salleh's Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern.
- Empty Suits
Defamation law and the price of dissent Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at lawsuits filed by companies that are intended to censor, intimidate, and silence dissenters by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense- known as SLAPP or strategic lawsuits against public participation.
- The End of "The Great War"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A thorough look at the ending of World War I, focusing especially on class conflict.
- The End of Policing & Police: A Field Guide
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 A Field Guide to the Police is a study of the indirect and taken-for granted language of policing, a language we're all forced to speak when we talk about law enforcement. The book refuses to see the world as police do, instead it contends that when we talk about police and police reform, we speak the language of police legitimation through the art of euphemism. State sexual assault becomes "body-cavity search," and ruthless beatings become "plain compliance." Like any other field guide, it reveals a world that is hidden in plain view. In entries like "Police dog," "Stop and frisk," "Rough ride," and scores more, the authors show how "copspeak" obscures the true meaning and history of policing. This book will arm activists on the streets--as well as anyone with an open mind--on one of the key issues of our time: police violence. The book argues that a redefined language of policing might help us chart a future free of police and police violence.
- Endless War, Swirling Chaos
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The editors of Against the Current comment on current American global affairs, including the Singapore Summit, Iran and Palestine as well as the need for a new Anti-War movement.
- Engineering the climate could cost us the earth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Political scientist Gareth Dale takes a look at Geoengineering as a "political technology" and institutional apparatus that is preventing effective climate action, and actually serves to reduce the sense of urgency needed for genuine and more effective structural change.
- Eric Hobsbawm’s histories
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Eric Hobsbawm was the author of, among many other works, a classic quartet on modern world history, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes. Hobsbawm was widely respected as one of the greatest historians of the left and one of the greatest historians of the 20th century more generally.
- Estar Baur (1920-2017)
Against the Current vol. 192 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 With the passing of Estar Baur, Dianne Feeley discusses Baur's life as a lifelong socialist activist.
- Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The wealthier they are, the more they fear that others will try to take their wealth. No wonder the super-rich are building bunkers to escape the apocalypse.
- Ethics and Whistleblowing for Engineers Affects Us All
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Some engineering professors worry that their students' busy course schedules prevents them from adequately exploring the liberal arts. Without exposure to the liberal arts, engineering students will lack the broad context that will help them approach their work as a profession, not just a trade.
- Europe's Political Turmoil (Part I)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Far-right parties are gaining ground all over Europe scapegoating immigrants and people of colour. The radical left has not come up with a competitive strategy for winning people over.
- European Communist Parties and '68
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 One effect of the May 1968 uprisings was to highlight and/or hasten the split between communist parties and social movements in Europe.
- Europe's Political Turmoil and the Rise of the Far Right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the recent rise of far-right governments all over Europe and the failure of the left to effectively counter this.
- Even the FBI Agrees: When Undercover Agents Pose as Journalists, It Hurts Real Journalists' Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The FBI doesn't want the public to know more about how its agents pose as journalists during undercover investigations.The government acknowledged in a court filing that FBI agents who pretend to be journalists create a chilling effect, making it harder for real journalists to gain trust and cooperation from sources.
- Ex-Muslims: A community in protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 I see ex-Muslims as a community in protest: insisting on freedom from religion, and freedom of conscience. For the right to apostasy and blasphemy, without fear. Like the LGBT, anti-slavery, anti-colonialist, anti-apartheid, suffragette or civil rights movements, it’s a movement which insists upon our common humanity and equality – not upon difference or superiority. It’s a movement of people who refuse to live in fear and in the shadows, and who are speaking out for social change in unprecedented ways.
- Expansion of monocultures expels peasants from their lands
Repression intensifies against peasant leaders opposed to land grabs, evictions and the pollution of water sources. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Guatemala a wave of violence at the hands of large agriculture corporations has been driving Indigenous people and peasants off their land.
- Exploitation, Alienation and Oppression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Bakan discusses the varations of Marxism and proports that the best of the Marxist tradition resists orthodoxy. She considers the complexity and variation in the core concepts in Marx's work regarding inequality.
- Exposing Canary Mission
A Resource for College and University Leaders Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A report on Canary Mission, a secretive and non-academic political organization that uses their website to engage in defamatory attacks against college students, academics and others who report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and advocate for Palestinian rights.
- Extinction Rebellion: From the UK to Ghana and the US, Climate Activists Take Civil Disobedience World-Wide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the Extinction Rebellion, an international movement that calls for peaceful mass economic disruption around the world in order to bring awareness to the growing environmental crisis.
- The Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Face recognition is poised to become one of the most pervasive surveillance technologies, and law enforcement's use of it is increasing rapidly. However, the adoption of face recognition technologies like these is occurring without meaningful oversight, without proper accuracy testing of the systems as they are actually used in the field, and without the enactment of legal protections to prevent internal and external misuse.
- Facebook announces latest step in censorship campaign, prioritizing "local news"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media giant will prioritize news from 'local sources' in the News Feed displayed to users. This is the third move this year in a roll-out of updates by Facebook aimed at censoring online information.
- Facebook: A Cooperative Transformation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Facebook represents a standard for a global model of concentration of wealth and power in the 21st century, joined by companies like Google, Amazon, and Uber. Entrepreneurs with computer skills and good or lucky timing have privatized and enclosed the global information commons and have enriched themselves by providing services for free or for reduced prices to the billions.
- Facebook and the Rise of Anti-Social Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 For those who haven't thought about it, the internet is insidious because of the very capacity that Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to exploit: customization. Users have limited ability to confirm the authenticity of anything they see, read or hear on it. Print editions can be compared and contrasted-- technology limits print media to large-scale deceptions. With the capacity to create entire realms of deception -- identities, content, web pages and entire online publications, trust is made a function of gullibility.
- Facing the left-wing challenge in the European Union - Ten proposals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The left could bring radical change if they could prove themselves capable to people in the Eurozone dissatisfied with austerity measures. Here are ten proposals for social mobilization and actions to be taken by any government that is truly operating in the interests of the people.
- Fact-Checking the Establishment's 'Fact-Checkers': How the 'Fake News' Story is Fake News
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the introduction of "Fake News" in the US and how is was used by both political parties in the lead-up to the 2016 US election, and moreover how it was propogated by the mainstream media and fact-checked by dubious verification sources.
- Fake News and the Gatekeepers of Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at misinformation or 'fake news' and how it has changed from the past; while only governments and prominent figures could once manipulate public opinion, today it is anyone with online access.
- The fallacy of Israel's human shields claims in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Desperately trying to justify the killing of unarmed protesters, Israel once again uses its 'human shields' mantra.
- Fascist Attack in Chile
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An open letter calling for international solidarity in the aftermath of an attack on the March for the Right to Free, Legal Abortion on Demand in Santiago, Chile where three women were stabbed.
- Fathi Harb burnt himself to death in Gaza: Will the world notice?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Self-immolation is more than suicide. That can be done quietly, out of sight, less gruesomely. In fact, figures suggest that suicide rates in Gaza have rocketed in recent years. But public self-immolation is associated with protest.
- A Faustian Bargain with the Climate Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Take as our inspiration the temptations of capitalist individualism set before us, we make the exact same bargain. The difference in this case however is that we know the disaster is coming; we don't even need to worry about what our spidey senses say, 97% of all climate scientists agree that the capitalist mentality that sees the world as an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump is warming the atmosphere. We have even less excuse.
- The FBI's Maoist Faction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The following is based on research by Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher for their book, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union - 1962-1974, (London: Repeater Books, 2018).
- FC St. Pauli: Antifascist, Antiracist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Haasen describes the political activism of FC St. Pauli footbal team and its supporters in Hamburg, Germany. Having once supported the Nazi Regime, this club has radiically changed it stance to become a vocal supporter of antiracism, antifascism and humanitarian efforts.
- The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 The little-known story of an eighteenth-century Quaker dwarf who fiercely attacked slavery and imagined a new, more humane way of life.
- 15 Actions That Can Shut Down Trump's Assault on Immigrant Families
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A list of recommended actions that can be taken against the Trump Administration's policy toward immigrant families, some of which include: Expose for-profit detention corporations; Target mayor's offices, state capitals, and governor's mansions; Practice non-violence, as well as using the media to your advantage.
- The Fight for Housing, 1967-68 & Milwaukee NAACP Commandos
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A history of The Commandos, an offshoot of the NAACP Youth Council formed in Milwaukee in the 1960s. Their main fight was against segregated housing.
- Finding the truth amid Israel's lies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The famous – and by now overused – expression that history is written by the victors can be countered in many ways. One way is by unpacking the victors’ publications in order to expose the lies, fabrications and misrepresentations, as well as their less conscious actions. A rereading of these open sources about the Nakba, mostly written by Israelis themselves, unlocks fresh historiographical perspectives on the big picture of that period – while declassified documents allow us to see that picture in a higher resolution. This reprise could have been done at any moment between 1948 and today – as long as historians were willing to employ the critical lens needed for such an examination. Rereading these open sources, especially in tandem with the numerous oral histories of the Nakba, reveals the barbarism and dehumanization that accompanied the catastrophe. The barbarism is common to settler communities in the formative years of their colonization projects and can sometimes be obscured by the dry and evasive language of military and political documents.
- First they came for Alex Jones. Now Facebook bans Venezuela news site
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Days after the purge of Alex Jones from social media, Big Tech seems to have found another suitable target for apparent censorship. Facebook suspended the page of a prominent leftist news site writing about Venezuela.
- Fishers under siege
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Penny McCall Howard, Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea: "Working the Ground" in Scotland.
- Fisk Puts to Test the Free-Press Myth in Douma
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Veteran Middle East corrrespondent Robert Fisk was the first western correspondent to arrive in Douma following the US, UK and French attacks on Syria. Based on first hand interviews Fisk's account is clearly honest about what he reported and certainly plausible, yet respected British newspapers like the Guardian gave his reports a cursory if not hostile treatment.
- A Flag for Trump's America
The power of strength Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the Blue Lives Matter slogan and flag, which became a symbol for the U.S. police counter-movement advocating that those who are prosecuted and convicted of killing law enforcement officers should be sentenced under hate crime statutes. It was started in response to Black Lives Matter.
- Florida Students Confront Spencer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Aliya recounts her experience protesting the Richard Spencer event at the University of Florida.
- 'Follow Your Bliss' - The Tweet That Brought Corporate Journalism To The Brink Of A Nervous Breakthrough
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Don't write for the "mainstream". Don't write for money. Don't write for prestige. Just "follow your bliss" by writing what you absolutely love to write to inspire and enlighten other people. Write what seems interesting, important and true, and give it away for free.'
- Following the Levellers, Volume Two
English Political and Religious Radicals from the Commonwealth to the Glorious Revolution, 1649–1688 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 The Levellers sought to restructure the state in 1647-9 around popular consent and liberty for conscience, especially in their Agreement of the People. Following the Levellers, Volume Two examines the later political efforts of Leveller spokesmen like John Lilburne, John Wildman, and Richard Overton, and their followers.
- For an international coalition to fight Internet censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In this open letter from the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, the threat and consequences of internet censorship and reduction in access to information is highlighted.
- For Campus Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Bose describes the right-wing incursion on universities and his troubled feelings about the climate of intellectual fear among some on the campus left. He elaborates on this by discussing the demands for speaking engagements for right-wing pundits to be cancelled.
- For International Women's Day: Honoring the Fighters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Brief descriptions of Ahed Tamimi, Asma Jahangir, Heather Heyer, Berta Cáceres, Erica Garner, and Tarana Burke in honour of International Women's Day.
- Force of Evil: Abraham Polonsky and Anti-Capitalist Noir
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Policy lies at the heart of Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, arguably the most anti-capitalist film ever to emerge from Hollywood. Released 70 years ago to puzzled critics and an indifferent public, over time it would achieve cult status among devotees of film noir while offering a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been accomplished by Polonsky and other members of the Hollywood Left had the blacklist not intervened.
- 'The Forced Displacement of Palestinians Never Truly Ended
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 As Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary, a child and grandchild of exiled Palestinian reflects on the Nakba, where 750,000 were driven from their homes or fled in terror following massacres of Palestinian civilians by Jewish militias.
- Foreign Interventions in Revolutionary Russia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 All over Europe, the First World War had brought about a potentially revolutionary situation as early as 1917. In countries where the authorities continued to represent the traditional elite, exactly as had been the case in 1914, they aimed to prevent the realization of this potential by means of repression, concessions, or both.
- Foreign Policy for Sale: Greece's Dangerous Alliance with Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 For a brief historical moment, Alexis Tsipras and his political party, Syriza, ignited hope that Greece could resurrect a long-dormant Leftist tide in Europe. A new Greece was being born out of the pangs of pain of economic austerity, imposed by the European Union and its overpowering economic institutions – a troika so ruthless, it cared little while the Greek economy collapsed and millions of people experienced the bitterness of poverty, unemployment and despair.
- The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 King believed that a multiracial working-class movement was required to overcome the failings of capitalism.
- A 14-Year-Old Girl Forced Alone and at Night Into the Gaza Cage. Another Routine Mishap for Israel's Occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 How did a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who has never set foot in the open-air prison of Gaza find herself being dumped there by Israeli officials – alone, at night and without her parents being informed?The terrifying ordeal – a child realising she had not been taken home but discarded in a place where she knew no one – is hard to contemplate for any parent.And yet for Israel's gargantuan bureaucratic structure that has ruled over Palestinians for five decades, this was just another routine error. One mishap among many that day.
- Foxconn: The Myth and Reality of the Welfare Queen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Social scientists who have studied the welfare system before and after the Clinton era welfare "reforms" have exposed the notion that women on public assistance were "welfare queens" as a myth.
- Fragmented Power: Portugal in Revolution, 1974-1975
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Portugal the underground Armed Forces Movement's long-planned coup d'etat to bring down the Estado Novo regime was a success; however it was relatively short-lived despite the modest intentions of its organizers. This article takes a look at the popular initiatives that brought Portugal to the brink of a socialist revolution and why it failed.
- Free and Accessible Transit Now
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Transit is a critical issue for many people in Toronto, as in all major urban areas. More is at stake than reducing traffic congestion and gridlock. Free transit opens the door to a broader transformation of urban life and the current social system. Our 'Red-Green' vision is socialist, based on the working class, environmentally just, internationalist, and transformative.
- Free Public Transit: And Why We Don't Pay to Ride Elevators
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 In an age of increasing inequalities and ecological crisis, movements for free public transit are proposing a profound rethinking of urban transit as a fundamental human right and public good. Research shows that, if the bus were free, people would ride it as much as 50% more in the first year, dramatically reducing car use, traffic, and pollution, while redistributing wealth and increasing social inclusion for poor and working people. But free public transit alone is not enough; it must also be combined with much better service and reserve bus lanes to be effective. In its twenty chapters, this book explores the winning strategies and pitfalls of case studies ranging across fourteen countries: the United States, Canada, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, China, France, Belgium, Germany, and Australia.
- #FreeSiwatu!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Siwatu-Salama Ra, an activist, was arrested in Detriot for felonious assault despite the fact that Siwatu-Salama was acting to defend herself and her family.
- From Catholicism and the working class to communism and Marx
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Garvey describes his childhood growing up in a Catholic community in New York and explains how Marx and Marxism were episodically present in the later periods of his life but first engagement with them was not nearly as deep as it needed to be. He asserts that in the 1960s Marx and Marxism that were on offer in the world of political practice were, more often than not, caricatures. What was needed in 1968 and beyond was not simply more Marx but a different Marx. At the end, he sketchs out some ideas of what a different Marx might have been and what difference it might have made.
- From Moral Outrage to Moral Panic: the Limits of Public Rage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 There has been forceful break from the culture of silence that has long protected men from being held accountable for their misdeeds. While rage emerges against male sexual abuse, some progressive feminists have raised concerns that this movement may slip into 'moral panic' and a possible conservative, neo-puritan anti-sex campaign.
- Fruits and perils of the 'bloc within': The Comintern and Asia 1919-25 (Part 3)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The most advanced experience of Communist alliance with national revolutionists occurred in Indonesia (Dutch East Indies) prior to the Baku Congress. However, it was not mentioned at the congress, even though one of its architects – the Dutch Communist Maring (Henk Sneevliet) – was present in the hall. Maring had been a leader for many years of revolutionary socialist Dutch settlers in Indonesia, who had achieved the remarkable feat of transforming their group into one predominantly indigenous in leadership, membership, and programmatic orientation. The key to success had been a close alliance with a mass national-revolutionary organization of the type described by the Second Congress, called Sarekat Islam.
- The future of the Nakba
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 If the Nakba’s most salient features are the theft of Palestinian land and the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land, and subjecting the lands that could not be stolen and the people who could not be expelled to systematic control and oppression, then, it would be most inaccurate to consider the Nakba as a discrete event that refers to the war of 1948 and its immediate aftermath. Rather, it should be historicized as a process which spanned the last 140 years, beginning with the arrival of the first Zionist conquerors to colonize the land in the early 1880s. In addition, Israeli leaders continue to regale their own people and the world with assurances that the Nakba is not just a past and present process of dispossessing the Palestinian people of their lands and expelling them, but rather one that must continue to preserve the future survival of Israel. The Nakba then turns out to be not just a past event and an ongoing process in the present, but a calamity that has a decidedly planned future ahead of it. If so, what might that future be?
- Miriam Garfinkle 1954 - 2018
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary for Miriam Garfinkle, who died on September 15, 2018.
- Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated places in the world. More than two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees, and more than half are under eighteen years of age. Since 2004, Israel has launched eight devastating “operations” against Gaza’s largely defenseless population. Thousands have perished, and tens of thousands have been left homeless. In the meantime, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless illegal blockade.
What has befallen Gaza is a man-made humanitarian disaster.
Based on scores of human rights reports, Norman G. Finkelstein's new book presents a meticulously researched inquest into Gaza’s martyrdom. He shows that although Israel has justified its assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions constituted flagrant violations of international law.
- Gaza medic killed by Israel as she rescued injured
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Israeli occupation forces shot dead a volunteer medic and injured dozens of people as they continued their indiscriminate attacks on Palestinians taking part in Great March of Return protests in Gaza for the 10th consecutive Friday. Razan Ashraf Abdul Qadir al-Najjar, 21, was helping treat and evacuate wounded protesters east of Khan Younis when she was fatally shot on Friday evening. She was about 100 meters away from the boundary fence with Israel at the moment she was shot and was wearing clothing clearly identifying her as a medic.
- Gaza: Who or What Has a Right to Exist?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at Norman Finkelstein's book "Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom", which investigates the Israeli attacks on Gaza such as Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), the Mavi Marmara (2010), and Operation Protective Edge (2014).
- Gazan Gandhis: Gaza Bleeds Alone as 'Liberals' and 'Progressives' Go Mute
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Tens of thousands of protesters, raising Palestinian flags continue to hold their massive rallies across the Gaza border. Despite the high death toll and the thousands maimed, they return everyday with the same commitment to popular resistance that is predicated on collective unity, beyond factionalism and politics.But why are they still being largely ignored? It is politically convenient to criticize Palestinians as a matter of course, and utterly inconvenient to credit them, even when they display such courage, prowess and commitment to peaceful change.
- Gender, Race and Marx's Whiskers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Roediger juxtaposes James and Marx quotations and discusses the iimplications for how Marx’s limits and his forward motion regarding race and gender might be understood together.
- Gentrification and Class Struggles in Barcelona, Spain: Interview with Etcétera Collective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In an interview with the Barcelona-based collective Etcetera, the processes of urban development in one of the fastest gentrifying cities in Spain and their implications for potential movements and struggles are examined.
- The Geography of Marxism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 David Harvey is a geographer and a Marxist. A collection of his works titled The Ways of the World was recently published in paperback. A collection pulled from his writing and lectures, the works are insightful, both in their approach to the world and the manner in which he combines geography and Marxism.
- Getting to Marxism in Wisconsin and Iowa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Dave Ranney recounts his experiences during the 1960s which led him to accepting Marxism. He emphasizes his experinces in Southeast Asia during the 1960s which exposed covert Americian military action in the region. Other formative experiences include those as an university professor in Wisconsin and Iowa where he witnessed and joined campus movements.
- GI Coffeehouses Recalled: a Compliment From General Westmoreland
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The New York Times has published an op-ed piece by historian David Parsons about the coffeehouses started near US bases during the War in Vietnam.
- Gideon Levy: A Voice of Sanity from Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In spite of a systemic policy of demonization, Israeli journalist and human rights activist Gideon Levy continues denouncing the Israeli government and the crimes against Palestinians.
- The "Gilets Jaunes" Seen From My Workplace
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Due to the insular and ambiguous nature of social media, the Yellow Vests movement may spark political unrest but probably won't lead to real social revolution.
- Gina Haspel's CIA nomination demands the United States account for its history of torture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 President Trump's nomination of Gina Haspel to head the CIA has stirred objections from many quarters. Dorfman recounts the impact of state sanctioned torture in Chile.
- Girls Reduced to Being Repositories of Communal and Religious Identities in Kashmir
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The rape and ruthless murder of an eight-year old girl in Jammu province underscores the brutal gender violence that is a consistent feature of the political thuggery that grips the subcontinent.
- GMOs, Global Agribusiness and the Destruction of Choice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 One of the myths perpetuated by the pro-GMO (genetically modified organisms) lobby is that critics of GMOs in agriculture are denying choice to farmers and have an ideological agenda. The narrative is that farmers should have access to a range of tools and technologies, including GM crops. But GM agriculture is not 'feeding the world', nor has it been designed to do so. The choice for farmers between a technology based on broken promises and conventional non-GMO agriculture is no choice at all.
- Google Is Helping the Pentagon Build AI for Drones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google's involvement.
- Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Google has admitted that its option to "pause" the gathering of your location data doesn't apply to its Maps and Search apps – which will continue to track you even when you specifically choose to halt such monitoring.
- Google's 'Smart City of Surveillance' Faces New Resistance in Toronto
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A plan to develop 12 acres of the valuable waterfront just southeast of downtown Toronto
by the government agency Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. has sparked concerns about privacy and lack of public consultation. A recent slew of resignations from its board has made these concerns increasingly urgent and public.
- Government Mass Murder
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 "This is not an assault." Twenty-five years ago, that was the lie blaring over government loudspeakers as the FBI and the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) carried out its plan to obliterate the Branch Davidians, an integrated group that formed as a breakaway from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Orchestrated and overseen at the highest levels of the Clinton administration, the 19 April 1993 assault outside Waco, Texas, engulfed the Branch Davidians’ Mount Carmel commune in an inferno that killed over 80 people, including some two dozen children.
- The Great British Empire Debate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Malik discusses the complex issues of British colonialism, its many painful legacies and how it should be dealt with in such fields as academia and politics.
- Grieve the Beloved Children: Israel and the War on Children
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A discussion of Israel's tactics in its campaign against Palestinians, which includes the use of deliberate provocation to incite retaliation, and the disturbing reality that results in large numbers of children's deaths.
- Gun Control in Old East Germany
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Communist-run East Germany weapons and ammunition were strictly controlled. Rifles, though privately-owned, were locked up at the hunting clubs, usually connected with the forest rangers' home and station.
- Haiti: An Example of Fake News by Omission
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The main problem with the mainstream media today, as in the past, is not 'fake news' but what is left out of articles dealing with controversial issues.
- Harvey's Toxic Aftermath in Houston
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Wingard exposes the enviromental devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey. The hurricane caused chemical spills and explosions which Wingard says forecast a pending enviromental crisis.
- Helping drought-stricken farmers requires recognising global warming and planning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 All of NSW has now officially been declared to be in drought, and 57% of Queensland has officially entered its sixth year of the current drought (though there has been little real change from when 88% was declared to be in drought in March 2017).Droughts keep getting worse, and the changing climate means they will continue to do so.The Coalition's "solutions" start with denying that climate change is real.
- Herbicides undermine antibiotics, threaten medical care
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A New Zealand study adds to the body of evidence that industrial herbicides, not intended to be antibiotics, can have profound effects on bacteria, with potentially negative implications for medicine's ability to treat infectious diseases.
- Here's how we stopped a brutal, inhumane and barely legal charter flight
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Helen Brewer describes how she, and 14 other activists, broke into Stansted Airport on the 28th of March 2017, and blocked a mass deportation charter flight due to send 60 people to Nigeria and Ghana -- a forced removal which threatened to place migrants in extreme danger.
- Here's what war with North Korea would look like
A full-blown war with North Korea wouldn't be as bad as you think. It would be much, much worse Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the chilling logistics and devastating loss of life a full-blown war between the USA and North Korea would cause.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Fictions and Facts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The New York Times reported that year, “Many historians believe the bombings [of] Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed.” Many historians, perhaps; but not that many.
- Historical Subjects Lost and Found
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Looking at the legacy of Marx in the West Indies.
- A History of International Women's Day in words and images
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An online history of International Women's Day, which includes visual materials and numerous photographs from each decade.
- Honduras: U.S. Support for Repression & Fraud
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The US has supported the illegitimate election in Honduras. The people continue to resist despite deaths, disappearances and incarcerations by the military.
- How a backwards shirt led to a lesson in kindness for P.E.I. kindergarten class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Students show their support for one of their own.
- How Apple is Paving the Way to a 'Cloud Dictatorship' in China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Apple Inc. is set to hand over the operation of its iCloud data center in mainland China to a local corporation, but Apple has not explained the real issue. With the move a state-owned big data company controlled by the Chinese government will have access to all the data of its service users in China; this will allow the state apparatus to jump into the cloud and look into the data of Apple's Chinese users.
- How Big Pharma Infiltrated the Boston Museum of Science
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Mental illness is a highly stigmatized, life-long condition, that millions do not even realize they have and only a pharmaceutical drug can fix says Pharma and its operatives.
- How can environmental activists use social media? Part 1
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Environmental activists and NGOs spend a considerable amount of time Facebook posting and Tweeting. But the best use of social networks is about what you want to achieve. Alessio Perrone spoke to some experts in the field and gives some tips about how to use platforms successfully to promote social change
- How can environmental activists use social media? Part 2
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Environmentalist activists and major NGOs all spend a considerable amount of time on social media - as an immediate and direct connection to the public. But to what effect?
- How can environmental activists use social media? Part 3
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Has Twitter jumped the shark? Is Facebook now MySpace? Should environmental activists bother with social media - and does the Cambridge Analytica scandal mean we should boycott?
- How Canada could use the Saudi quarrel to help the Middle East - and itself
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Saudi Arabia's overreaction to Canadian criticism on human rights provides an opportunity for Canada to rethink Middle East policy. Such a policy, based on universal human rights, would greatly benefit not just Saudi Arabians but those in the broader Middle East, and also Canada.
- How the 'free' media dupe us on climate change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Commentary on a segment of Al Jazeera's programme The Listening Post on why climate scepticism persists only in what it terms the "Anglosphere media", that is, those in the United States, UK, Australia and Canada.
- How Labour's Campaigns Attempted to Make the Political Personal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The basic techniques of convincing people on the doorstep are not different to those of convincing friends or workmates. However, election canvassers have typically gone door-to-door telling voters what the party's policies are. The British Labour Party's new approach, developed by Momentum, emphasized listening to people and identifying their key issues.
- How Many Millions Have Been Killed in America's Post-9/11 Wars? Part 3
Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Davies investigates the death toll of U.S. covert and proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen and underscores the importance of comprehensive war mortality studies.
- How Neoliberal Fundamentalism Helped Make Trump President
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A common, headache-inducing media narrative has surfaced since the election in 'mainstream' liberal U.S. publications they can no longer trust, such as The Washington Post or New York Times: that the true decline of U.S. democracy, the true dominance of U.S. corporate power in public life, and the true deterioration of the 'American Dream' has at last begun to arrive with the victory of Donald Trump.
- How Not To Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This essay refutes conceptions of what working class really means by reactivating fundamental Marxist insights about class formation that have been obscured by decades of neoliberalism. The author argues that the key to developing a sufficient understanding of the working class is the framework of social reproduction.
- How Palestinian women led successful non-violent resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Two women share their stories of how they peacefully protested during both Intifadas and challenged Israel's occupation.
- How the EU's principled pragmatism sows strife in the Middle East
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at how the European Union is creating greater instability, distrust, and casualties like Jamal Khashoggi, by trading fundamental values such as human rights for more practical avenues coined as "principled pragmatism".
- How the Guardian aided the anti-semites
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Who do you help when you censor a cartoon depicting Israel's well-documented war crimes against Palestinians – and do so on the grounds that the criticism of Israel is anti-semitic?
The answer is: you help anti-semites.
- How the Guardian became the West's Pravda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Cook says that the British newspaper The Guardian has become a mouthpiece for the establishment.
- How the internet 'punishes' Palestinians
Tech giants Google, Airbnb and PayPal accused of shaping false narratives with policies in Palestinian territories. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Multinational tech companies, including Google, Facebook and PayPal are being accused of complicity in rights violations and in shaping false narratives with regard to policies in Palestinian territories.
- How the System Got Trumped: Cambridge Analytica's Electoral Psyops Campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Available from Cinema Libre Studios, "Trumping Democracy" provides the key to understanding how we have ended up with the most unpopular president in history.
- How the UAW Can Make It Right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Aswar discusses how the UAW lost the vote at the Nissan plant in Mississippi and proposes that Organized laboUr adapt Opertaion Dixie to move forward.
- How They Sold the Iraq War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold: it was a propaganda war, a war of perception management.
- How To Be A Reliable 'Mainstream' Journalist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A commentary on what is required to be a 'good' and 'reliable' journalist for the mainstream Western media.
- How to create an ecological society
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of the book "Creating an Ecological Society: Towards A Revolutionary Transformation" by Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, which addresses different aspects of the debate on the politics of the environment.
- How to Start a Nuclear War
The increasingly direct road to ruin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A chilling look at the security measures and processes behind the U.S. nuclear weapons system. The article examines how safeguards and procedures have evolved, including more recent efforts to curb the President's absolute authority to push the button.
- How to Use Critical Thinking to Spot False Climate Claims
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This article outlines ways to address common climate-contrarian arguments, all of which contain errors in reasoning that are independent of the science itself.
- Huawei executive's arrest provokes anti-US protests in China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The arrest of a Huawei executive in Canada has led to a wave of anger in China, in a move perceived to undermine China's increasingly dominant position in advanced technology. On Chinese social media comments denounce the arrest and call for the executive's immediate release as well as a boycott of Canadian brands.
- Hue Back When: the Bloodbath in Vietnam Was Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at Mark Bowden's book "Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam", which provides a two-sided perspective on a particularly tragic moment in the Vietnam War.
- "I Really Don't Care, Do U?" the Mendacity of Evil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 While Americans consider themselves well above the authoritarianism and atrocities of such regimes as Nazi Germany, the author takes a look at some disturbing connections and similarites with the United States.
- ICE: The making of an American Gestapo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Justin Akers Chacón, author of Radicals in the Barrio and co-author with Mike Davis of No One Is Illegal, takes an in-depth look at the troubling history and practices of a government agency that more and more people are calling to be abolished.
- The Ideal of a Free Media Died Long Ago
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Most of us instantly recoil from any blurring between editorial and advertising in the media. How would we know if what was reported was factual, truthful and newsworthy or there simply as public relations spin? How could we trust anything we read? But here's a seditious idea. Would that be such a bad thing? Maybe it would better if we were far more wary of the corporate media and began to think of it chiefly as a sales platform – selling us an ideology harmful to our individual welfare and that of our societies.
- The Ideal of a Free Media Died Long Ago
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Should the media include positive editorial content secretly paid for by major corporations, as London's Evening Standard newspaper has begun doing, according to new revelations?
Most of us instantly recoil from any blurring between editorial and advertising in the media. How would we know if what was reported was factual, truthful and newsworthy or there simply as public relations spin? How could we trust anything we read?
- 'If I don't come back, call my lawyer': Practical solidarity for people
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A recommendation of practical steps to help people facing the threat of detention, and the importance of standing in solidarity with others who are dealing with a hostile environment.
- If John Bolton Is Right, Pearl Harbor Was Perfectly Legal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Michigan attorney Kary Love explores the legal basis for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea by the USA.
- If only we could revive the fruitful tension between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X
Reflections on Dr King’s death have overlooked how his liberal universalism and Malcolm X’s separatism gave each other strength Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Kenan argues that conflict averse approach to activism blunts the edge of contemporary social movements for change.
- If We're on the Left, How Come We're Still Here?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Andrew Levine looks at why the Left is largely ignored by Trump's more radical followers and pundits.
- The ignorant, repressive attack on Frank Loesser's "Baby, It's Cold Outside"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at Frank Loesser's 1944 song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and the social forces which have aggressively pushed the new 'Puritanism' that seeks to have the song banned.
- Illegal logging: An organized crime that is destroying Latin American forests
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A recent report indicates that Illegal wood trafficking is the most profitable crime against natural resources, and allows other crimes to flourish, including deforestation, labor exploitation, land invasions, tax evasion, document forgery and state corruption.
- Illegal logging: An organized crime that is destroying Latin American forests
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Illegal timber trafficking is a complex type or ogranized crime that involves other crimes such as tax evasion, labor exploitation, and land invasion. Countries in Latin America need to work together to fight this crime.
- Immigration and Cultural Loss
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 While immigration has brought major changes in the physical character of British cities and in the rhythm of social life, it is not alone in driving social changes nor is it even the most important driver of social change.
- In Middle East Wars It Pays to be Skeptical
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In the context of Western air strikes on alleged Syrian biological weapons sites on 14 April, 2018, the history of the bombing of the Abu Ghraib baby milk factory in 1991 underscores the need for permanent scepticism towards claims by U.S. and Western governments that they know exactly what is happening on the ground in Syria.
- In Run-Up to Vote to End Yemen War, MSNBC Remains Totally Silent
MSNBC outflanked from the left by Breitbart Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Johnson expresses concern about the lack of MSNBC coverage of the role of the USA in the conflict in Yemen since 2015.
- Indian Country: The Situation is Bleak, But Not Hopeless
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Discusses how even though issues such as the Dakota Access Pipeline have received lots of public attention people are unaware of how Indigenous dispossession is deeply ingrained in the fabric of the US.
- Indian Country: The Situation is Bleak, But Not Hopeless
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A discussion of Stephanie Woodard's book "American Apartheid: The Native Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion" and looking at how present-day colonial practices impact Native people in the US.
- India's Freedom Struggle Influenced by Marxism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In India Marxism has influenced revolutionary figures to varying degrees. As inequality rises a renewed interest in Marx that engages local philosophies could invigorate a proletarian movement.
- Indigenous Sovereignty & Socialism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018
- Industrial accident claims three lives in Leduc, Alberta
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the troubling indifference to the alarming statistics on worker fatalities, and the lax occupational health and safety regulations that are designed to protect employers and permit the further expansion of company profits.
- Inside Google's Effort to Develop a Censored Search Engine in China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Google analyzed search terms entered into a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for a censored search engine it has been planning to launch in China, according to confidential documents seen by The Intercept. Engineers working on the censorship sampled search queries from 265.com, a Chinese-language web directory service owned by Google.
- Institutionalizing Intolerance: Bullies Win, Freedom Suffers When We Can't Agree to Disagree
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 As America has become ever more polarized, and those polarized factions have become more militant and less inclined to listen to -- or even allow for the existence of -- other viewpoints, we are fast becoming a nation of people who just can't get along. Here's the thing: if Americans don't learn how to get along--at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other's right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different--then we're going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals). In such an environment, when we can't agree to disagree, the bullies (on both sides) win and freedom suffers.
- Intellectual Property Regime Undermines Equity, Progress
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Developing countries must reject the intellectual property rights regime imposed on them by powerful foreign monopolies in recent decades.
- International Women's Day
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The annual day for recognition of and struggle for women's economic, social and political rights.
- Intersectionality is a Hole. Afro-Pessimism is a Shovel. We Need to Stop Digging, Part 1 of 2
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Dixon argues that intersectionality - or, rather, its interpretation by the so-called "US left" - decenters class struggle in its effort to equalize oppressions.
- An interview with Mike Leigh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Working on the film, there were people of various generations, from their twenties to people of my age, from the area, who said, 'I didn’t know about this.' And yet the massacre was widely reported and is a famous and significant, seminal event in the history of democracy in Britain, the labour movement, etc., etc.
- An Interview with Norman Finkelstein: "I'm Not Betraying the Legacy of My Parents in Order to Make Myself Palatable."
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Norman Finkelstein is among the leading scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the United States. His work primarily focuses on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Nazi Holocaust. For decades, he has advocated for a two state solution on the June 1967 borders, a "just solution to the refugee question," an end to the Israeli settlements in Palestine, the deconstruction of the border wall, the right to clean water, and an end to the occupation, the Gaza blockade, and the use of force against the Palestinians.
- Iran: Compulsory veiling is abusive, discriminatory and humiliating; end the persecution of women for peacefully protesting against it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Amnesty International criticizes Iran's compulsory veiling laws, arguing that they are not only harmful to women, but fundamentally unconstitutional.
- Iranian police arrest 29 women over protests against compulsory hijab
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Iranian police have arrested 29 women in the capital, Tehran, after they protested against a law that makes wearing the hijab compulsory.
- The Irishmen Who Fought in the Last Great Battle Against Spanish Fascism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An account of the numerous Irishmen who were killed, injured, captured and who simply disappeared while volunteering to fight against the rising fascist tide during the Spanish Civil War.
- Is There a Gig Economy?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A data-heavy analysis questioning whether 'gig-economy' precarious jobs are indeed growing rapidly as reported.
- Islamic State in Ukraine: A Christmas present from the West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The report in British newspaper the Times, that Chechen Islamists, many reeling from defeat in Syria and Iraq amongst the alphabet soup of fanaticism, had indeed arrived at the war front in eastern Ukraine, woke me up from any Christmas torpor.
- Israel Commemorates Nakba with Mass Murder at the Gaza Fence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the "catastrophe" that resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and the theft of their lands, homes, and even their household possessions, the message today was clear: the Israeli state is prepared to maintain its apartheid state by any means necessary. The catastrophe for the Palestinians was the birth of Israel and was celebrated by the Israeli state with tear gas, bullets and the blood of Palestinians.
- Israel deliberately provoked the latest violence in Gaza, but you won't learn that in the NY Times
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Times breathlessly and at length recounts Israeli anxiety over the limited attacks from Gaza: "Sirens blared again;" "cellphones were buzzing with alerts of incoming rockets."
- Israel deliberately provoked the latest violence in Gaza, but you won't learn that in the NY Times
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Times breathlessly and at length recounts Israeli anxiety over the limited attacks from Gaza: "Sirens blared again;" "cellphones were buzzing with alerts of incoming rockets." The Times has a reporter in Gaza, Iyad Abuheweila, but the paper had nothing to say whatsoever about how Gazans were reacting to being under assault. Maybe their cellphones were also buzzing, and their children were also afraid?
- Israel: Democracy or Apartheid State?
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 Josh Ruebner draws on personal anecdotes and reflections, historical documents, and legal analyses to answer one of the most pressing issues in international affairs today: is Israel a democracy or does its separate and unequal treatment of the Palestinian people render it an apartheid state?
- Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A report on Israeli weapons and training being provided to anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi soldiers in the Ukraine.
- Israel Is The Real Problem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Elite power cannot abide a serious challenge to its established position. And that is what Labour under Jeremy Corbyn represents to the Tory government, the corporate, financial and banking sectors, and the 'mainstream' media. The manufactured 'antisemitism crisis' is the last throw of the dice for those desperate to prevent a progressive politician taking power in the UK: someone who supports Palestinians and genuine peace in the Middle East, a strong National Health Service and a secure Welfare State, a properly-funded education system, and an economy in which people matter; someone who rejects endless war and complicity with oppressive, war criminal 'allies' such as the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
- Israel rolls out the welcome mat for Europe's neo-fascists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The recent visit to Israel of a dominant figure in Italy's right-wing coalition government, is the latest in an increasingly open alliance between the Israeli state and resurgent forces of the far-right and neo-fascism in Europe.
- Israel steps up its war on mixed marriages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Israeli government has long funded various efforts to try to prevent romantic relationships between Jews and non-Jews, both inside territories it controls and around the world. But a new program confirmed this month by the tourism ministry takes Israel's war on families of mixed religion or ethnicity to a new level.
- Israeli army razes home of prominent Palestinian activist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Israeli army has demolished a residential building owned by a prominent Palestinian activist, whose six sons have been imprisoned by Israel. The building, owned by Latifa Abu Hmeid, is located in the Amari refugee camp near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
- Israeli forces 'deliberately killed' Palestinian paramedic Razan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Probe by Israeli rights group B'Tselem concludes that intentional fatal shot was fired at the Palestinian paramedic.
- Israeli Government Fears Palestinian Cameras
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A report on a Bill by the Israeli Knessett that would criminalize the filming of Israeli soldiers in Palestine, with a proposed five year jail sentence for offenders.
- Israeli minister threatens to destroy Gaza "once and for all"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 As Israel bombed it dozens of times in the past day, a senior Israeli minister has incited the total destruction of Gaza.
- Israeli spyware being used to monitor Indonesian LGBT community, religious minorities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the company and spyware product that is used by various institutions to monitor the activities of the LGBT community and religious minority groups in Indonesia.
- Israelis Just Keep Killing People, Stealing Land
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The recent killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by Israeli sharpshooters following the "The Great March of Return" is outlined, as well as the ongoing futility of Israel's policy and actions against the self-governing Palestinian territory whose population are forced to live under dire conditions.
- Israel's 'nation-state law' parallels the Nazi Nuremberg Laws
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Israel's new 'nation-state' law follows in the footsteps of Jim Crow, the Indian Removal Act and the Nuremberg Laws.
- The Italian Long ’68
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Taddeo describes how the charateristics of 1968 continued in Italy passed 1968 and his subsequent participation in various movements. He explains that with the struggles of 1977 and the repression that followed, one can say that the social ferment begun in Italy in 1968 had exhausted itself.
- "It's Killing the Student Movement": Canary Mission's Blacklist of Pro-Palestine Activists Is Taking a Toll
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Canary Mission, a website that compiles dossiers on Palestinian rights advocates and labels them racists, anti-Semites, and supporters of terrorism has taken a toll on activists' mental health and their ability to engage in free speech and public advocacy on Palestine.
- It's Time for America to Reckon With the Staggering Death Toll of the Post-9/11 Wars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Researchers strive to count the casualties of American wars but are faced by a lack of political and military accountability and a seemingly apathetic public.
- It's Time to Call Economic Sanctions What They Are: War Crimes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Cockburn argues that economic sanctions impose collective punishment on the general population rather than targetting the people in power.
- Jackson Rising: At Last, a Real Strategic Plan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Moser reviews Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.
- Jan and Carrol Cox, Political Activists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary for Jan and Carrol Cox, long-time activists from Illinois.
- Janus and My Ode to Capital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Looking at Marx and how to make him relevant to people through 40 years of teaching Capital.
- Jeff Bezos' Quest to Find America's Dumbest Mayor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Baker questions the wisdom of cities offering online-retailer Amazon tax and infrastructure incentives to host the company's second head quarters.
- Joel Kovel (1936-2018)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary for psychiatrist, teacher and author Joel Kovel.
- John Pilger's speech at Sydney rally to free Julian Assange
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2018 Video by Cathy Vogan & Liam Kesteven (https://www.facebook.com/liam.kesteven), for Politics in the Pub. http://politicsinthepub.org.au
- Joyless in Zion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Israel is held in contempt by much of the western world, and Israelis know it even as they get down to the hard business of shooting border-crossers. The New York Times did a piece suggesting that Israelis have a conscience about the violence they poured forth at the Gaza border, and they hope that it was the right thing to do. But Gideon Levy says they have lost their conscience; and that was my impression too from interviewing Israeli Jews in West Jerusalem. I talked to 20 people. Every one expressed support for the killings. There was simply no dissent.
- Just Transition: Let Detroit Breathe!
A talk by William Copeland Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 William Copeland presents the campaign, Let Detroit Breathe. The campaign's prinicipal aim is to help Detroiters win their right to breathe clean air.
- Just When You Thought 'Russiagate' Couldn't Get Any Sillier
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The lawsuit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government and WikiLeaks is simply the latest version of what the DNC has been doing since 2016, which is trying to fob blame for its loss of an election it should have won.
- Justice for Hassan Diab and the Unbearable Banality of Evil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Deutsch examines the case of Dr. Hassan Diab - a sociology professor and Canadian citizen who was accused of bombing the Rue Copernic Synagogue - and uses it to critique international and domestic justice systems.
- Justice Kennedy and the Myth of the Legal Neutrality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The enduring myth in America that law and politics are separate is put into question at the end of 2017 with 5-4 decisions upholding President Trump's travel ban, the striking down mandatory public sector union fees, and the resignation of Justice Kennedy.
- Karl Kautsky: From Pope to Renegade
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Once recognized as "The Pope of Marxism" for his popularization and systematization of Marxist ideas, Kautsky fell into obscurity following the Russian Revolution. In recent revival of interest in his politics, in both academia and on the political left, raises questions about the meaning of Kautsky's orthodox Marxism and about what a renewed revolutionary left should adopt from it as their own.
- Karl Marx in the 21st Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Looking at how Marx's theories can explain today's global crisis.
- Karl Marx: Revolutionary Heretic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A celebration of Marx as a thinker who constantly adapted his ideas and thinking.
- Kenya's 'Erin Brockovich' defies harassment to bring anti-pollution case to courts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Phyllis Omido is leading a landmark class action demanding a clean-up and compensation from a lead-smelting factory accused of poisoning local residents - including her own son.
- Kidnapper Trump as Symptom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The current plight of asylum seekers in the United States and the traumatic separation of children from parents at the southern U.S. border, is the most recent American policy that is racially motivated.
- A Killer Dies, a Teacher Lives: George H.W. Bush v. Noam Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The obsequious praise of the life and legacy of the now deceased mad-dog killer George H. W. Bush (1924-2018) contradict the reality of his actions during his life and presidency.
- Killing Children: From Ireland to Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The most tragic casualty in a conflict is that of a child, the most disturbing casualty in a conflict is that of a child killed purposely. In Palestine there is a disturbingly tragic high rate of children killed by those sporting the uniform of Israeli armed forces.
- Killing Gaza
A documentary film about life under siege Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2018 Independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen documented Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza during the war, and chronicled its horrific aftermath. As they waded through the rubble of Gaza’s destroyed border regions, they turned a camera onto the survivors of the slaughter and let them speak for themselves. Dan returned, week after week, to capture on film the daily struggles of the people of Gaza as they suffered through one of the worst winters in recorded history, and then weathered the sweltering summer heat without electricity and -- in many cases -- without homes. While giving voice to the pain of a people under siege, Cohen and Blumenthal also highlighted Gazans’ inspiring acts of creative resistance, from painting to break-dancing to literature, that allow them maintain their humanity in the face of deprivation and war. Yet this film is much more than a documentary about Palestinian resilience and suffering. It is a chilling visual document of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, featuring direct testimony and evidence from the survivors.
- "Killing Gaza" captures culture of resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Watch Killing Gaza, absorb the atmosphere of siege and listen to the testimonies of the trapped. You might then understand why so many chose to rush the gates.
- Killing Mosquitoes: The Latest Gaza Massacres, Pro-Israel Media Bias And The Weapon Of 'Antisemitism'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The most recent brutality against Palestinians, and brazenness with which the killings were carried out, is yet another demonstration of the Israeli contempt for the people it tried to ethnically cleanse in 1948.
- The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66,
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018
- Korea: What the Generals Aren't Telling You
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Hamilton points out that the 24 nuclear power stations in South Korea represent high risk targets in a retaliatory attack from North Korea.
- The Kurdish Crisis in Iraq and Syria
Against the Current vol. 192 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In discussion of right of self-determination for the between 28 and 35 million Kurdish people in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, the author considers the current polticial landscape.
- Labor's Last Stand
Unions must either demand a place at the table or be part of the meal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The slow degradation of workers' rights through the use of the courts has led to a weakening of negotiated power of unions and the retreat of organized labour.
- Language for Resisting Oppression
Review of Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of the Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left by Ian Parker.
- The language of the unheard
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A book review of "A People's History of Riots, Protest and the Law: The Sound of the Crowd" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) by author Matt Clement.
- Latin America Crises and Contradictions
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Detailed review of a collection of essays on Latin America.
- A Lavish Bollywood Musical Is Fueling A Culture War In India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of the controversial 2018 Bollywood film "Padmaavat". Qureshi summarises the politically charged campaign of misinformation and resulting sectarian violence that has dogged its release.
- Lawsuit accuses DC police of collusion with far right
An advocacy group has filed a lawsuit alleging that police broke protocol by working with a far-right organisation. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Federal prosecutors and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC, colluded with far-right groups in cases against anti-Trump protesters, a recently filed lawsuit alleges.
- James Laxer - Canadian iconoclast 1941-2018
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary for the prominent campaigner, author and academic James Laxer, who passed away February 23rd 2018.
- The League of Assad-Loving Conspiracy Theorists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 So the global capitalist ruling classes' War on Dissent is now in full swing. With their new and improved official narrative, "Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis," successfully implanted in the public consciousness, the corporatocracy have been focusing their efforts on delegitimizing any and all forms of deviation from their utterly absurd and increasingly paranoid version of reality.
- The Left Has Better Things to Do Than Watch Liberals Scratch Their Heads
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Drawing from author David Harvey's work "The Ways of the World", Munson examines how Liberal-democracy has changed when the nucleus of capitalism shifted in the 1970's from the production of goods to the production of 'signs'. He further examines how 'neo-liberalism' is now grappling and adjusting in the era of Trump.
- Left-Wing Disaster Relief Efforts Spread Goodwill for Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at some of the disaster relief initiatives by left-wing groups in the United States, as well as the disconnect that seems to underscore a number of issues with the state's disaster relief efforts.
- Lenin and the Bolshevik Party: A revolutionary collective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Russian Revolution of 1917 clearly reveals the complexities of Bolshevism – Lenin's party – as a revolutionary collective.
- Lenin and the Tsarist Duma
A review of August H Nimtz, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Ballot, the Streets—or Both Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Donnelly reviews Nimtz's two volume account of Lenin's pre-revolution electoral strategy and summarises the thesis that Lenin's critique of reformism in parliamentary democracy was rooted in the conclusions of Marx and Engels.
- Leon Rosselson on Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Gaza the slaughter was premeditated and calculated. The snipers were primed to kill. They had their orders. They used the protesters, men women, children, for target practice. According to the latest reports, 109 Palestinians?—?including children, one an 8 month old baby -- have been killed and over 6,000 wounded, including nearly 1000 children. The wounds were particularly debilitating because Israeli soldiers used dumdum bullets which expand when they enter the body. The bullets used are causing injuries local medics say they have not seen since 2014. The entrance wound is small.The exit wound is devastating, causing gross comminution of bone and destruction of soft tissue.
- Less Than Fundamental: the Myth of Voting Rights in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The story of voting rights in America is one of exceptionalism. In 1787 when the US Constitution was drafted the right to vote was absent from the text.
- Lessons from James Baldwin
Review of James Baldwin: The FBI File; Against the Current vol. 192 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of James Baldwin: The FBI File, a novel edited by William J. Maxwell which sets out an interpretive frame,through which readers may study his excerpts his file from the FBI.
- The Lessons of the World Cup for our Victim Culture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 That we are living in an age of victim culture is well-exemplified by an article recently published by the CBC suggesting that minorities "feel apprehensive about heading into the wild because they don't see themselves reflected in the outdoor industry and media." The underlying premise is that a paucity of representations of members of these groups constructs the outdoors as a kind of "unsafe space" of which people from these communities ask, according to the African-American author of a book called The Adventure Gap, James Mills, "'Do I belong here? And if somebody believes that I don’t belong here, will they do something to harm me?'"
- Let Us Now Praise Infamous Animals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault and murder. The defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites. These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day. The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the community.
- Letter to the Editors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Georgakas responds to the book review of Finally Got the News in a previous issue of the journal. He was disheartened that pertinent political and artistic seeds that directly fed that period have been neglected.
- A Liberal Pillar Of The Establishment - 'New Look' Guardian, Old-Style Orthodoxy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Respected liberal media like the New York Times and Guardian are key battlegrounds in the relentless elite efforts to control public opinion.
- Liberal Totalitarianism and the Trump Diversion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Baraka warns against enthusiastic embrace of the FBI as a "neutral political force populated by people of unreproachable character" in light of their well documented history of politically motivated targetting of civil rights activists.
- Liberation of Dalits: Key to Indian Workers Revolution
Review of Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Ants Among Elephants is both a family memoir and a political history.
- License to Kill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Halimi places alleged Russian involvement in the attempted assasination of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the context of routine extrajudicial killings by the wider inernational security services.
- Life without Limits: The Delusions of Technological Fundamentalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In a routinely delusional world, what is the most dangerous delusion? This delusion is not limited to one country, one group, or one political party, but rather is the unstated assumption of everyday life in the high-energy/high-technology industrial world. This is the delusion that we are -- to borrow from the title of a particularly delusional recent book -- the god species.
- Linking class and gender theory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A detailed review of "Social Reproduction Theory" an essay collection edited by Tithi Bhattacharya. Contributors include Nancy Fraser, Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman, Susan Ferguson, Carman Teeple Hopkins, Serap Saritas Oran and Alan Sears.
- Lissa Lucas Dragged Out of West Virginia House Judiciary Hearing For Listing Oil and Gas Contributions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Mokhiber's article summarizes the case of political candidate Lissa Lucas, whose testimony against a bill "that would allow companies to drill on minority mineral owners' land without their consent" was censored by the court.
- 'A Load Of Tosh'– The BBC, 'Showbiz News' And State Propaganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 BBC News reporting on international relations, with particular reference to 2017-2018 tensions with Russia, relies heavily on state propaganda.
- Local Autonomy: A Key to Protection of the Ecosystem
Apo Island's Protected Landscape and Seascape Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In his book, The Plundered Seas, Michael Berrill called the Grand Banks and Georges Bank maybe the saddest story of overfishing.Berrill’s solution was the management of Large Marine Ecosystems.
- Lockheed Martin receives bloody images instead of cool weapons photos in failed Twitter campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The world's largest defense contractor fails miserably in a social media campaign asking Twitter users to send them an "amazing photo" of a Lockheed Martin product.
- The Logic of Human Survival
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of a Marxist look at the concept of the Anthropocene.
- London Pub Crawl with Karl Marx
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An account by Wilhelm Liebknecht of an incident which occured during a 'beer trip' -pub crawl- between Karl Marx, other Germans, and some Englishmen.
- Lopez Obrador in Mexico: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The newly elected President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has been described by some in the U.S. as a radical socialist, however this article explains that he has already back-peddled on important pre-election promises.
- Made-in-China fake news overwhelms Taiwan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected as Taiwan's president relations between Taiwan and China have been increasingly strained. In parallel, a series of fake news campaigns have captured Taiwanese media, with experts tracing several of these stories back to China.
- The Making of C.L.R. James
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A short, positive review of a graphic novel about CLR James.
- The Making of Corporate Empire
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of a book covering Henry Ford's "ethos of the assembly line" and how his racist views shaped it in different places.
- The Malevolent Hypocrisy of Selective Sanctions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at why the US government is steadfast in its support of the Saudi dictatorship no matter what criminal excesses may be perpetrated by the Riyadh regime, while on the other hand it is determined to punish other countries like Cuba and Venezuela with severe economic sanctions.
- Manifesto of Indian Farmers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Adopted by an assembly representing the farmers of India, the manifesto outlines Indian farmers convictions, principals, concerns, rights and calls on the parliament of India to hold a Special Session to address the agrarian crisis by passing and enacting the two Kisan Mukti Bills and address additional demands.
- Marc Lamont Hill's Detractors are the True Anti-Semites
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Temple University's administration announced the unsurprising news that it has found no grounds to punish or investigate Professor Marc Lamont Hill for his speech on the occasion of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Yet, the university's Board of Trustees felt compelled, nonetheless, to issue a statement further maligning Dr Hill, albeit indirectly this time.
- Martha (Marty) Quinn, 1939-2018
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary for Martha Quinn, a founding member of Solidarity.
- Marx at 200; Capital at 150
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Holmstrom discusses the relevance of Marx's Das Capital in understanding modern and historical economic systems. Specifically, she looks at the themes of exploitation, gender, race and capital.
- Marx, Engels and the National Question
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A historical look at the role of class and nation-states in socialism.
- Marx in 1968 in France
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In a personal essay, Coleman describes his personal experiences in France from 1966-1968.
He highlights significant number of Marxists teaching in both high schools and secondary settings. Furthermore, he discusses how the working class perceived in the Marxist far left, Trotskyist and Maoist press before May 1968.
- Marx in 1968: Report on a Journey
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Harvey Goldman discusses his intellectual jounrey during the 1960s in relationship to Marism. As a member of SDS, Goldman was engaged actively in student activism.
- Marx and the "International"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A rebuttal of the idea of Marx as Eurocentric and a white supremacist.
- Marx is dead, long live Marx!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Duran describes 1968 as an an "ideological revolution which unquestionably affected the dominant revolutionary ideology, Marxism, and here begins my contribution, which I will divide into two large sections: an account of the situation in Spain, and then the rebirth of
Marxism, and why we can say: 'Long live Marx!'"
- Marx and Marxism in Berkeley in 1968
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Setting context by describing the early twentieth century political landscape in Berkeley, Goldner continues to describe his experince as a student at UC Berkeley by discussing local, national and international contexts for my encounter with Marx in Berkeley, 1968.
- Marx and Organization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Lause examines Marx's involvement in different organizations and argues that he seems never to have had a problem not being in an organization -- not because he accorded organization no importance, but rather that the importance he accorded it depended entirely on the demands of the class struggle around him.
- Marx Turns 200: A Mixed Gift
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A mixed but detailed review of a biography of Karl Marx. The author likes the Life material but has problems with the treament of the Works.
- Marxism, class and revolution in Africa: the legacy of the 1917 Russian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This article assesses the influence of 1917 on African liberation movements and explains how it influenced struggles against and beyond colonialism.
- The Marxist and the Gamers: Reading, Fortnite, and My Students' Identities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A school teacher reflects on the differences he sees in his students from past generations, notably the many young people who are avid online gamers.
- A Marxist History of Capitalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 A short history of capitalism by a history professor at University of Manitoba
- A Marxist History of Capitalism (Book Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A book review of Henry Heller's "A Marxist History of Capitalism" which restores class struggle to a central place in explaining how capitalism arose and grew, and can eventually be overcome.
- Marx's Capital as Organizing Tool
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A guide to how the left could use Marx's Capital as a text for organizing.
- Marx's Ecology: Recovered Legacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Löwy says that while mainstream ecologicail theory has been dismissive of Karl Marx, serious research in recent decades has recovered some of his very important insights on ecological issues.
- Mass Incarceration
New Jim Crow, Class War, or Both? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, Lewis analyzes racial and class disparities in incarceration.
- Massacres and Morality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 What can one say about the morality of Israeli soldiers who shoot unarmed protestors, and then are caught on camera cheering their kills? And how do we judge the civilian population of Israel, many of whom openly support and cheer their soldiers as they go about their work of killing Palestinians? And what can we say about the political leaders of other countries, Canada say, who sit down and smile and make deals with officials of the Israeli government at the very moment that the killing is going on?
- The May '68 Events and Revolution in the West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The political explosion fifty years ago in May 1968 in France has become a key historical marker for the Left. In an outburst of political revolt, workers seized factories and students occupied universities bringing France to a halt in a series of massive general strikes.
- Me Too's Misguided Pursuit of Equality: Drop the Spirit of Vengeance and Defend Dignity Instead
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 With Me Too’s focus where it is, on man’s injury to woman, the capitalist for-profit system can wash its hands. Eyes glued to salacious details are off the oppressive economic order that has over time erased our cultures, communities and is set to destroy all life on the planet.
- The Meaning of Heritage in an Age of Identity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A discussion of the meaning of heritage in the current age of identity politics, and why there is a need to reject the nativist, or clash of civilizations, and the multicultural approaches to heritage.
- Media Panic Over the Stock Market Plunge
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The media continue to be in a panic over the drop in the stock market over the last few weeks. Fortunately for political pundits, there is no expectation that they have any clue about the subjects on which they opine. For those more interested in economics than hysterics, the drop in the market is not a big deal.
- Memoir From the Underground
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of the film "Memoir of War", directed by Emmanuel Finkiel, a semi-fictional memoire of writer Marguerite Duras who lived under a facist regime in Vichy France.
- #MeToo for All Women
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The #MeToo movement exposed systems that abuse and silence of women. It's important to note that these systems are not just individual professions or university administrations but they are enabled by the larger system of capitalism.
- The #MeToo Revolution Edtorial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The editors ask whether the #MeToo Movement will be different than other moments in which sexual abuse was revealed, and propose that organized labour can play a role in ensuring harassment-free work enviroments.
- Microfinance or Debt Trap? What the Poor Don't Know
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Qazi's article outlines how poorly designed microfinance initiatives harm rather than help low income borrowers.
- Midian Farm
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2018 From 1971 - 1977, Midian Farm was a back-to-the-land social experiment created by a community of urban baby boomers from Toronto. Part of the youth counterculture movement during a period of social and political re-imagining, its utopian vision eventually collapsed. More than four decades later, filmmaker Liz Marshall unearths a transformative piece of family and Canadian history.
- A Mighty Voice for Peace Has Gone Silent: Uri Avnery, 1923-2018
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A brief article in commemoration of Israeli human rights activist Uri Avnery, who died in Tel Aviv at the age of 94.
- Military 'Service' Serves the Ruling Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Military veteran and peace activist Will Griffin comments on the military campaigns in which he participated, and why he believes that military service ultimately serves noboby but a minority ruling class.
- Mining History Written in Blood
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Domestic coal mining history above and below ground lives on the pages of Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction edited by Wess Harris (PM Press, 2017). The anthology unpacks the industry, people and communities of a coal-rich region, amplifying relevant class and gender issues over a century.
- Missing Children: The Pottery Barn Rule Revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 If one in five American parents couldn't figure out where their kids were, most people would rightly see the phenomenon as a crisis and a national scandal. Grandstanding prosecutors with visions of gubernatorial campaigns dancing in their heads would conduct mass parental perp walks. Legislators would boost their presidential aspirations by co-sponsoring legislation requiring universal implantation of GPS trackers at birth.
- "Mr. Boston": Meet the Man Who Secretly Helped Daniel Ellsberg Leak Pentagon Papers to the Press
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Interview with historian Gar Alperovitz. Alperovitz has revealed for the first time the key role he and a handful of other activists played in helping whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leak to journalists the Pentagon Papers -- a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam.
- MLK: To the Promised Land
Charles Williams interviewing Michael Honey Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Interview with Michael Honey author of the study, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice.
- Modernity and Negations
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Finkel reviews The End of Jewish Modernity and What is Modern Israel? He says they offer complementary perspectives on some of the tragedies confronting today’s world, and their historical backgrounds.
- The Moral Economy of the Iranian Protests
Beset by inequality and corruption, Iran's provincial working classes are revolting against the revolution's broken promises Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the root causes of the widespread protests that have been taking place, primarily in provincial towns, throughout Iran. Persistent unemployment and inflation, overdue wages and pensions, environmental degradation, and ponzi schemes are a far cry from the social justice vision that animated and united the revolutionary forces of 1979.
- Moroccan Catastrophic Convergence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The convergance of injustices in Morocco - climate change, neoliberalism, political suppression - make for a completely untenable situation. This could make people hopeful since it makes radical change the only possibility.
- Mozambique won't be Mato Grosso
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A popular movement centred on a small farming village in northern Mozambique has, for the moment, halted an attempt to move to cash-crop monocultures mainly for export.
- Mozambique's farmers battle to keep land in Nakarari
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Parenti and Liberti examine the Nakarari community's ongoing resistance to commercial agricultural planning.
- Mueller Indictment - The "Russian Influence" Is A Commercial Marketing Scheme
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An explanation of why the U.S. Justice Department's indictment is based on a misunderstanding of the commercial activities of a Russian marketing company in U.S. social networks.
- My Experiences in 1968 in Working-Class Turin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Lepore recounts his experiences growing up in 1968 in working class Turin. He highlight the influence of the newspaper, Lotta Comunista, its developed Marxist approach and his subsequent involvement with, and then commitment to, that group.
- My Longest Day: How World War II Ended for My Family
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An essay excerpted from Hans-Armin Ohlmann's memoirs, which recounts his experiences growing up in Germany during the Second World War.
- Myron Perlman, Z"L: Working-Class Jewish Radical
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Memorial for Myron Perlman, union carpenter and social justice activist.
- Nanking Massacre
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A summary of the massacre at Nanking (Nanjing) , which occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937. During this period soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army perpetrated horrific atrocities, and murdered Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants who numbered an estimated 40,000 to over 300,000.
- The NED's Useful Idiots
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On Friday, June 8, 2018, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow augmented her nightly Russiagate fetish by extolling the merits of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), telling her huge audience that the NED, created in the 1980s by the Ronald Reagan administration, still does the "non-partisan hard work around the world, of promoting small D democracy and promoting the institutions of civil society that any culture needs in order to have a functioning democracy."
- A New COINTELPRO?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Malik discusses the revelations that the FBI is targeting Black Lives Matters and what Justice Department head Jeff Sessions calls “Black identity” extremists as well as the response to open racism and how to move forward.
- New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018
- A New Economic Model for the South: Ditch Corporate Welfare and Fund Agricultural Co-ops
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A report from the Institute for Policy Studies, titled "Agricultural Cooperatives: Opportunities and Challenges for African-American Women in the South," makes the case that redirecting governmental support from corporate welfare to agricultural co-ops could provide an alternative vision for economic development in the Southern United States.
- New maps of land destruction show why caravans flee Central America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A new map developed at the University of Cincinnati illustrates the extent of worldwide land degradation, including the deforestation that is now forcing migrants to leave Guatemala and Honduras.
- A New Native-Led Strategy for Fighting Keystone XL
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Sacred crops planted by the Poca represent another legal barrier for the construction of the Keystone pipeline, as its intended path must now cross sacred historic sites owned by a sovereign tribal nation.
- New Orleans' History of Struggle
Review of Development Drowned and Reborn; Against the Current vol. 192 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Development Drowned and Reborn which is a novel by Clyde Woods.
- A New Politics? Movements, Power and Transformation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Hilary Wainwright’s latest book, A New Politics from the Left (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), represents a timely appeal for a democratic, participatory, and bottom-up political transformation.
- The New Poor People's Campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Though there has been progress in electoral politics since the days of MLK this success leaves many people behind. The New Poor People's Campaign seeks to create a grassroots movement to counter that.
- The New York Times' Second Assassination of Razan at-Najjar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On 1 June 2018, an Israeli assassin poised along "the largest concentration camp ever to exist" killed 20-year-old paramedic Razan al-Najjar. On 7 June 2018, the New York Times assassinated her a second time. It surely does not surprise that the Times provides yeoman’s service for Israeli hasbara.
- Nicolas Calas: The Trotskyist Time Forgot
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A lengthy, detailed look at modern Trotskyist poet Nicolas Calas (1907-88).
- The Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Henry A. Geroux gives his analysis on such subjects as fascism and white nationalism in the age of Trump, and the state of higher education in a time of Neo-liberalism.
- 1917 and the Colonial Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Solenberger discuss the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent spead of the communist movement internationally. He focuses on the conditions which led to the rapid spread of its ideas and how in 1920 the movement went from being on the offense to defence.
- The 1970s: Finally Got the News!
Charles Williams interviews Brad Duncan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Interview with Brad Duncan, editor of Finally Got the News: The Printed Legacy of the U.S. Radical Left, 1970-1979.
- The niqab represents a pernicious ideology and its spread should worry us all
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the controversial niqab and similar veils, and why they are so concerning.
- No Exit
The ongoing abuses of Australia's refugee policy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A first person account of the refugee crisis in Australian detention centres. At great expense the Australian government holds detainees offshore in crowded camps, many of whom are stranded and living under deplorable conditions.
- No Fare Is Fair: A Campaign for Free Public Transit in Toronto
Why Do We Need Free Transit? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Public transit should be a right for everyone in Toronto. Using subways, buses, and streetcars shouldn't require paying fares, or user fees, that penalize riders with lower incomes.
- No matter how it appears, Trump isn't getting out of Syria and Afghanistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Trump's plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Syria don't reflect a large change in US foreign policy. US troops are only a small part of the forces currently deployed there and they will probably be replaced with mercenaries paid for by oil monarchies.
- No Remorse: Reflections on Radical "Purism"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Street justifies his critical commentary on the disappointing presidency of Barrack Obama and the standard neoliberal manipulation of campaign populism and identity politics in service to big-money. He also takes a cynical look at the DMC, another party of corporations, as well as Bernie Sanders and what a Sanders Presidency might have looked like.
- No Spirit Of Liberty - The Salisbury Case, Corbyn And The Need For Dissent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at recent 'Mainstream' media coverage, notably the Guardian and BBC, which has been instrumental in presenting a misleading image of Prime Minsiter May as a stable leader, and yet presents Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in a much less flattering light.
- No such thing as socialist Zionism
The historic contradictions of the Zionist left are being played out in the death throes of Meretz, writes Tony Greenstein Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Greenstein discusses the historic contraditions associated with Labour Zionism and explains why the term 'Socialist Zionist' just cannot exist.
- No Trump, No Clinton, No NATO
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Murray explains why the notion that those who do not want Clinton in power are therefore supporters of Trump is intellectually risible and politically dishonest.
- Noam Chomsky: Moral Depravity Defines US Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An interview with Noam Chomsky where he discusses the political parties' lack of focus on crucial issues. Though made hopeful by young progessive candidates winning in the midterms, electoral politics should not be the focus for radical political change.
- Noam Chomsky Turns 90: How a U.S. Anarchist Has More Than Survived
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A brief look back at the life and work of world reknowned linguist, philospher and social activist Noam Chomsky, who turns 90 on December 7, 2018.
- Norman Finkelstein and Dr. Mads Gilbert
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2018 A discussion with professor and author Norman Finkelstein about his book "Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom".
- Not My Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Women's March is not immune to the same forces that have confronted the political left in the U.S. for decades. The larger women's movement itself, that sprang from the antiwar movement and civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, carried flaws along with its development that are not new to left political movements in the U.S.
- Not Saving Private Ryan
The Murderous Finale of the Great War. November 11, 1918, One Hundred Years Ago Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- Notes on Terminology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at common and popular terminology and 'labeling', especially in the media, which at times is not only inaccurate and misleading, but also diminishes or softens the severity of an event.
- NPR Runs IDF Playbook, Spinning Killing of 17 Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The article looks at the NPR reporting on the killing of 17 palestinians, which follows a pro-Israel bias that dates back for years.
- NYT op-ed describing Israel as a place of refuge is missing the word, Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A rebuke by author Levine to the New York Times op-ed written by Susan Silverman titled "How Did Israel Become A Place of No Refuge?".
- The October Revolution: Its Necessity & Meaning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Mandal examines the necessity and meaning of the October Revolution.
- 'October Song' - A challenging portrayal of the Russian Revolution
Review of Paul Le Blanc, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review 'October Song,' Paul Le Blanc's book about the Russian revolution. Detailed with excerpts and criticism.
- Of a Type Developed by Liars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation "of a type developed by Russia" after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation.
- Off the Map: Disabilities and Just Mobility
People with disabilities who rely on local public transit are getting squeezed between gentrification and austerity. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An examination of the tensions between investment driven public transit improvements and displacement of less affluent residents; with particular reference to people with mobility issues or disabilities.
- The Official Fake News
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Emmanuel Macron, who was comfortably elected to the presidency, has instructed his parliamentary majority to provide him with a law against 'fake news' during election campaigns. The law would be a selective halt to the the dissemination of information with dangerous consequences.
- Oil Industry Cleanup Costs Vastly Exceed Alberta Government’s Estimates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Transcript of interview with Regan Boychuk of Reclaim Alberta on the cost to clean up after Alberta's tar sand industry.
- Oliver Law, the Lincoln Brigade's Black Commander
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 General Colin Powell was three months old when at 33 tall, broad-shouldered Texas African American Oliver Law, became the first Black Commander of an American Army.The date was June 12, 1937.Law was selected by a committee of three white officers to lead this integrated army.Heard of Colin Powell but never heard of Oliver Law? Hardly surprising. Law’s not mentioned in school books or social studies classes, and has yet to find a place in most college texts or history courses. But Law made his mark on world history in June 1937and for very good reasons.
- The Omega Principle: A vicious circle of fish, cattle and capitalism (Book review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Paul Greenberg's book "The Omega Principle: Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet", which examines how the fishing industry that plunders the seas for tiny fish is supporting unsustainable industrial agriculture.
- On 'Bullshit Jobs'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of the book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by anthropologist David Graeber, which provides a classification for the many forms of employment, some which he deems not only meaningless and unfullfilling, but ultimately harmful to society.
- On the 'Duty to Protect'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On April 14, 2018, U.S.-British-French forces launched a missile strike on alleged Syrian chemical weapons facilities, citing as justification the 'duty to protect'. Finkel make it clear that this attack was illegal under international law.
- On Economic Madness
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A mostly positive, informative review of "Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason" by David Harvey.
- On Justice And Vengeance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- On Militancy, Self-reflection, and the Role of the Researcher
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Researcher Jared Sacks examines and questions methodologies of social movement researchers through a self-reflective investigation into his own experience and work.
- On Nakba Day Palestinians in Gaza explain why they joined the 'Great March of Return'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Palestinian refugees in their own words, on the 70th anniversary of the creation of Israel. In the context of the 2018 opening of the USA embassy in Jerusalem.
- On our way to the moon? A snapshot of feminist marches which shook the world.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The authors tell the story of the Midsummer's day 1908 'Votes for women' Suffragist rally and the March 1971 Women's Liberation Movement Demonstration in Hyde ParK, London.
- On Purpose, In Kabul
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Amid years of fighting and war profiteering the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APV) forge ahead with impressive work that demonstrates what needs to be done to rebuild the war-torn and economically devastated country.
- On Resistance: BDS and Israel's Declining Support Among Diaspora Jews
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Like its predecessor movement decades ago in South Africa, assessing the success of BDS against Israel today necessarily rubs up against the tension between Israeli Hasbara (propaganda) and its reality as an effective organizing tool against it throughout the world.
- On the "Transformation Problem"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Further discussion of Marx's "transformation problem." References a previous column reviewing Fred Moseley's "Money and Totality."
- On the nature of change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The first in a series of articles exploring how dialectical systems thinking can direct change making. The 'On the Nature of Change' series will have three clear sections: 'The Philosophers' will examine a philosophical theory of change, and how this has developed and evolved over time. The second, 'Interpreting the World', and will apply this theory to three fundamental areas: the self, the team, society. Lastyly, 'Changing the World', will present clear ways in which this theory of change can be practically applied.
- The 'One Democratic State Campaign' program for a multicultural democratic state in Palestine/Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 As the Leonard Cohen song goes, ":everybody knows" the two-state solution is dead and gone. Zionism’s 120-year quest to Judaize Palestine – to transform Palestine into the Land of Israel – has been completed. Every Israeli government since 1967 has refused to seriously entertain the notion of a genuinely independent and viable Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel.
- One Hundred Years, "We" Past and Present
Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Steve Bloom's epic poem about the Russian Revolution.
- 100th Anniversary of 1918 Australian & New Zealand Surafend Massacre Of Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look back at the premeditated massacre of male Palestinian villagers by Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the village of Surafend and a nearby Bedouin camp, which took place on December 10, 1918. The massacre has been largely ignored but serves as an allegory of settler colonialism.
- Open and Hidden Horrors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Before Trump's December 6, 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, American aggression and its results were apparent in the Middle East and Africa.
- Organizing Workers Strikes Against War and Repression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A Brief History of Labour Strikes Against Imperialist Wars and Reaction
- The other side of Gaza: Swimming, canoeing and 'trying' to be a child
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Here in Gaza, I want to tell this story. To show our audience a piece of a normal life, away from Hamas, or Israel's "terror" rhetoric, away from the diplomatic efforts, the political bargaining, away from the weekly Friday protests. Just show you something normal.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 21, 2018
What are we eating? Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2018 What are we eating? A simple question which opens up a labyrinth of devilishly complex issues about production and distribution, access to land, control of water, prices, health and safety, migrant labour, and much else.
For millions of people, the answer is brutally simple: not enough to survive. UNICEF estimates that 300 million children go to bed hungry each night, and that more than 8,000 children under the age of five die of malnutrition every day. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 12% of the world's population is chronically malnourished.
How is this possible in a world where there is an enormous surplus of food, where farmers are paid not to grow food?
A short answer is that food production and distribution are driven by the need to make profits, rather than by human needs.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 17, 2018
Hearts and Minds: How do People Change? Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2018 How can we reach the millions we need to reach and engage if fundamental change is to happen? How can we accomplish the essential task of persuading a majority of the population that a fundamental social and economic transformation is necessary? Even more importantly, what will it take for people to come together and act collectively to bring about that transformation? What can we do to help make this happen?
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 25, 2018
Looking for Answers, Creating Alternatives Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2018 This issue of Other Voices features people who are questioning and challenging the way the world works and trying to create better alternatives.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 21, 2018
Their Interent or Ours? Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2018 The Internet, which was at one time a free and open space for sharing information and ideas, has been privatized and twisted to serve the profit-making agenda of huge corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments which want to suppress opposition and alternatives. What can we do about it? Is it our Internet or theirs?
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 10, 2018
Massacres and Morality Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2018 In the wake of Israel's brutal massacres of Palestinian protestors in Gaza in May and June 2018, Other Voices looks at the ways in which state terrorism is used to keep subjugated populations in line, at home or abroad. The issue also questions the morality of those who either support, or keep silent about, the violence of the oppressor.
- The Other Whisper Network
How Twitter feminism is bad for women Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Katie Roiphe takes a closer look at the #MeToo movement, particularly the use of Twitter and social media which can dangerously be used to rouse extremes in a similar way that Trump has energized his supporters.
- 'Our Rivers are Black with Coal' - living with Siberia's mines
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the aggressive coal mining industry in Siberia where local opposition and human rights are ignored, and indigenous communities and ecosystems are being destroyed.
- Over 90% of the world's children breathe toxic air every day
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the WHO report on "Air pollution and child health: Prescribing clean air", a study of the heavy toll of both outdoor and household air pollution on the health of the world's children, particularly those living in low and middle-income nations.
- Painting a false picture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of the book "The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media" by Greg Shupak.
- Pakistan / Gilgit-Baltistan: Advocate Ehsan Ali, a symbol of political sanity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Gilgit-Baltistan, one of the most politically sensitive regions of Pakistan, the author explains why it is important to recognize and support people like Ehsan Ali, who is a vocal human rights activist and a symbol of interfaith harmony.
- Pakistan, hostage of the religious - The radical left in resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Radical leftists strive amid fundamentalist hostility in Pakistan where blasphemy is a serious charge with its roots in colonial religious divisions.
- Pakistan: Teachers and Farmers Protests Brutally Crushed in Sindh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On December 25, 2017, primary, secondary and high school teachers in Karachi held a defiant protest against the Sindh government due to its refusal to provide them with permanent jobs despite having agreed to do so in 2014. The provincial government is refusing to honor its agreement even after forcing teachers to pass a rigorous examination conducted by the National Testing Service and the University of Sindh.
- Pakistan's blasphemy laws – The Supreme Court, Asia Bibi and the laws' historical background
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A description of a blasphemy case in Pakistan. Also includes a history of blasphemy laws going back to British India.
- Parkdale tenants' campaign blames real estate agent for loss of rooming houses
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at 'displacement realty' in the Parkdale area of Toronto, where the selling affordable homes at inflated prices pushes new landlords into forcing out old tenants in order to increase rents.
- The Patriarchal Stranglehold
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of the book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne.
- PayPal censors journalists who criticize Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Under apparent influence from Benjamin Weinthal, PayPal chose to close down the account of the French online publication Agence Media Palestine. Such a move constitutes censorship as it denies journalists the means to raise money for their work and freedom to express ideas.
- The PCP in the Portuguese Revolution 1974-5: crisis, state and revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 How did the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), loyal to the Soviet Union deep into the second half of the 20th century, react to a social revolution in 1974-5? The moments are rare when we can study workers' revolutions in a European country where the Communist Party had a decisive influence. I argue here that the revolution happened despite the party, not because of it. The USSR wanted above all to maintain the equilibrium of the Cold War, and Portugal was, in the division made at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, in the NATO sphere. The PCP was faithful to that policy.
- William A. Pelz
Obituary Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary for labour history scholar and activist William A Pelz.
- A People's History of the German Revolution
1918-19 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 The story of the revolutionary moment which overthrew the German monarchy in 1918, but was then defeated by the forces of reaction.
- Peterson unmasks stitch-up of TV interviews
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Jonathan Cook on Jordan Peterson’s recent interview with Channel 4’s Cathy Newman.
- Plastic plague intensifies on remote southern islands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at a report titled " Marine plastics threaten giant Atlantic Marine Protected Areas", which examines the alarmingly high concentrations of plastic on southern Atlantic islands and throughout the food chain.
- The Plot to Attack Iran
How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 A summary to the US war against Iranian democracy and the complex situation in the Middle East.
- Police Broke Into Chelsea Manning's Home with Guns Drawn - in a 'Wellness Check'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A video recording of a 'wellness check' by police in Maryland, USA, shows police officers arriving with weapons drawn. The incident sheds light on a very disturbing police procedure and whether law enforcement should be called at all as first responders in matters of mental health.
- A Political Education and Militant Intervention Before, During and After May ’68
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In the context of the Algerian War for independence, Charroussart discusses his political education and activism before, during after 1968 in relation to Marixsm.
- Popular Front Counter-Memories
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Ehlers reviews Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War by Benjamin Balthaser.
- Portrait of an Icon
Review of Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical by Judith E. Smith.
- The Power of Story, the Evidence of Experience
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of a book of oral histories of migrant farmworkers.
- The Power Struggle in Catalonia, or the Staging of a Tragicomedy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 One, a consolidated power, is the Spanish state. The other, an emerging power, drives the project to create a state of its own, a project promoted by nationalists and pro-independence currents. These include a fraction of the divided system (PdeCat, erc and cup) and some social organizations (the Catalan National Assembly, Omnium Cultural and some trade unions) -- with the support of an important part of society.
- Preservation Acts
Toward an ethical archive of the web Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 But they began to wonder what it meant to take an ephemeral object -- destined, after days and weeks, to sink to the bottom of an ever-shifting pile -- and render it permanent. It wasn't hard to see how an archive of civil disobedience could become a tool of government surveillance.
- President Trump's War Crime is Worse than the One He Accuses Assad of
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The single most important thing that happened Friday night when the US military on President Trump's orders launched a wave of over 100 cruise missiles against Syria was that once again the US violated the most profound international law of war: initiating a war of aggression against a nation that posed no threat, imminent or otherwise, to the US or its allies.
- Pret-A-Patriarchy – on "modest" fashion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 "Modest" fashion is a fast growing industry with companies like Dolce & Gabbana, H&M, Marks and Spencer, DKNY, Zara and others all rushing to cash in. But while more choice is undoubtedly good, I have a problem with the labelling.
- Privatization is Killing Us: Dispatches from the Capitalist War on Society
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at various sectors of society that are suffering under privatization in the United States- including education, the prison system, healthcare, and the environment.
- Privatizing the IRS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The headline in the New York Times on January 10, 2018, a few short days before Congress decided it was easier to shut down the government than to legislate, announced that the I.R.S. "paid $20 million to collect $6.7 million in Tax Debts." At first blush the reader assumed this was a story that had somehow crept into the newspaper by mistake and escaped the attention of the articles editor. The reader who thought that could be forgiven for being surprised at seeing the story. That is because that story had appeared in the New York Times and other publications on two earlier occasions.
- The Progress of This Storm
Nature and Society in a Warming World Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 An attack on the idea that nature and society are impossible to distinguish from each other.
- Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 A look at how corporate media distort the news. Uses recent examples such as the Scottish Independence referendum.
- Public Spaces, Private Control
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the commercialization of public spaces in Britain and elsewhere in the industrialized world, where gentrification and increasingly troubling privatization of public spaces goes largely unnoticed by a populace caught up in the day-to-day grind of living.
- Punching the Clock
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An excerpt from David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" published by Simon and Schuster. Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, looks at the existence of meaningless work and the psychological and societal harm that results.
- Quiet, Please! The Latest Threat to the Big Wild
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the growing problem of noise pollution in Glacier National Park in Montana, where each summer helicopters carrying tourists fly low over the landscape.
- Québec solidaire reviews the election and maps campaign on climate crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Meeting in Montréal December 7-9, 2018, Québec Solidaire reviewed elections results, adopted a proposal to prioritize the issue of climate crisis, and held a discussion on how to prepare an internal debate on "secularism and religious signs."
- Race and the Logic of Capital
Review of Class, Race, and Marxism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Review of Class, Race, and Marxism by David Roediger.
- Racial Terror & Totalitarianism - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination
by Vaughn Rasberry.
- The radical Robert Burns
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 For many people the only association they have with the work of Robert Burns is singing Auld Lang Syne at New Year celebrations or at annual Burns Supper events. The real Burns, the radical, revolutionary Burns, is rarely even hinted at in these events. Instead what we have is a sentimentalised, romanticised portrayal of Burns as what Henry Mackenzie called "that heav'n taught ploughman". MacKenzie was a lawyer, novelist and editor of The Lounger magazine in which he reviewed Burns's work. Burns admired some of Mackenzie's work; indeed one of his favourite novels was his Man of Feeling (1771). Mackenzie, however, was scornful of Burns's use of vernacular Scots "which greatly damps the pleasure of the reader".
- Rage Against the Machine: A War vs. Consensus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 As it stands now, even if the unlikely liberal wet dream of a Trump impeachment actually comes to pass, the theocratic Mike Pence will simply assume office. No doubt cities like New York and Boston will initially erupt in celebration. But should it really be that long before the realization dawns that the real work remained ongoing?
- Raising Consciousness About The Color of Law
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" by auther Richard Rothstein, and how racial segregation is the underlying cause of much of the country's social and economic problems.
- Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll. Review discusses history of Appalachia as well as previous literature on the subject.
- Readings: Intersectional Black Activists
Domestic Worker Organizers, 1960s-1970s Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A brief history and suggestions for further reading on 1) Black women fighting for labor rights for domestic workers, 2) Callie Houses's struggle for reparations 3) Sojourner Truth and her fight for emancipation and suffrage for Black women.
- Reality check: Croatian uniform virtually identical to...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Some media reports are ga-ga that the Croatian team will be wearing its red and white checkered uniform in the 2018 World Cup final on Sunday against France. Far from being innocent or fashionable, this is ominous. By allowing this uniform to be worn, FIFA is emboldening the Croatian fascists and their European allies such those in Ukraine.
- Rebel Without a Clue: Autonomy and Authority in the American Public School
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The high school dropout is a revolutionary without having recovered the sense of dignity of failure, in a system of authoritarian control. Blaming the dropout is to blame the victim of institutional abuse of power exercised within youth indoctrination centers carrying the misnomer, school. Is it possible that the problem is mainly systemic and not due to the personal faults of the dropout? Is it possible that the education system itself contributes to young people dropping out of high school? Is it possible that capitalism is the root cause?
- Red Fawn Fallis and the Felony of Being Attacked by Cops
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The tackling, arrest and imprisonment of female protester Red Fawn Fallis near a Dakota Pipeline construction site is another example of corporate and government abuse of power. When it comes to women dissenters, particularly of black or indigenous dissent, US authorities have a significant history of intimidation and punishment.
- Reflections on Chomsky's Voting Strategy: Why The Democratic Party Can't Be Saved
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Nick Pemberton explains why his opinion is different from that of Noam Chomsky on the matter of third party voting during US elections.
- Remembering Ireland's Great Famine
A review of Black '47 a soon to be released film about the famine in Ireland Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Irish film, Black 47 (Director Lance Daly) is about the worst year of the catastrophic Irish famine and is set in the west of Ireland in 1847. The story centers around an Irish soldier, Feeney (James Frecheville), returning from serving the British Army in Afghanistan only to find most of his family have perished in the Famine or An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger) as it is known in Gaelic.
- Remembering Italy's Cervi brothers amid far-right surge
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Cervi brothers in Italy are famous for leading the local peasant resistance against Benito Mussolini's rule. Today, Adelmo Cervi is still a leading voice against the rise of far-right populist parties in Italy.
- Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look back at the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of April 13, 1919, where British colonial forces opened fire on peaceful Indian protesters. The massacre stands as a pivotal moment in Indian history that laid bare the true face of British Imperialism.
- Remembering Joanne Landy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Farber recalls the life and work of Joanne Landy. She is remembered as a supporter and organizer for a radical democratic politics opposed to oppression and exploitation throughout the world.
- Reply
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A reply by the author of "Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the End of the Transformation Problem" to two previous responses to his book.
- Report From Southeast Asia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A general commentary on work and economic conditions in parts of Southeast Asia, and possible comparisons with the ferment in Eastern Europe prior to 1917.
- Reproductive Justice in an Age of Austerity
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Reviews of two books about reproductive rights.
- Resistance is life: Mehmet Aksoy's last letter to his family
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A tribute authored by family and friends to Mehmet Aksoy, a hero of Kurdistan and the internationalist struggles against capitalism, colonialism and fascism.
- Rethinking community organising
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Building a just, sustainable future will require transcending traditional community organising models. Working through existing institutions within the current system is not good enough.
- Rev. Edward Pinkey Freed after 30 Months
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Michigan's Supreme Court has ruled that Berrien County Prosecutor improperly charged activist Rev. Edward Pinkney with five felony counts of election forgery.
- Revealed: The Saudi death squad MBS uses to silence dissent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The MEE reveals information from a Saudi source with intimate knowledge of the Saudi intelligence services, about a death squad that operates under the guidance and supervision of Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
- Revised NAFTA Shows Every Sign of Being Another Trump Scam
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement between the US and Mexico, a deal intended to force Canada, which has the strongest regulations, into signing on disadvantageous terms. Dolack explains why any new NAFTA will undoubtedly be a windfall for multi-national corporations at public expense.
- Revising Class: Lumpen in Literature
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of Ragged Revolutionaries by Nathaniel Mills. Marxist analysis of depression-era African-American literaature by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker.
- Revolutionary Optimism: Journeys in Radical Politics Past and Present
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2018 On the "Reality Asserts Itself" program of The RealNews network, Prof. Leo Panitch is interviewed by host Paul Jay. Discussion topics include his political leanings, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour Party, and whether radical change is indeed possible.
- Revolutionary Rojava: An polyethnic, feminist and anti-capitalist experiment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A history of the Democratic Federation of North Syria as a beacon of hope in Syria's 8-year-long civil war.
- The Rewilding of Humanity?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 John Davis looks back at the exploitation of the wilderness, where urban dwellers are now alienated from the natural world that once surrounded them, and wonders whether we can ever return and live in a more natural and balanced state.
- "Right to Try" Is a Cruel Farce
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Drug companies want you to think they're providing glimmers of hope to terminally ill patients. Don't believe them.
- Right-wing coup or popular revolt? The April 2018 Nicaraguan uprising examined
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Description of a report on the causes of the April 2018 conflict in Nicaragua.
- The Rise of the Intellectual Pornstar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Once only found in society's margins, the pornography industry has developed into a multi-billion dollar business that is branching into the mainstream. The article explains that the industry, while still controversial, increasingly comments on the social problems of today and pushes for reforms in areas that other large industries are scared to.
- Russia and the War Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A critical look at the book "Russian Roulette", by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, which examines alleged Russian interference in the 2017 U.S. election.
- "Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists"; Against the Current vol. 194
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In October 1864, Marx drafted the inaugural rules for the International Working Men's Association (First International). Its opening lines were a hymn to freedom and self-activity: "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves."
- Sacrificing Gaza: The Great March of Zionist Hypocrisy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Great March of Return is a startling, powerful expression of Palestinian identity and resistance. Thousands of Palestinians have come out, bravely and unapologetically, to say: “We refuse to remain invisible. We reject any attempt to assign us to the discard pile of history. We will exercise our fundamental right to go home.” They have done this unarmed, in the face of Israel’s use of deadly armed force against targets (children, press, medics) deliberately chosen to demonstrate the Jewish state’s unapologetic determination to force them back into submissive exile by any means necessary. By doing this repeatedly over the last few weeks, these incredibly brave men, women, and children have done more than decades of essays and books to strip the aura of virtue from Zionism that’s befogged Western liberals’ eyes for 70 years.
- The Saga of a City Rising
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Positive review of a collection of essays about Black organizing in Mississippi. The review focuses on two of the essays with two "key takeaways."
- Sanitized Radicals: Whitewashing 20th Century Socialists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at some of the 20th century's most inspiring leaders, whose socialist views have been conveniently ignored by the Right and the mainstream American media.
- Say 'I Love You'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A commentary on the issue of gun violence in schools in the United States, and the current lack of leadership which narrowly places blame on the shooter rather than tackle the more complex issues and policies which could make a difference.
- Say No to 'Hardening' the Schools with Zero Tolerance Policies and Gun-Toting Cops
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The last thing the school system needs is harsher penalties and armed guards which turn students into 'inmates'. Schools in the Unites States are already heavily policed, with School Resource Officers (SRO) funded by the Deptartment of Justice, and harsh penalties for kids as young as 4-5 years old.
- School Shootings: Who to Listen to Instead of Mainstream Shrinks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine discusses the prevailing cynicism and hopelessnes among young people in the United States -- about their country and their future. In particular the article focuses on troubled young people who have lost any connection with adults and view the world as an uncaring place, and are commonly prescribed medication such as anti-depressants.
- A search for roots and connections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The post-third-way Labour Party is trying to encourage its many new activist members, especially among the young, to turn the party into a social movement.
- Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 Food production in the age of climate change and corporate control.
- Separating Migrant Families Is Barbaric. It's Also What the U.S. Has Been Doing to People of Color for Hundreds of Years.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the root of the current human rights crisis at the southern border, a crisis based primarily on racism and bigotry which has driven many American policies throughout the nation's history.
- Seven Forbidden Words: On the Uses of Censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In December 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) moved to take ideological control of the agency's budget-writing process. A Trump appointed official presented a directive to the agency's departments listing seven words that were not to be used in budget preparation.
- Sex and the Russian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The philosophy of the October Revolution contained radical ideas around sexual politics which have been forgotten today. Drawing parallels to today's issues on gender and sexuality could help a new generation get into radical labour politics.
- Sex, Scandals and Power
#MeToo Mania and the Democrats' "Resistance" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A wide range of behavior -- including flirtation and innuendo, a vulgar text or a crude joke, not to mention unpleasant sex -- is being lumped together with real crimes of coercion and assault. Those called out for sexual impropriety, no matter how trivial, how unproven or how long ago, run the media gantlet, are declared guilty and their careers ruined.
- She's Planting the Seeds of Indigenous Food Sovereignty
How Jessie Housty feeds the growth of her Heiltsuk culture and community Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the efforts of Jessie Housty, an Indigenous woman from British Columbia, who is helping to change the diet of her community that is overwhelmingly dominated by industrial food products.
- Should Communists ally with revolutionary nationalism? The Comintern and Asia 1919-25 (Part 2)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 But how would the proposed alliance of workers' and national uprisings be effected? This strategic issue was addressed in the Comintern’s Second Congress, held in Moscow 9 July-7 August 1920.
- "Show Me Your Papers!" Roundups, Checkpoints and National ID Card
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 With the government empowered to carry out transportation checks to question people about their immigration status within a 100-mile border zone that wraps around the country, you're going to see a rise in these "show your papers" incidents. That's a problem.
- Siege and resistance in Gaza – For more than 10 weeks...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Toufic Haddad, an activist, academic and author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory, spoke to Omar Hassan about the meaning of the protests – and what next in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.
- Siloed Thinking, Climate, and Disposable People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Judith Deutch takes a look at the human side of the climate disaster and the constricted way of thinking about it, as even those who do recognize anthropogenic climate change still do not examine a range of critical interactions.
- The Simulation of Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The global capitalist ruling classes have been stuck with "democracy" ever since, or, more accurately, with the simulation of democracy.
- Single Payer: What Will It Take to Pass It?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Single payer healthcare needs to be implemented in a universal, sweeping move. Incremental changes will only impede progress.
- The Skripal Poisonings and the Ongoing Vilification of Putin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Pinning the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter by a nerve agent on the Russian state makes little sense, and is an attempt by the West to futher villify Putin who actually had little to gain by ordering such an action.
- Slavery and Capitalism
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of a collection of essays about the economics of American slavery.
- Socialist Register 2019
Volume 55: A World Turned Upside Down? Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 Since the Great Financial Crisis swept across the world in 2008, there have been few certainties regarding the trajectory of global capitalism, let alone the politics taking hold in individual states. This has now given way to palpable confusion regarding what sense to make of this world in a political conjuncture marked by Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ presidency of the United States, on the one hand, and, on the other, Xi Jinping’s ambitious agenda in consolidating his position as ‘core leader’ at the top of the Chinese state.
- The Socialists of the Prairies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Proyect talks about the arrival of the Prairie Trilogy at the Metrograph Theater on Friday, July 27th. The trilogy consists of three documentaries made in 1978 by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson about the radical movement in North Dakota during the heyday of the IWW, the Socialist Party, and the Nonpartisan League (NPL).
- Soros & the £400k Question: What constitutes 'foreign interference' in democracy?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The news that US billionaire Soros donated £400k to an anti-Brexit group came on the day that YouTube said they found no evidence of Russian interference in Brexit.
- South Sudan archivists fear loss of historical texts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 South Sudan doesn't have a museum, so thousands of archival documents are sitting in a small building in the capital, Juba, waiting for a national archives to be built. The project will also need the help of international donors to get off the ground, and the ongoing conflict has made it difficult to secure funding.
- The Soviets and Tsarist Debt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A history of the Soviet's refusal to honor Tsarist debt afterthe 1971 revolution. Looks at the effect on Russia up to and after the end of the USSR.
- Speaking of Indigenous Politics
Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 On her radio program Indigenous Politics, J. Kehaulani Kauanui talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist, bringing Indigenous activism to the mainstream. Collected here, these conversations speak with clear and compelling voices about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life.
- Stansted 15: British Activists Who Stopped Deportation Charter Flight Convicted of Terrorism Charge
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at a group of fifteen activists who prevented a deportation charter flight from leaving Stansted airport in the UK by securing themselves around the aeroplane, and were subsequently found guilty of a terrorist offence.
- Starving and Bombed Children of Yemen Seek Entrapment in Flooded Thai Cave
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 While the world was gripped by media coverage of trapped Thai boys in a flooded cave, hundreds of thousands of children were killed and suffering in other parts of the world -- yet received little or no attention. This article examines what this tells us about ourselves and geopolitics.
- State of the UAW
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Since the 1979-1981 economic crisis, when the UAW convinced its members to make concessions to the Big-Three, auto-workers have been losing benefits, wages and programs. Feeley discusses the current state of UAW focusing on its leadership.
- Stop Whining and Start Organizing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A commentary on the state of the labour movment in the United States, which has been in a marked decline since the 1950's. Lindorff discusses why unions are vanishing, loss of membership, disassociation with the Democratic party, and the changes needed to reorganize and enforce workers' rights.
- Struggle for equal rights for Palestinians is 'right choice,' and will lead to 'significant exodus of Jews' - Henry Siegman
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Everyone should read Henry Siegman's long piece in the National Interest on the "Implications of President Trump's Jerusalem Ploy." Siegman is a great leader because he has bucked the American and Jewish establishment, of which he is a member, to declare that the two-state solution is dead and buried. He is also a prophet inasmuch as he is counseling American Jewry to give up its attachment to Zionism as a dead letter, no different from a Christian state here, and so prepare itself for a future in which Israel is isolated as a pariah state and there is a "significant exodus of Israel’s Jews." His words are astounding because Siegman, a Holocaust survivor now in his late 80s, was himself a Zionist, and head of the World Jewish Congress. His bravery in renouncing the animating political faiths of his life-- it's inspiring.
- Struggling for Justice
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Mainly postive review Keith Gilyard’s biography of organizer, educator, cultural worker and Black Left feminist Louise Thompson Patterson.
- Studying Marx
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Buhle discusses how often participants in "The Movement" were not formally educated in Marxism but rather held self-studies conducted individually and in groups.
- The suffering of surrogacy: A veteran feminist spells it out
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation Dr Renate Klein takes on the surrogacy industry with plenty of sass and hard evidence. A dogged feminist academic and publisher for over thirty years, her critique of neoliberal capitalism is always underpinned by an authentic concern for women’s wellbeing and a focus on patriarchal structures. She never fails to point out the power differentials. She completely rejects surrogacy in all its forms.
- Superunknown: Scientific Integrity Within the Academic and Media Industrial Complexes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Mattis provides an analysis of the competing priorities of scientists, funders and the media that together, create a perfect storm of "unscientific science".
- Supreme Toxicity -- Confirmed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Editorial about Brett Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court and the hopefulness of grassroots movements like #metoo and BLM spur people to take action.
- Surveillance Self-Defense
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2018 Modern technology has given those in power new abilities to eavesdrop and collect data on innocent people. Surveillance Self-Defense is EFF's guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure technology and developing careful practices.
- Surveillance Self-Defense
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A guide on how online surveillance works and the various tools and techniques the public can use to help protect themselves from spying.
- Suspect in Lahore blasphemy case fighting for his life
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A Christian resident of Lahore says he attempted suicide as interrogators forced him to perform oral sex on cousin.
- Suspect in Lahore blasphemy case fighting for his life
A Christian resident of Lahore says he attempted suicide as interrogators forced him to perform oral sex on cousin. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Christians and other minorities, who make up about two percent of Pakistan's 207 million population, are disproportionately targeted by blasphemy laws, which prescribe a mandatory death penalty for anyone found guilty of "defiling the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad". There is increasing violence associated with the laws, with at least 74 people killed in attacks motivated by blasphemy accusations since 1990.
- Syria: The Assad regime - a response to Marcel Cartier
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A response to Marcel Cartier's article "Vanguards of Humanity: Why I support Afrin & the Rojava Revolution", which denounces the Turkish invasion of Afrin and calls for solidarity with Rojava. While author Slee agrees with the call for solidarity, there is disagreement with some fundamental points in Cartier's article.
- The Syrian Observatory: Funded By The Foreign Office
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The UK funded a project worth £194,769.60 to provide the 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights' with communications equipment and cameras.
- Syria's Disaster, and What's Next
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Detailed description of Syrian crisis as of July 2018.
- System change means dismantling patriarchy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at patriarchy and the sexual division of labour, and why gender justice is fundamental for meaningful environmental justice, and moreover how grassroots, anti-capitalist feminism is key to system change.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Coates represents the neoliberal wing of the black freedom struggle that sounds militant about white supremacy but renders black fightback invisible. This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people. The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview.
- Taking on the Far-Right Menace
An Interview with Mark Bray Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Diana Feeley and David Finkel interview Mark Bray, author of The Anti-Fascist Handbook and professor at Darmouth College. Bray answers questions about his book, facism, tracking the racist right and tactical issues.
- Taking the World to the Brink of Annihilation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Western neoconservatives and hawks are driving the international situation to increasing tension and danger. Not content with the destruction of Iraq and Libya based on false claims, they are now pressing for a direct US attack on Syria.
- A Tale of Two Atrocities: Douma and Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Compare the intense media coverage of an alleged Syrian chemical attack to the near silence accorded the horrific civilian massacre perpetrated by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, at the very same time.
- Tax Havens and the Other Paris Agreement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Paradise & Panama papers, Canada & red herrings, and the international agreement on tax havens with "enough loopholes to drive a fleet of Ferraris through"
- Thailand: Junta orders pro-democracy leaders charged with inciting rebellion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The junta has ordered seven of the most prominent pro-democracy activists charged with crimes including sedition after they launched a protest campaign calling for general elections to be held in November.
- Thankstaking in the Trumpfederacy: Terminate the Tribe That Aided the Pilgrims
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the hostile climate that exists under the Trump Administration for America's first peoples. The article looks at the further erosion treaties and protective laws, and the belief among indigenous communities that the administration's policy is a return to 'termination'.
- Their Internet or Ours? - Chinese text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- Their Internet or Ours?
Introduction to the April 21, 2018 issue of Other Voices Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 What happened to the Internet? The Internet, which was at one time a free and open space for sharing information and ideas, has been privatized and twisted to serve the profit-making agenda of huge corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments which want to suppress opposition and alternatives. What can we do about it? Is it our Internet or theirs?
- Theorizing the Soviet Bureaucracy
Review of Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of the book: Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy by Thomas M. Twiss.
- There Is a Coordinated Campaign to Suppress Criticism of Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Israel's human rights violations are accompanied by U.S. efforts to stifle dissent.
- These Activists Blocked Migrant Deportations. Now They Face Life Imprisonment in the U.K.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Fifteen activists who blocked a plane deporting migrants are being charged with laws intended for terrorists. The use of charter flights for deportations is one of the issues they raise.
- 'They stole the beach' - the major mafia that almost nobody wants to talk about
The building boom in China and worldwide demand for consumer goods containing ilmenite has enriched criminals who specialise in stealing san Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Increasing demand for sand has led to targeting of sandy beaches by organised crime. Community members who speak out or protest the destruction of beaches are often victims of intimidation, harrassment and violence.
- 13 protesters against copper plant in India killed after police open fire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Public protests at the copper smelter plant of Sterlite Industries in the town of Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu, India, were met with police fire during the last two days, with 13 protesters killed and and hundreds injured.
- 'This is murder': French islanders want Paris to own up to poisoning their land with pesticide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean want France to take responsibility for polluting their land with a toxic pesticide. This article looks at the effects of Kepone, also called chlordecone, on the people of the islands, who now suffer from alarmingly high cancer rates and fertility problems.
- This Is Why Carrots Cost More Than Twinkies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An examination of the role of Government-subsidized crop insurance, farm loans, tax credits, agricultural research and education, as well as environmental and public-health exemptions for farming, on the cost of food production and how that transfers to the consumer.
- Though Invisible to Us, Our Dead Are Not Absent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A reminder that the world is a beautiful place, and we must save it by listening to the voices of those who have passed, who instilled us with life, love and the spirit of resistance.
- Thousands march in Ukraine to mark Nazi collaborator Bandera's birthday
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Some 6,500 people across Ukraine took part in marches on the first day of the year to mark the birthday of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist leader considered a hero in the country despite his violent past and history of collaboration with the Nazis.
- Thousands of Palestinians and Israelis Chant: 'No to the nation-state law, yes to equality'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Palestinian flags were seen held high during a demonstration in which tens of thousands of Arab Palestinians and Israeli Jews marched on Saturday, in Tel Aviv, to protest against the controversial Jewish Nation-State Law.
- A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union - 1962-1974
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 A Threat of the First Magnitude reveals the untold story of the FBI informants who penetrated the upper reaches of organizations such as the Communist Party, USA, the Black Panther Party, the Revolutionary Union and other groups labeled threats to the internal security of the United States.
- 'Time is Running Out,' American Petroleum Institute Chief Said in 1965 Speech on Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In 1965 the president of the American Petroleum Institute discussed the effect of CO2 in the changing the atmosphere and the role specifically of the petroleum industry in causing climate change. More than 50 years later the science on this has become stronger but messaging from the industry has softened.
- Time magazine honors journalists facing repression - but snubs Julian Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at Time Magazine's 'Person of the Year' award for 2018, which did not list any journalist who exposed state secrets or government misconduct in the United States, nor whistleblowers from Israel, Egypt, India or any of the NATO countries.
- The Tip of the Iceberg: My Lai Fifty Years On
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- To overcome climate paralysis, unite for system change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at how to break through the climate paralysis that has led to the environmental crisis that mankind is currently facing. Wallis indicates that by having identified who the enemy is, we know who our potential allies are- the other 99%.
- To stop migration, stop the abuse of Africa's resources
Europe should tackle migration not by deploying troops, but by curbing economic abuse and destablisation. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On January 17, Italy's parliament approved the deployment of up to 470 troops in Niger to combat "irregular migrant flows" and the trafficking of people towards Libya, and, from there, to Europe. A number of other European countries are pursuing similar policies, including France, Germany, and Spain.
- 'Today is one of the most tragic days in the history of the Jewish people: one American Jews response to the Gaza massacre
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In this open letter to the Westchester Israel Action Committee by congregant Howard Horovitz, Horovitz asks "When will we stand up, as human beings, as a committee and as a Temple, to condemn the massacre of Palestinians on the Gaza border?"
- A Tool to Combat Washington's Middle East Wars
Book review: "The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State have Conspired to Vilify Iran" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A Review of Dan Kovalik's book "The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State have Conspired to Vilify Iran", which provides a concise overview of US imperial conduct since WWII and the disturbing hypocrisy and deceit of the US Government and media.
- Top 10 Civil-Rights Songs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Upon the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., some of the more popular civil-rights songs are remembered. The article includes online links to music videos.
- Toronto does not need to hire more police officers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 As you contemplate the push by the Toronto Police Association to have more police officers hired, remember that the issue is not the need for more officers, but featherbedding.
- Toronto's film industry grows, but at what cost?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 While high profile film productions are increasing in Toronto, the article questions whether taxpayers are getting good value for the billions of dollars of public money being invested into the film industry's expansion in the city.
- Toward a global strategic framework: The Comintern and Asia 1919-25 (Part 1)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The revolutionary activists who founded the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 had little contact with movements for national and colonial liberation outside Russia. Nonetheless, only a year later, in July 1920, the Comintern adopted a far-reaching strategy for national and social revolution in dependent countries, later termed the anti-imperialist united front.
- Transformation Problem Unraveled
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of "Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital
and the End of the 'Transformation Problem'" by Fred Moseley. Burkett provides a summary of the details of Moseley's theory.
- The Trials of Africa and the Real Dr. King They Want Us to Forget
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s views beyond those emphasized by the mainstream media, where he pushed beyond 'liberal' America and his strong anti-war and global solidarity values were unapologetically linked to the fight against racism and poverty.
- Triumph and Tragedy
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Le Blanc's sympathies with the Bolshevik project are clear, but this is no apologia. On the contrary, grounded in material and intellectual evidence, it is a work that helps us better understand the factors that shaped the choices the revolutionary leaders made and the alternatives paths that might have been open to them.
- The Trouble With Uplift
How black politics succumbed to the siren song of the racial voice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 I've long suspected that, to a certain strain of race-conscious or antiracist discourse, historical exploration in popular culture was less important than the propagation of tales of inspiration and uplift. These fables typically feature singular black heroes who have overcome crushing racist adversity against all odds. In recent years, a steady stream of films and other narratives have openly embraced that preference.
- The Troubling Link Between Attacks on Immigrants and Repression of Labor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the targeting of immigrants and its connection to attacks on labour movements, and how it leads to disturbing increases in violations of civil liberties.
- Truckers Spend the Holidays Driving Too Much for Too Little Pay
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the diminishing compensation provided to truck drivers, and why the trucking corporations get away with paying so little.
- Trump & the Fed: US Shadow Bankers About to Deepen Control of US Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 What's sometime referred to as 'shadow bankers' have been running the economy and drafting US domestic economic policy since Trump took office. 'Shadow' banks include such financial institutions as investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, insurance companies, finance companies, asset management companies, etc. They are outside the traditional commercial banking system (e.g. Chase, Bank of America, Wells, etc.) and virtually unregulated. Shadow banks globally now also control more investible liquid assets than do the world's commercial banks.
- Trump, the NYPD and the People We Call 'Animals'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the reckless use and dissemination of de-humanizing pejorative language, notably by President Donald Trump and some police agencies in the United States, which has consequences for the public who interact with police and for society as a whole.
- Trump and Science
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Although Trump is called anti-science he simply continues a trend that started with Reagan. Calling him anti-science can mask how his policies and tactics are rational ideologies in the service of neoliberalism.
- Trump threat to cut Palestine aid could 'unravel Oslo'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 US President Donald Trump's threat to withdraw aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) would deprive Washington of its influence on the body, and could cause the Oslo accords to unravel, analysts say.
- Trump's Amoral Saudi Statement Is a Pure Expression of Decades-Old 'U.S. Values' and Foreign Policy Orthodoxies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Donald Trump's statement that the US would continue business and diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi may be blunter than people are used to but it is standard operating procedure of American policy.
- Trump's Protectionism: A Great Leap Backward
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 US Presidents, European leaders and their academic spokespeople have attributed China's growing market shares, trade surpluses and technological power to its "theft" of western technology, "unfair" or non-reciprocal trade and restrictive investment practices. President Trump has launched a 'trade war' – raising stiff tariffs, especially targeting Chinese exports – designed to pursue a protectionist economic regime.
- Trump's War on Children is an act of State Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 State terrorism comes in many forms, but one of its most cruel and revolting expressions is when it is aimed at children. The Trump administration has detained more than 2,000 children, and the numbers are expected to grow exponentially in light of Trump's refusal to change the cruel policy.
- The Truth About "Trailer Trash"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 "Trailer trash" remains one of the last unquestioned relics of political incorrectness in our nation. As a toxic slur, the "trailer trash" brand works to stigmatize an entire category of people marginalizing them from mainstream society.
- 'A Turtle is Worth More Alive Than Dead'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Various participants at the Sustainable Blue Economy Conference in Kenya discuss ways they can sustainably economically benefit from the local environment.
- Twitter closes down my account for 'hateful conduct'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Several Twitter accounts with pro-Palestinian content have been suspended. At the same time those making explicit threats against them have been found not to violate Twitter's terms of service.
- Two Powerful Films on Indonesian Mass Terror
Film Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Short review of two films about Indonesian genocide.
- 2018: When Orwell's 1984 Stopped Being Fiction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A commentary on The Guardian's news story "Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance". Cook questions facts and the terminology used in the Guardian article, a form of 'journalistic fraud', which promotes the UK government's policy towards Russia.
- Typewriters Still Smoking? An Interview with Underground Press Maven John McMillan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An Interview with Underground Press Maven John McMillan, who is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta, with degrees from Michigan State and Columbia, and the author of the best book about the underground press. Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University Press)
- Uber? Taxis? Or Plan C? How to Get Ride Hailing Right
BC could show the world a non-profit model that beats oligopolies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at 'ride-hailing' and why it should be run on a non-profit basis as a co-op or other non-profit model.
- Uber Used Clandestine Technology Tool To Thwart Police Raids
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Uber uses a number of technological tools for tax evasion, undermining competition and monitoring customers and drivers.
- UN Security Council Rejects Proposal for Investigation Into Syria Chemical Allegations
Russian envoy urges US, allies to refrain from attacking Syria Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A UN Security Council resolution proposed by Russia has been voted down, with Western nations fighting against it. The resolution would've called for a formal investigation into the alleged Syrian chemical weapons attack on Saturday.
- Unions Should Go Big on a Green New Deal for Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Canada's unions need to play a much larger leadership role on climate change, not just because it deals with economic policies directly affecting members but also because it will be difficult to get where we need to go without them.
- Unit 731: How Leaders of Japan's WWII Germ Warfare Unit Ended Up Working for the US
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the post-war collaboration between the United States and members of Unit 731, a germ warfare branch of the Imperial Japanese Army that conducted horrific and lethal experiments on Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners.
- The Unjust Prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation Five
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Miko Peled, in "Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five," his exhaustive study of the U.S. government's case against five defendants from a friendless minority, demonstrates how American justice has deviated so far from Blackstone that the courts can convict a hundred innocents for one who is guilty.
- Unprecedented Cruelty Against Immigrants and Their Children
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Recently White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly backed up the policy when he explained that, "the children will be put in foster care or whatever." This comes at the same time as a new report revealed that there are some 1,500 undocumented children, who have been placed by federal authorities in homes of "sponsors," and are now missing in the system.
No other country has a policy of separating families who intend to seek asylum.
- An Unrepentant '68er's Life
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of an autobiographical book by May 1968 figure Daniel Bensaïd.
- UNRWA Does not Perpetuate the Conflict, the Conflict Perpetuates UNRWA
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In January, without warning, Donald Trump refsued to pay $305 million of his country's $365 million commitment to UNRWA. UNRWA, the UN agency serving Palestinian refugees, remains $200 million short of the funds it needs to provide humanitarian services for five million people, including 2/3 of the population of the Gaza Strip.This is not really a story about under-funding UNRWA. This is about the people who strenuously seek to eliminate it.
- Up Against the Ivy Wall: the Columbia Insurrection at 50
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 "My plan was to major in English and become a professor," she writes in an essay titled "Stopping the Machine" that's collected in A Time to Stir: Columbia '68, a new 438-page book (Columbia, $35) which is edited by filmmaker Paul Cronin. Rosahn explains that at the start of the protests, she was a "leftish Democrat" and that in the course of the rebellion she became "a devoted student radical."
- An Updated and Improved Marxism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An article that criticizes the stubborn immersion in the past by current Marxists and left wing intellectuals, and to comprehend activism and set goals in the twenty-first century requires a revision of the Marxian conception of revolution.
- An Urban Teacher Union Epic
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Swerdlow reviews A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike. She suggests that the 2012 Chicago teachers strike can be used as a model to persuade the public that public employees and their labour organizations benefit society and lead to effetive change.
- Ursula K. Le Guin - Rest in Power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary celebrating Le Guin's contributions as a community activist, a fighter for feminism, peace, freedom of speech, access to knowledge for everyone, and radical democracy in addition to her literary acclaim.
- US bombs continue to kill in Laos 50 years after Vietnam War
US dropped two million tonnes of bombs on Laos at height of Vietnam War. Why are cluster munitions still killing? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the problem of unexploded US bombs in Laos which have killed tens of thousands of people since the end of the war, and continue to kill and maim dozens annually.
- US Isn't Leaving Syria -- but Media Lost It When Possibility Was Raised
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The US military exists to fight wars. It is the most heavily armed, most violent organization in the world. Saying that it should continue to occupy Syria, and most of the mainstream media do, is a way of saying that the war in that country should continue. In fact, it’s a call for escalation of that war.
- US J20 defendants: 'Waiting is part of the punishment'
The first six people have been acquitted, but the 188 remaining Inauguration Day defendants have yet to go to trial. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Alleged anti-fascist protestors, controversially arrested at the 2017 US presidential inauguration, await trial and or sentencing in 2018.
- US 'Outrage' Over Slaying of US Residents Depends on the Nation Responsible
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This article takes a look at the reasons why the US media managed to be outraged at the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia's government, yet there was no such reaction when Israel killed Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old American citizen.
- US plastic waste is causing global environmental crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A recent ban in China, which normally takes in the largest proportion of US plastic waste, has left the US dumping plastic in other over-burdened countries, while waste still continues to pile up in the States. US plastic scrap exports dropped by almost a third in the first six months of 2018, as waste firms struggled to find a home for their plastic scrap.
- US, UK and France 'Inflicted Worst Destruction in Decades on Raqqa'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Amnesty International reports that air and artillery strikes by the US and allies inflicted devastating loss of life on civilians in the Isis-held city of Raqqa. It is a report that contradicts claims by the US, Britain and France, that they precisely targeted Isis fighters and positions during the four month siege.
- Venezuela: Maduro survives assassination attempt -- but journalism doesn't
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Venezuela was rocked on August 5, 2018 by an attempt to assassinate President Nicolas Maduro during a public event, using drones armed with explosives.But as more details of the attack became available, mainstream media coverage sought to sow doubt on the events, using words such as "apparent" or "alleged". It focused on the government using this "alleged" event to step up repression.
- Venezuela: US Imperialism Is Based On Lies And Threats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 First-hand report of a delegation to Venezuela from the US. They say the coup is weak and the Venezuelan people are strong and Maduro has their support.
- A very British coup: The spies who went out to the cold
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Former British MP George Galloway comments on the revelation that subcontracted work from MI5 and MI6 targeted not only Russia but also smeared British politicians whom they perceived to be "pro-Russian"; those smeared include not only himself but Jeremy Corbyn and others in his party.
- Video: IJV and CJPME tell Israeli trade Minister Eli Cohen and the Canadian Trade Minister to #EndApartheidTrade and divest from the Israeli-Canadian arms trade
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2018
- Viktor Orban, Trump and the Populist Battle Over Public Space
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Hungarian legislation and the turmoil caused by Trump's moral equivalencies reveal how politicized space is not a distracting side effect of populist politics; rather, public space treated as a symbol of national identity is a defining characteristic of populism.
- Violet McNaughton: the Mighty Mite Reformer From Saskatchewan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Violet McNaughton deserves recognition as one of Canada's greatest and most formidable adult educators and co-operator of the twentieth century bar none
- The voice of Hobsbawm
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at how the work and ideas of influential British Historian Eric Hobsbawm made an entry into the Indian intellectual scene, as well as his involvement in two crucial political and intellectual debates in Brazil that cemented his reputation there.
- Want to Fix Foster Care? Ask Kids Who Have Been Through the System
Innovative report co-researched by youth from care focuses on importance of relationships Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A report called Relationships Matter for Youth "Aging Out" of Care, co-researched by youth from care, focuses on what truly matters to the young people who are in the system and notably on the importance of building relationships.
- The War Against "Fake News" is a War on Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Barely a day passes without a new development in the war on social media -- that is, the war on us. Today, it is a report that Twitter has emailed hundreds of thousands of its users, warning them that they shared "Russian propaganda".
- War is just f**king wrong
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Jacobs explains the underlying capitalist imperative of waging war.
- War, lies and censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Damon cautions news consumers that there is precedent for dissemination of government propaganda in the Anglo-American mainstream media when leaders are preparing to take part in military action.
- The Wars of Rich Resources
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Review of Bolivia's mid-20th century conflicts over resource extraction.
- Washington using legal cover to conceal economic banditry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The arrest of a Chinese telecom executive in Canada on behalf of the US is an abuse of the legal process and international law to pursue American economic interests. China's anger resonates with similar grievances against the US felt by Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and even American allies in Europe.
- Water Wars: El Salvador Social Movements Resist Water Privatization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at the efforts of Salvadoran social movements which have unified in an urgent effort to counter the right-wing's most recent push to privatize El Salvador's scarce water resources.
- The Weaponization of Social Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 How the online environment and social media is being used as a political weapon, notably through the use of 'Bots'.
- Welcome to Arivaca: Where residents want anti-migrant militia out'
Many in this Arizona border town want armed vigilantes, who've vowed to round up undocumented migrants, to leave. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Many in this Arizona border town want armed vigilantes, who've vowed to round up undocumented migrants, to leave.
- West's failure to act will be cause of the next Gaza massacre
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Jewish Israelis celebrate, and governments around the world stand by passively, as Israel massacres Palestinians in Gaza. Inaction by Western governments ensures that Israel will feel embolded to commit further massacres in the future.
- What are we eating?
Introduction to Other Voices, January 21, 2018 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 What are we eating? A simple question which opens up a labyrinth of devilishly complex issues about production and distribution, access to land, control of water, prices, health and safety, migrant labour, and much else. For millions of people, the answer is brutally simple: not enough to survive. UNICEF estimates that 300 million children go to bed hungry each night, and that more than 8,000 children under the age of five die of malnutrition every day. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 12% of the world's population is chronically malnourished. How is this possible in a world where there is an enormous surplus of food, where farmers are paid not to grow food?
- What are we eating? - Arabic text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- What Brett Kavanaugh Really Learned in High School: Make the Rules, Break the Rules and Prosper
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The accusations against Kavanaugh may be an open question but his behaviour in handling them proves he is unfit for the Supreme Court. This is reinforced by his previous evasiveness about his role in the Bush administrations torture policy which called his integrity into question long before Christine Blasey Ford made her accusations.
- What Fascism is, and Isn't
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 By examining historicial fascist movements, Oppenheimer delineates what is and isn't fascism and also explores the common themes between the alt-right and its fascist predecessors.
- "What followed horrified us beyond our wildest imaginations": an eyewitness account of the Bangladesh student protests
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Like other high school students, Abdul Karim Rajib, 18, and Dia Khanam Mim, 17 had many hopes and dreams for their lives. One had hoped to become an army officer, the other, a banker. On July 29, 2018, around noon, the two teenagers were killed in the streets of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, by three buses speeding against each other for no reason other than to arrive first and cram as many passengers into their already overcrowded interiors, for maximum profit.
- What if Ida B. Wells Depended on Facebook?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The work of Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who forced Americans to pay attention to lynchings and human rights abuses, is a reminder why we need a tax-dollars-funded, and journalism focused, commitment to public media.
- What is Organizing?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Morgan reviews the history of Organizing in the USA and provides advice to activists on how to organize in an inclusive, constructive, way.
- What 'News' Media in U.S. And Allied Countries Never Report
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Newsmedia effectively ban reporting corruptness of newsmedia -- even of media that stand on the opposite side of the political divide.
- What the Attack on Marc Lamont Hill Tells Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Destruction is the Zionists' strategic goal and the attack on Marc Lamont Hill and others like him is dictated by the tactics they have chosen to use toward that end.
- What would you do if soldiers dragged your son out of bed in the middle of the night?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 After more than half a century of occupation, most Israelis can no longer imagine themselves in the place of the Palestinians. But if we cannot imagine what it is like to live under occupation, we must at least confront its brutal reality.
- What You Don't Know About Abolitionism: An Interview with Manisha Sinha on Her Groundbreaking Study
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Manisha Sinha draws attention to the role of Black abolitionists in ending slavery in the USA in her book: The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition.
- What's it like for a social movement to take control of a city?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Ada Colau surprised many when she won the election to become mayor of Barcelona. The housing rights activist was part of a deep social movement aiming for participatory democracy. But this latest article from the Symbiosis Research Collective examines how winning the election was just the first step
- What's Kinder Morgan's Real End Game?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An ultimatum has been imposed by Texas based Energy Infrastructure company, Kinder Morgan,that they will cancel the Trans Mountain Pipeline Extension at the end of May 2018 unless clarity is provided by the government. Klein argues that Kinder Morgan knows that the pipeline is already doomed, due to external economic factors and Indigenous opposition.
- When America Downed an Iranian Airliner and Celebrated It!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Every 3rd of July Iranians commemorate the killing of 299 innocent people, including 66 children, by the US Navy. Adding to the tragedy is the American attitude towards this catastrophic event.
- When Covering Up a Crime Takes Precedence Over Human Health: BP's Toxic Gulf Coast Legacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. Over the next 87 days, it gushed at least 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the worst human-made environmental disaster in US history and afflicting the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
- When Worse is the Enemy of Bad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The claim that all that is wrong with America is due to the malignant machinations of Putin is the most blatantly false, potentially disastrous bucket of bullshit ever inflicted by the matrix on this ignorant, credulous, propagandized people.
- Where Have All the Nazis Gone?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Thousands of "anti-fascist" protestors converged on the streets of the nation's capitol to deny a platform to (or just beat the snot out of) twenty or thirty racist idiots who were trying to assemble in Lafayette Square and stand around shouting racist slogans at each other.
- Where It All Began: The Dawn of 'Fake News'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 While today's political smear campaigns and propaganda have gotten more sophisticated and subtle, the underlying ethics remain as maggoty as ever.
- Where to Begin?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The rise of socialist-identified candidates like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are a hopeful resistance against the politics that resulted in President Trump. But people must organize outside of electoral politics to bring real change.
- Where's the Beef Stroganoff? Eight Sacrilegious Reflections on Russiagate
Street, Paul Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Street expresses his frustration with the US political establishment in light of the 2017-2018 FBI investigation into alleged foreign intervention in the 2016 US presidential election.
- The White World and Black Reality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 White people on the left must deal with racism to create true solidarity and resist Trump's politics.
- Who is Afraid of Venezuelan Democracy?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 We are witnessing before our eyes a scenario of subversion and disqualification of Venezuela’s democracy.
- Who Killed Marielle?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman, whose murder is still unsolved, was a thorn in the side of the right-wing, repressive government. The fight she fought continues through with people people she represented.
- Who profits from keeping Gaza on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe?
Keeping Gaza on the verge of collapse keeps international humanitarian aid money flowing to exactly where it benefits Israeli interests. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Economic researcher and journalist, Shir Hever shows that Israel benefits economically from its siege and oppression of Gaza.
- Who's Funding the White Helmets?
Reality Check Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2018 You've no doubt heard of the White Helmets, aka the Syria Civil Defense. They claim to be a neutral entity in Syria. They say they are just helping people caught in the middle of a civil war. But are they? Follow the money and you will find numerous ties to government funding from not only the U.S., but the U.K., Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. We untangle these ties to the White Helmets in a Reality Check you won't get anywhere else.
- Why "Coercive Diplomacy" is a Dangerous Farce
Offering to talk while threatening military force hasn't worked in 30 years. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In the context of rising tensions between the USA and North Korea 2017-2018, historian and journalist Gareth Porter, details the history of failure of "Coercive Diplomacy" as a tool in US foreign policy.
- Why Do Students Kill Their Class-Mates
Detachment, Isolation, Dehumanization, and Emotional Estrangement from Human Relationships Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A recently released phone video shot by 19-year-old Parkland, Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz, reveals a cold, callus young man who claims to "hate everyone and everything."
- Why does the language of journalism fail indigenous people?
A journalist with indigenous roots reflects on the making of We Are Still Here: A Story from Native Alaska. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A journalist with Indigenous roots reflects on the difficulty of doing justice to the community she is filming a documentary about. Historical misrepresentation due to lack of cross-cultural understanding has led to a distrust of the media.
- Why Is Allergan Partnering with the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe?
Inside the bizarre world of patent law. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The St. Regis Mohawk Tribe has invested in a portfolio of patents, their status as a sovereign-entity allows the holder to circumvent the "inter partes review" if a patent dispute is raised, increasing the value of their holdings.
- Why is Inclusive Mosque so Afraid of Secularism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Secularism is merely a framework that separates religion from the state to ensure that religion cannot influence the state and public policy and impose itself on private lives. After all, not everyone in a given society is a believer and even if they are, they don’t usually want the state to tell them how to believe. Only a secular framework can ensure the equal rights of all citizens before the law and not different rights for different categories of communalised groups. It is only a secular framework that can ensure one law for all via changeable laws made by people versus unchangeable ‘divine’ laws imposed by clerics. It is a secular framework which can allow for multi-ethnic, multi-religious and plural societies and is a minimum precondition for the rights of women and minorities. It is a secular framework that can ensure freedom of conscience, including freedom of and from religion.
- Why It Just Makes Sense for the U.S. to Withdraw from the UNHRC
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Having withdrawn from the Paris Accord, and the Iran deal; having broken with the world to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital; having provoked allies and rivals with trade war-triggering tariffs and personal insults; having shocked the world with talk of a Great Wall to keep out Mexicans (paid for by Mexico).
- Why (Mostly) Men Trophy Hunt: a Biocultural Explanation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of several studies offering insights into the biological basis of human behavior, specifically trophy hunting, and the biologically responsive strategies for changing it.
- Why Ocasio-Cortez's Platform is So Great
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 By labeling her foreign policy platform "A Peace Economy," Ocasio-Cortez, using a phrase popular with the peace movement, makes the financial connection without shying away from the immoral and criminal and counter-productive character of war. The fact is that war endangers rather than protecting, erodes rights, militarizes police and society, destroys the natural environment, directly kills and injures and traumatizes and harms millions, and - on top of that - does the most damage through the diversion of resources from where they could do good.
- Why the food movement needs to understand capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 To fully appreciate the challenges we face in transforming our food system we need to explore the economic and political context in which food is grown, sold and consumed in the world today.
- Why There are Few Christians Left in the Holy Town of Bethlehem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 This is the time of year when they have a chance to break out of an isolation enforced in concrete since Israel enclosed the town with a "separation wall" more than a decade ago.
- Why the "Two State Solution" is Apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018
- Why white supremacists and Hindu nationalists are so alike
White supremacy and Hindu nationalism have common roots going back to the 19th-century idea of the 'Aryan race'. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Many members of the so-called "alt-right" - a loosely knit coalition of populists, white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis - turned to India to find historic and current justifications for their racist, xenophobic and divisive views.
- Will The Conspiracy Against Trump and American Democracy Go Unpunished?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The American people do not realize the seriousness of the Russiagate conspiracy against them and President Trump. Polls indicate that a large majority of the public do not believe that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the presidential election, and are tired of hearing the media prostitutes repeat the absurd story day after day. On its face the story makes no sense whatsoever.
- Will We Ever See Al Jazeera's Investigation Into the Israel Lobby?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 So when am I going to be able to watch Al Jazeera's hard-hitting investigation into Israel’s powerful lobby in the United States? Remember Al Jazeera? The tough, no-holds-barred Middle East satellite channel that transformed Qatar into a media empire whose reports frightened dictators and infuriated potentates and presidents alike? Why, George W Bush once wanted to bomb its headquarters in Doha – so it must have been doing something right. It even has an office in Jerusalem.
- William ('Bill') Pelz:
Againist the Current vol. 192 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In memoriam, Patrick M. Quinn and Eric Schuster discuss the life and contributions of William ('Bill') Pelz, a well-known socialist activist and prolific scholar in the field of European and comparative Labour History.
- William Blum: Anti-Imperial Advocate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The late William Blum, former computer programmer in the US State Department and initial enthusiast for US moral crusades, who died December 2018, gave us various exemplars of this counter-insurgent scholarship. His compilation of foreign policy ills in Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, was written with the US as sole surveyor of the land, all powerful and dangerously uncontained.
- William Blum, Renowned U.S. Foreign Policy Critic, Dead at 85
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Obituary for William Blum with biographical information and links to his work.
- A Window on Inhuman Detention
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A first-hand account of the inhumane conditions of immigration detention by a Korean woman seeking asylum in the US.
- Without a Popular Movement We Don't Stand a Chance: Andreas Malm on Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 An interview with the author of "Fossil Capital and The Progress of This Storm", who says there are reasons to be hopeful but significant progress will require a global movement of unprecedented scale.
- Women in the Black Panther Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 While much that has been written about the Black Panther Party (BPP) is focused on the role of certain prominent male leaders, lesser known is that during peak membership women made up nearly two-thirds of the party. Leela Yellessety spoke to three authors of recent books that highlight the contribution of women in the Black Panther Party.
- Women-Led Radio Station Amplifies Voices of Indigenous Communities in Argentina
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 In the late 1990s several Indigenous women founded a radio station which continues to broadcast. It resists cultural subjugation and provides a voice to Indigenous people.
- Working Class Movement Must Be Independent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A new chapter in the history of the South African working class was opened in Soweto on 21-22 July 2018, when representatives from over 147 South African working-class formations represented by 1000 delegates assembled to unite workplace and community struggles.
- The World Google Controls and Surveillance Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Google's encroaching powers over our lives, to include the freedom of expression protected by most national laws, not to mention EU and UN Charters, around the planet today.
- World War I: Crime and Punishment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Jacques Pauwels' The Great Class War is a contribution to the ideological front in the struggle for a world without wars, for in resetting the story of that war in the Marxist frame, he loosens our ties to idealist interpretations that obscure the class nature of wars, naturalize war as an inevitable part of life, and force us to assume and share a guilt that largely rests on the shoulders of a profiteering and exploitative class, which holds the power of decision making through its control of political, economic, military, police, and media powers and grants us a vote that is largely cosmetic.
- Worldwide "Moment of Madness"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A look at 1968 a legendary year in history. Analysis of how student- and worker-led revolts played out in different parts of Europe.
- Worldwide Wobblies Remembered
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 A review of the essay collection Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW.
- Worse than Obsolete: NATO Creates Enemies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Twenty years' worth of "unintended" or "collateral" damage hasn't created friends in the war zones.
- The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 The Wrong Story lays bare the flaws in the way large media organizations present the Palestine–Israel issue. It points out major fallacies in the fundamental conceptions that underpin their coverage, namely that Palestinians and Israelis are both victims to comparable extents and are equally responsible for the failure to find a solution; that the problem is "extremists," often religiously-motivated ones, who need to be sidelined in favour of “moderates”; and that Israel’s uses of force are typically justifiable acts of self-defense.
Weaving together the existing literature with new insights, Shupak offers an up-to-date and tightly focused guide that exposes the distorted way these issues are presented and why each is misguided.
- Yanis Varoufakis's Self-Incriminating Account of the Greek Crisis - Parts 3 and 4
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Yanis Varoufakis traces his collaboration with Alexis Tsípras and his alter ego, Nikos Pappas, back to 2011. That collaboration gradually broadened, starting with 2013, to include Yanis Dragasakis (who became vice-Prime Minister in 2015). There is a constant in the relations between Varoufakis and Tsípras: Yanis Varoufakis constantly argues for changes in the political programme that Syriza had adopted. Varoufakis tells us that Tsípras-Pappas-Dragasakis themselves clearly wanted to move toward an orientation that was different from, and significantly more moderate than, the one their party had adopted.
- Yemen's Turn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 The Arab Spring, numerically strong but politically weak, failed to break this destructive dynamic. With the corpse of Arab nationalism in a state of advanced decay and the principal opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, desperate for a deal with Washington, the 2011 uprisings were easily confiscated by the US to further its own aims in the region. Despite its many national peculiarities, the ruinous war in Yemen has to be viewed in this context.
- YIMBYs Exposed: The Techies Hawking Free Market "Solutions" to the Nation's Housing Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Anti-displacement activists hate them. Tech firms and big developers love them -- and shower them with cash.
- You Can't Commit Genocide Without the Help of Local People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 How do you organise a successful genocide – in Turkish Armenia a century ago, in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s, or in the Middle East today? A remarkable investigation by a young Harvard scholar – focusing on the slaughter of Armenians in a single Turkish Ottoman city 103 years ago – suggests the answer is simple: a genocidal government must have the local support of every branch of respectable society: tax officials, judges, magistrates, junior police officers, clergymen, lawyers, bankers and, most painfully, the neighbours of the victims.
- You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2018 A collection of memoirs from people who were part of Progressive Labor Party in the United States in the 1960s.
- Young protesters are defying Israel's blockade with scraps of paper and plastic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2018 Five years ago, the film Flying Paper documented the successful efforts of Gaza’s children to set a new world record for mass kite-flying. The children defied Israel’s blockade, which prevents entry of most goods, by making kites from sticks, newspapers and scraps of plastic.
2017
- Abbas fears the Prisoners' Hunger Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is due to meet Donald Trump to discuss reviving the long-cold corpse of the peace process. Back home, things are heating up. There is anger in the West Bank, both on the streets and within the ranks of Abbas's Fatah movement. The trigger is a hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners..
- The Absurd Consequences of a "Right to Privacy"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 British MP David Davis’s text messages poking fun at the appearance of a female colleague make him the latest whipping boy for those determined to root out sexism and misogyny in public life, the Daily Mail reports. Curiously, they also make him the latest poster boy for exponents of an expansive "right to privacy."
- The Absurdity of Saying "White Privilege'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Using rhetoric like "white supremacy" and "white privilege" is a way of stereotyping the whole of "white" people and lumping everyone into one group. This is the surest way to turn potential allies in the struggle for justice into adversaries; by doing so we end up perpetuating the very divides that the "system" depends on to splinter people apart.
- Academe's Poisonous Call-Out Culture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 I cannot help thinking that something has gone seriously wrong when a scholar who is not transphobic or working against the interests of trans people, but, in fact, considering an important question, is labeled as "doing harm."
- Academic Bullying the Vacuum of Moral Leadership in the Academy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Workplace bullying is an increasing problem. Books are being written about it, and there is even a Workplace Bullying Institute. The problem isn't restricted to the business world. Books such as Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do About It, Bully in the Ivory Tower: How Aggression and Incivility Erode American Higher Education, and Workplace Bullying in Higher Education suggest that bullying is a particular problem among academics.
- Actually, I Am Anti-Police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The I'm not anti-police stance would work if, and only if, police brutality could be separated from the nature of policing. But it can't. That's because the major purpose of policing is to maintain the supremacy of the ruling class.
- Adapt or Die: Millennials, Technology, and Net Neutrality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Internet is changing the way we think, concentrate, and process information. Studies are showing the Internet is lowering our concentration because the Internet offers constant distractions. It’s reducing our attention span, and it’s ruining our interpersonal communication skills. Basically this technology is dehumanizing us.
- Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Vials reexamines Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, F-scale, and their implications for a Trump America.
- African Migrants Bought and Sold Openly in 'Slave Markets' in Libya
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Hundreds of migrants along North African migration routes are being bought and sold openly in modern day 'slave markets' in Libya, survivors have told the United Nations migration agency, which warned that these reports "can be added to a long list of outrages" in the country.
- After Middle Eastern Wars End, the Medical Wars Begin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What are the wars doing to the health care infrastructure?
- Against imperialist regime-change intervention in Syria and the Middle East
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 David Bush has published an appeal for reasoned and informed discussion in Canada of the war and humanitarian disaster in Syria. Roger and Courneyeur write this essay as a contribution to the discussion David suggests be opened.
- Ahwazi Exiles Hold Four Massive Freedom Rallies in London, The Hague, Canberra, And Berlin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Demonstrators hold flags of the region of Al-Ahwaz as they take part in a rally in support of the Ahwazi people in Iran, in Berlin, Germany, 21 April 2017. Dozens of demonstrators took part in the march striving for the recognition of this population and their human rights.
- Al Qaeda Is Attacking Major Syrian Cities with US Weapons -- but You Wouldn't Know That from the Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Norton analyzes media coverages of attacks linked to Al-Qaeda in the West to highlight how this emphasis on Muslim extremism is used to justify Islamophobia.
- Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Criticizing Enlightenment thought has become fashionable across the political spectrum. For the past several decades, more and more academics have called reason into question. This is especially true among left-leaning, postmodern, and post-structuralist thinkers. This coincides with one of the Alt-Right’s primary tactics: adopting leftist rhetoric as cover for its racialist, nativist, and often misogynistic agendas.
- "All Power to the Soviets!" Biography of a Slogan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of the origins of the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" in its original context of Russia in 1917.
- 'All Power to the Soviets?' - Biography of a slogan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The origins of one of the most famous slogans in revolutionary history: "All power to the Soviets!" in its original context of Russia in 1917.
- Allegations Against Russia Less Credible Every Day
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Swanson calls into question the US government-driven media accusations that the Russian government had direct involvement in swaying the 2016 US election for Trump, and exames the motivations behind these claims.
- Alternative Toronto: 1980 - 1995
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 Published: 2018 A community archive and historical map of Toronto's alternative cultures, scenes and spaces of the 1980s and early 1990s.
- American Rape of Vietnamese Women was Considered "Standard Operating Procedure"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Comparing testimony from Vietnamese women and American soldiers, Gina Marie Weaver, in her book Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in The Vietnam War, finds that rape of Vietnamese women by American troops during the US invasion of Vietnam was a "widespread", "everyday occurrence" that was essentially "condoned", even encouraged, by the military, and had its foundation in military training and US culture.
- American/Russian Vladimir Posner on the State of Journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A Russian journalist's views on the state of journalism.
- "American Thought": from theoretical barbarism to intellectual decadence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Juraj Katalena argues that direct transposition of ideological frameworks developed in the specific cultural and economic context of the USA, to Eastern Europe (and other regions), is misguided.
- America's "Open Door Policy" May Have Led Us to the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The article takes a critical look at the potential outcome of North Korea's stigmatized relationship with the United States. It considers the role of US-produced propaganda against North Korea in relationship to the disparity between the militaries of the two countries.
- Amid the Tumult in Durham
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Peter Gilbert (a rights attorney) and his wife Elena Everett,a non-profit organizer, had their house searched by Sheriff's officers in Durham when nobody was at home. It had to do with a demonstration of some 200 on Monday, Aug. 14, 2017.
- Analyzing the Failures of Syriza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examines the failture of Syriza, The Coalition of the Radical Left, since their election in Greece.
- Another Dangerous Rush to Judgment in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The U.S. government and the mainstream media have rushed to judgment again, blaming the Syrian government for a new poison-gas attack and ignoring other possibilities, reports Robert Parry.
- Another Housing Bubble?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This is an edited transcript from an interview on The Real News Network. Sharmini Peries interviewed Michael Hundson (author of J is For Junk Economics).
- Another peace activist, Raza Khan, goes missing in Lahore
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Raza Mahmood Khan, a Peace activist and social worker, went "missing" in Lahore on Dec. 2, 2017, shortly after he had organised a public discussion about a recent demonstration that ended in ignominious surrender to those seeking power in the guise of religion.
- Anthem Protestors Should Stop Mucking Around and Make Their Demands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The "anthem protests" have gone on for two years now, but so far the players have not presented a specific set of demands.Why? Do the players simply want to use Sunday football as a platform for raising awareness of racial injustice and police brutality or is there something else going on here?
- The Anti-Empire Report #153
Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity. Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A comentary on current events in Russian and US relations which may be entering a new Cold War, as well as a look back at events through the Cold War period from 1948 to the 1980's.
- Anti-Racism at the Neighbourhood Level
Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2017 On this week's episode of Talking Radical Radio, Scott Neigh speaks with Rabea Murtaza, a member of East Enders Against Racism, a neighbourhood-based anti-racism group in Toronto. Podcast and article.
- The Anti-Empire Report #150
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Anti-Empire Report by William Blum.
- The Anti-Fascist Revolution
Remembering the Action Party, one of Italy's biggest anti-fascist partisan movements. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Over the last two decades, the Italian Resistance has been a subject of sharp public debate, with both political and historical efforts "radically to repudiate the role and significance" of anti-fascism in Italy's contemporary history. As Pier Giorgio Zunino wrote in 1997, "for the Italian history of the second half of the twentieth century, anti-fascism is the villain."
- Anti-Fascist Self-Defense: From Mussolini's Italy to Trump's America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A conversation with Mark Bray, a political activist, historian and a lecturer at Dartmouth College and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
- Antifa in Theory and in Practice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In recent weeks, a totally disoriented left has been widely exhorted to unify around a masked vanguard calling itself Antifa, for anti-fascist. Hooded and dressed in black, Antifa is essentially a variation of the Black Bloc, familiar for introducing violence into peaceful demonstrations in many countries. Imported from Europe, the label Antifa sounds more political. American Antifa looks very much like a middle class wedding between Identity Politics and gang warfare.
- Antifa in Theory and in Practice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A masked vanguard calling itself Antifa, for anti-fascist, is just a variation of the Black Bloc, which is familiar for introducing violence into peaceful demonstrations in many countries. Imported from Europe, the label Antifa serves the purpose of stigmatizing those it attacks as "fascists", yet despite its imported name Antifa in the U.S. is basically just another example of America's steady descent into violence.
- Antifa is a 'major gift to the right
World-renowned academic prompts criticism for his comments about the anti-fascist movement in the wake of Charlottesville Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the wake of the violent protests in Charlottesville and tension between white supremacists and anti-fascists, Noam Chomsky condemns Antifa militant tactics and suggests constructive activism based in education is more effective.
- AntiFa's Moral Superiority and the Potential for Left-Wing Unity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On the tragedy at Charlottesville and its aftermath.
- Anti-Vax Propaganda Helps Measles -- Once Eradicated -- Spread Across the Twin Cities
Health officials expect the number of diagnoses to rise. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The anti-vaxxer misinformation campaign has led to yet another outbreak of a preventable disease. Minnesota's Department of Health has announced that 44 people in the state have been diagnosed with measles, a disease once eradicated in the United States. Forty-two of the cases are in children, most of them Somali-Americans who were never vaccinated. According to numerous sources, the outbreak is the result of a sustained anti-vaccination campaign.
- Antiwar.com vs. the Decline of American Journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What is the "alternative" media? If we look at the phrase itself, it seems to mean the media that presents itself as the alternative to what we call the "corporate media," i.e. the New York Times, the Washington Post, your local rag – in short, the Legacy Media that predominated in those bygone days before the Internet. And yet this whole arrangement seems outdated, to say the least. The Internet has long since been colonized by the corporate giants: BuzzFeed, for example, is regularly fed huge dollops of cash from its corporate owners. And the Legacy Media has adapted to the primacy of online media, however reluctantly and ineptly. So the alternative media isn’t defined by how they deliver the news, but rather by 1) what they judge to be news, and 2) how they report it. And that’s the problem.
- The anti-Zionist Bund led the Jewish Resistance in Poland whilst the Zionist Movement abandoned the Jews
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Zionism and Israel's racist rulers have created a series of myths about how the only Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland was from the Zionists. The role of the anti-Zionist Bund has been erased. In fact the Zionist movement in Palestine and the West abandoned the resistance including the Zionist component of that resistance.
- Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A story of the caste system in India told through the autobiography of an untouchable woman.
- Any White Cop Can Kill a Black Man at Any Time
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Any white cop can kill a black man at any time and the cop will not go to jail, exemplified in the Jason Stockley, Anthony Lamar Smith case.
- Arab Spring: Against Shallow Optimism and Pessimism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Gilbert Achcar's Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising, and Joel Beinin's Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
- Archives As Activism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Last week was archives awareness week in Ontario, a week to raise awareness about what archivists do, what archives are, and just generally celebrate all of the good stuff associated with archives. In addition to general archives promotion this week it is also about the connection between archives and activism.
- Are Credit Rating Agencies America's Secret Fifth Column?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Rating Agencies and the Banks are part of an organized criminal enterprise that include our Justice Department and our Politicians.
- Are They Really Out to Get Trump?
Sometimes paranoia is justified Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 President Donald Trump and the firing of FBI Director Comey
- As the World Turned Upside Down
Left Intellectuals in Yugoslavia, 1988-90 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An account of the author's experiences and reflections meeting left intellectuals, primarily during conferences in Yugoslavia between 1988 and 1990.
- The assassination of the Rosselli brothers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A summary of the ideology and actions of Carlo and Nello Rosselli, highlighting what led up to their assassinations and its aftermath.
- Assessing Togliatti
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Broder provides a historical perspective of Italian Communism, looking at longtime leader Palmiro Togliatti's concrete actions during his leadership and not just the party's Gramscian-inflected theoretical canon.
- Assuming Boycott
Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A collection of essays and seminars that looks at the history of boycott and divestment within activism. Examines a variety of cultural and academic boycotts around the world.
- The Attack on Al Jazeera
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Since its genesis, Al-Jazeera has served as much more than a mere signpost of speech or thought... popular or otherwise. Its existence, alone, stands as a safety valve against those closed societies that embrace repression as so much a check against the light of day of which they fear. Al-Jazeera's availability throughout the Middle East changed its information landscape ... introducing a level of freedom of speech, on TV, that was previously unheard of in the region.
- Attica from 1971 to Today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Interview with Heather Ann Thompson.
- Attica: The Revolt and Afterwards
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
- Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock captures the story of Native-led defiance that forever changed the fight for clean water, our environment and the future of our planet.
- Baby remains found in mass grave at ex-Irish orphanage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Remains of children ranging from new-born to three-years-old discovered in the sewers of a former children's home run by the Roman Catholic Church.
- The Bait and Switch of Public-Private Partnerships
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This being the age of public relations, the genteel term "public-private partnership" is used instead of corporate plunder. A "partnership" such deals may be, but it isn't the public who gets the benefits.
- The Balance of Probabilities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Unlike the famous chemical weapons "attack" portrayed by the BBC in Saving Syria's Children, it does appear that in the latest incident at Idlib there was real horror inflicted by chemical attack of some kind. The question is who did it and why?
- Dennis J. Banks, Naawakamig (1937-2017) - Cofounder of the American Indian Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Under cofounder of the American Indian Movement, Dennis Banks, AIM became the most powerful Native movement of the twentieth century, galvanizing indigenous people throughout the United States, Canada, and beyond.
- Banned Love: Trump, Pocahantas and the Lovings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author looks at the history of interracial relationships, from thier legalization 50 years ago, to their future during the Trump administration.
- Barry Commoner: Radical Father of ModernEnvironmentalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Biography of Barry Commoner, a scientist who laid the groundwork for what later become known as the environmental justice movement.
- Baum, Gregory - obituary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Obituary for renowned Canadian theologian Gregory Baum, 94, who died Oct. 18, 2017.
- The BDS movement is about justice for Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The University of Ottawa Israeli Awareness Committee (IAC) blocked a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) resolution presented by the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO). The BDS movement is a call to action from Palestinians seeking justice and equality, while the IAC is a pro-Israel lobby group which works with the Israeli Embassy and others to promote the Israeli government to students.
- Be the Change: Six Disabled Activists On Why the Resistance Must Be Accessible
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Six activists, leaders, and advocates on how we can all move forward, whether on our feet, on wheels, or online -- plus a resource list.
- Beautiful Rising
Creative Resistance from the Global South Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Follow up to 'Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution', Beautiful Rising showcases some of the most innovative tactics used in struggles against autocracy and austerity across the Global South.
- The beginning of the end for identity politics?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While the millennial left’s preoccupation with identity has not disappeared, the moralistic fire has grown dimmer.
- Bequests
Leaving a social justice legacy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Many of us have made working for social justice a lifetime commitment. If you are thinking about leaving a legacy for social justice that will live on, you might want to consider leaving a bequest to Connexions in your will.
- Berkeley Republicans Hope More Left-Wing Riots Will Create "Pedestal" For Conservative Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The students hosting conservative pundit Ben Shapiro at University of California, Berkeley this week say their fingers are crossed in the hopes for a left-wing protest that could amplify his message.
- A Better World in Birth
The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Michael A. Lebowitz' The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now.
- Beware the Poisoned Chalice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the aftermath of the recent (2017) UK election Jeremy Corbyn may be well poised to form a Labour government. But there would be huge risks in assuming office in a context of economic chaos.
- "Beyond Banksters" by Joyce Nelson
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of "Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism" by Joyce Nelson.
- Beyond Neoliberal Identity Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Neoliberal identity politics (NIP) is a great weapon on the hands of the privileged capitalist Few and their mass-murderous global empire.
- Big Business and Hitler
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 This book discusses the multiple multinationals doing business with Germany during the Second World War, including American companies such as General Motors, IBM, Standard Oil and Ford, which may explain America's late entry into the war and Hitler's support from powerful businesses despite the horrendous actions of the Nazis'.
- Big city war: NATO seeks concepts for waging urban conflict
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 NATO is asking outside contractors to pitch concepts on military operations in urban areas, admitting that the bloc’s forces are still unprepared for waging wars in big cities, including those lying close to the coast.
- Big Data is Accelerating Corporate Control of the Global Food Supply
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A summary of the report "Too Big to Feed: Exploring the Impacts of Mega-Margers, Consolidation and Concentration of Power in the Agri-Food Sector," published by The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
- The Big Lie About the Tax Bill: Why Bosses Will Never Raise Wages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The big lie underlying the $1.5-trillion Trump/Republican Congressional tax bill is that Corporations will pass much of it on to workers in the form of higher wages, and to consumers in the form of lower prices.
- Biological Warfare: US & Saudis Use Cholera to Kill Yemenis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The US has supported Saudi Arabia and its allies in their aggression against Yemen, committing daily war crimes involving civilians, who are now suffering a cholera epidemic with more than 400,000 victims.
- The Biotech Industry Is Taking Over the Regulation of GMOs from the Inside
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 When a comprehensive evaluation of GMOs and the weaknesses of scientific risk assessment within the biotech industry is urgently needed, the chemical and biotech industries are forcing risk assessment in the opposite direction.
- The Birth of a Holiday
The late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm recounts the origins of International Workers' Day. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The history of the fight, by the working class, for a holiday for the working class.
- Birth of a New Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 I came back from the Women's March in D.C. exhausted but thrilled, convinced that we are seeing the birth of a new women's movement. Hearing about all the other Women's Marches around the world only confirmed that impression.
- Birth of the "Open Shop"
Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Chad Pearson's Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement.
- Birth of the Abolitionist Nation
The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition.
- The Black Lives Matter Response to Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Our mandate has not changed: organize and end all state-sanctioned violence until all Black Lives Matter.
- Black and White
Images from the Archives of Liberation News Service Photographer Howard Epstein, 1968-1974 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Black and White is a book of 32 evocative images of political conflict and confrontations in the streets taken by Howard Epstein when he was a photographer for Liberation News Service.
- A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Like Serge's extraordinary novels, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the "immense shipwreck" of Stalin's ascendancy.
- BLM: Challenges and Possibilities
From #BlacLlivesMatter to Black Liberation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
- The Blue-Collar Hellscape of the Startup Industry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The tactics and work environments at tech companies, including Amazon, show a disregard for the fundamental health, safety and humanity of low-tier workers, demonstrating what laissez-faire startup-styled late capitalism really looks like.
- Blueprint for a Progressive US: A Dialogue With Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the Trump era, what would an authentically populist, progressive political agenda look like? What would a progressive US look like with regard to jobs, the environment, finance capital and the standard of living? What would it look like in terms of education and health care, justice and equality? In an exclusive interview with C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout, world-renowned public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin tackle these issues.
- The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Antisemitism was found across the political divide in Russia's year of revolution.
- Borneo: Island Devastated, People Oblivious
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Borneo is now synonymous with mining and logging, as well as with terrible plantations that have already cannibalized most of the land. Nothing is being produced, but everything has been extracted.
- Bouncing Back Against the Corruption of Science in Capitalist Society
Part 2 of a 2-part series: The Role of Science in Capitalist Society and Social Change Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Part two in a look at capitalism and the role of science, and the strong evidence that science can be on the side of social justice and social change.
- Bounty Hunters
A clandestine war on wolves Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The centuries old killing of wolves has extirpated the species throughout most of the United States, yet there remains a strong anti-wolf lobby which continues to threaten even a modest recovery.
- Brazil: Amazon's Indians, rainforest under attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Attacks on Amazon Indians and on their land rights threaten vital areas of rainforest. FUNAI, the agency responsible for safeguarding indigenous tribes is being forced to withdraw due to underfunding, while Indians' attempts to assert their rights are met with state violence.
- Brazil: Government to abandon tribes to 'genocide' by loggers and ranchers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Brazil's extreme right wing government is preparing to open up the rainforest territories of uncontacted indigenous tribes to 'free for all' development by defunding the protection they currently receive.
- Brazil: Increase in land killings as political crisis threatens Amazon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Cuts to Funai, the agency meant to protect Brazil's indigenous tribes, have encouraged land barons to expand their land holdings into indigenous territories.
- The Breaking Of The Corporate Media Monopoly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Alternative articles are being shared more widely online than the views of mainstream newspaper commentators. Discussed in relation to 2017 UK election.
- Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerillas, and Digital Ninjas
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Breaking the Spell offers the first full-length study that charts the historical trajectory of anarchist-inflected video activism from the late 1960s to the present. Video plays an increasingly important role among activists in the growing global resistance against neoliberal capitalism.
- A brief dictionary to help understand the US far right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A break down of some of the most important phrases, terms and numerology that are used by the far right online.
- A Brief History of Mass Theft
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The process by which communal land and resources are appropriated by private wealth (or capital), and people are robbed of their self-sufficiency and thereby forced into a position where they have to sell their labour in order to survive, is called Primitive Accumulation. Today we might call this Privatisation, or in plain-speaking, Mass-Theft.The entire process of mass-theft took centuries to carry out in Western Europe and is often difficult to grasp in its entirety.
- Britain Refuses to Accept How Terrorists Really Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Self-interest is motive for the British government's portrayal of terrorism as essentially home-grown cancers within the Muslim community.
- Britain's Real Terror Apologists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite a smear campaign to denigrate Britain's Labour leader as soft on terror, Jeremy Corbyn pulled of a remarkable achievement in the general election.
- The British Camps
Though it reached its horrific heights at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the British, not the Nazis, pioneered the concentration camp. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Today, the expression "concentration camp" evokes the horrors of Nazi Germany, conjuring up black-and-white images of Auschwitz and Belsen. But Germans were neither the first nation to make use of concentration camps nor the last.
- Broadband monopolies to censor Internet content
Behind the FCC plan to abolish net neutrality Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The recently released plan by the American Federal Communications Commission to abolish net neutrality has evoked mass opposition across the US and around the world.
- Broken Homes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In East Jerusalem, home to 300,000 Palestinians, Israel has been using home demolition as a tool to control the population. Following what some have described as a "third Intifada" in 2015, Al Jazeera started monitoring the policy of home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem and how it was being enforced -- 2016 was documented to be a record year. Al Jazeera presents an extensive month by month report with graphs, video and photographs.
- Bullied BBC? Alternative media returns fire on claims it's waging 'war' on the corporation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Alternative media accused of waging "guerilla warfare" against the BBC by its former political editor Nick Robinson say they are just providing balance to the 'biased' government-funded corporation.
- The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America's Soldiers
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of the book, "The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America's Soldiers" by Joseph Hickman.
- Call Center Unions Build International Connections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 One big issue in the three-day strike by 38,000 AT&T workers was the company's offshoring of jobs. To shine a spotlight on the issue and strengthen international solidarity, a group of union members visited the Dominican Republic a couple of weeks before the strike to meet the call center workers on the other end of that offshoring.
- Can You Say "Conflict of Interest"? Not at the UN
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Exposing the ways that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) allows oil giants to shape negotiations.
- Canada's Impossible Acknowledgment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its final report in 2015 with ninety-four calls to action, and renewed hope that the nation would finally confront its darkest history with tangible action. This article looks at why this process has yet again stalled, one which repeats the cycle of promises and yet again does not deliver.
- Canada's State of Reconciliation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The brutal suppression of water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota and their ongoing resistance has also galvanized Canadian conversations about Indigenous land rights and environmental welfare.
- The Canadian Left and Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Accusations of Left anti-Semitism may mask a more significant racism problem on the Left.
- Canadian William Grant Stairs: Killing Natives and Seizing their Land for Leopold II in Congo
A Brutal Part of Canada's Dark History in Africa Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 William Grant Stairs of Halifax played an important role in two expeditions that expanded Leopold II's profitable Congolese venture, one that included forced labour and ultimately resulted in millions of deaths.
- The Cancer in Blue: Cop Documentaries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 John Ridely's film "Let it Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992" is a 144-minute kaleidoscope of interviews and television news footage that climaxes in the riots that followed the acquittal of four cops who were captured on home video by a man named George Holliday as they were beating Rodney King with steel batons.
- Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital by Jason Moore. The author examines how capitalism is innately destructive of its environment, but the solution is revolutionary socialist organisation says Graham-Leigh.
- The Case for Haitian Reparations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A history of France's exploitation of colonial Haiti, the aftermath of Haiti's independence, and the lasting social and environmental impacts, arguing for Haiti's recent demands of reparations from the French government.
- A Case Study in the Creation of False News
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Paul Craig Roberts discusses a classic case in the creation of false news.
- Catalonia: The Revolt of the Rich?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Catalonian rebellion, similar to Scottish separatism, is an uprising of the rich against the poor, the protests of a liberal society against the remnants of a redistributive social state.
- CBC Radio badly off track with too much personal storytelling
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 CBC Radio's wandering off into a journalistic sub-culture must be curtailed. At most, radio's schedule should include a couple of the storytelling programs.
- The Censorious Vortex of the "Flash News" Barons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For decades, the factors that decided what noteworthy stories would not find their way into print or on the air came down to the media's ignorance, laziness or from advertising restraints. For too long, the explosive material for good journalism in these and other areas had remained hidden in plain sight.
- A Century Later, Namibia Demands Justice From Germany for Its First Holocaust
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Between 1904 and 1908, German colonialists committed a holocaust against the Herero and the Nama, exterminating as many as 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama. Now Namibia is demanding reparations.
- The Challenge of Defining Fossil Fuel Subsidies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of the ways fossil fuel subsidies are measured and why semantic arguments over definitions may be missing the point.
- Challenging Racism isn't Anti-Semetic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Engler criticizes Canadians' willingness to defend the Jewish Defense League, even with their growing connection to white supremist groups.
- Changing minds on a changing climate
What Makes Climate Science Deniers Change Their Minds? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Reddit commenters point to reasons they went from being climate contrarians to having confidence in mainstream climate science.
- The Character of the Russian Revolution: Trotsky 1917 vs. Trotsky 1924
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An analysis of the evolution of Leon Trotsky's views from 1917 to 1924.
- Chicago Teachers Settle Contract
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While an almost 3-1 vote in favor is decisive, the vote against is significant in showing both dissatisfaction and anger among teachers. Who voted against the contract?
- Child Soldiers Reloaded: The Privatisation of War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at private military companies, a multibillion-dollar industry, and how they recruit former child soldiers for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Includes a link to the film by Mads Ellesoe.
- China Widens its Silk Road to the World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 China's new 'Silk Road' initiative is a large-scale, multilateral development Asian project which has the potential to change the shape of the world economy.
- China's Ancient Labor Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Mozi was an outstanding thinker and what is more a militant, grounded on a well-defined program, who fought on behalf of the toilers in ancient China.
- Chinese neocolonialism in Africa
The Dragon eating the African Lion and Cheetah? (Part I) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 China has literally invaded Africa with its investors, traders, lenders, builders, developers, labourers and who knows what else. The fancy phrase for that is win-win cooperation. The "cooperation" has opened up Africa as a source of raw materials for China and a dumping ground for cheap Chinese manufactured goods. It is Chinese neocolonialism.
- Choices Facing African Americans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For African Americans, this campaign against Russia (and North Korea, Iran) is a diversion from more central issues including the right to vote.
- Chomsky clarifies position on the cultural boycott of Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Prof. Noam Chomsky makes the essential point: the presence of international artists in Israel is used by the government to cover up its occupation and human rights abuses.
- Christophe Guilluy, Le crepuscule de la France d'en haut: Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Le crepuscule de la France d'en haut, by Christophe Guilluy (2016).
- Chronicle of Black Detroit
Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination (Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Herb Boyd's Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination.
- The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Author of three books on CIA operations, Valentine’s research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam.
- CIA Chief Declares War on Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Mike Pompeo made it clear that he has little regard for truth, for personal decency, or for the Constitutional protections for free speech or for the free exercise of religion. It was an altogether chilling debut for a spy agency head in a country that still imagines itself enjoying some basic freedoms.
- The CIA in Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Edited excerpt from "The CIA as Organized Crime", by Douglas Valentine, detailing the CIA's activities in Ukraine and influence on political movements there.
- The CIA Reads French Theory
On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A recently unclassifed CIA documents reveals that in the 1980s, the agency had its analysts devote substantial time and resources to studying trends in French theory, and specifically, the work that writers like Michel Foucault, Jacques, and Roland Barthes were doing in undermining the Marxist left. The CIA saw this trend as beneficial to the maintenance of American power, and capitalism generally, because it undermind the idea that there could or should be fundamental revolutionary change.
- CIA sneak undetectable 'malicious' implants onto Windows OS - WikiLeaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Windows machines are targeted by the CIA under 'Angelfire,' according to the latest release from WikiLeaks' 'Vault7' series. The documents detail an implant that can allow Windows machines to create undetectable libraries.
- CIA wrote code 'to impersonate' Russia's Kaspersky Lab anti-virus company, WikiLeaks says
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 WikiLeaks published documents exposing the elaborated malware suite used by the CIA to hack, record and control modern hi-tech appliances worldwide.
- The CIA's 60-Year History of Fake News: How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In this week's episode of "Scheer Intelligence," Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer interviews Joel Whitney, author and co-founder of Guernica magazine.Whitney's new book, "Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers," explores how the CIA influenced acclaimed writers and publications during the Cold War to produce subtly anti-communist material. During the interview, Scheer and Whitney discuss these manipulations and how the CIA controlled major news agencies and respected literary publications.
- Civil Rights Movement Is a Reminder That Free Speech Is There to Protect the Weak
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The importance of First Amendment rights is examined, and even while those rights do protect actions of the powerful, the author argues that it is ultimately the poor and powerless who beneffit from it's protection.
- Class and class struggle in China today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of the transformed economy in China and the consequent changes in class relations, and how the Communist Party has managed to maintain its rule.
- Class Dismissed: Identity Politics Without The Identity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In a capitalist society, work is at the core of identity, In the United States there are sharply divergent attitudes between professionals and the working class.
- Class, Party and the Challenge of State Transformation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An essay examining the challenges of changing the state and status quo following major crises of capitalism, and how the current neoliberal status quo has persisted through the various crises it has presented.
- Class, Race and Marxism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Through the lense of Marxism, Roediger argues that racial divisions and the identity of whiteness are inexorably connected to capitalism and the logic of capital.
- Cleaning Toilets for Jesus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of the job-readiness program called Jobs for Life. Founded in 1996 in North Carolina, JFL is a global nonprofit organization premised on the belief that the local church is the ideal solution to unemployment and poverty.
- Climate Change As Genocide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Is this what a world battered by climate change will be like—one in which tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of people perish from disease, starvation, and heat prostration while the rest of us, living in less exposed areas, essentially do nothing to prevent their annihilation?
- Climate Struggles and Ecosocialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The hard right U.S. administration of Donald Trump has widened the terrain of struggle over climate change and, indeed, the entire array of environmental issues facing the ecology of North America and the working class movement.
- Clinton, Assange and the War on Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An overview of an interview with Hilary Clinton by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to promote her score-settling book about why she was not elected President of the United States.
- Clinton lost because PA, WI, and MI have high casualty rates and saw her as pro-war, study says
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A new study appears to show that Hilary Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in the 2016 presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate.
- C. L. R. James and His Times
Every Cook Can Govern: The Life, Impact and the Works of C.L.R. James Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Review of the Worldwrite documentary film Every Cook Can Govern: The Life, Impact and the Works of C.L.R. James.
- CNN: "Russia is an Adversary, Ukraine is Not."
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Monday morning. David Chalian, CNN Political Director, on CNN's "New Day" program. News ticker: "How do Trump-Russia and DNC-Ukraine compare?" New Day co-anchor Alysin Camerota (former Fox anchor) puts the question to her Political Director. Chalian's mechanical reply: "Russia is an adversary, Ukraine is not."
- Coal Miners' Futures in Renewable Energy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 If President Trump wants to earn a rare legislative victory and take political credit for reviving hard-hit regions of rural America, he should take a close look at how one Kentucky coal company is creating jobs.
- A Coalition of Scientists Keeps Watch on the U.S. Government's Climate Data
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Via memos leaked to the press, rogue tweets, and unnamed agency sources, the public learned of growing pressure on federal employees to avoid sharing their scientific work. Meanwhile, small but significant changes to federal web pages hinted at the demise of former president Barack Obama’s efforts to manage climate change.
- Colin Kaepernick: Patriotism and the Owning Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 National Football League player Colin Kaepernick takes a stand for human rights by kneeling during the U.S. national anthem prior to football games.
- Collateral Damage: U.S. Sanctions Aimed at Russia Strike Western European Allies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Sanctions by the U.S. Congress which aims to distance relations with Russia may also have a crippling effect on European banks, particularly those in Germany and France.
- Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia
Introduction to the December 17, 2017 issue of Other Voices Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Our society is obsessed with the short-term present. It devalues memories and the past. That's the nature of capitalism, especially the speeded-up hypercapitalism of today. The past is useless: profits are made by getting rid of the old and replacing it with something new.
- Colonialism Never Gives Anything Away for Nothing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Decolonization is a violent phenomenon exemplified in Zohra Drif’s memoir, "Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter."
- The colour-coded Israeli ID system for Palestinians
Israel's control over the Palestinian population is based on a system of colour-coded IDs in the occupied territories Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at the colour-coded system of Palestinian population control that has remained in place in Israel for five decades; it still affects everything from freedom of movement to family unity.
- Comey's Lies of Omission
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of testimony by FBI Director James Comey, which pitted President Donald Trump against the powerful US foreign policy establishment that aims to punish the President for not being 'sufficienty hostile' to the Kremlin.
- A common treasury for all: Gerrard Winstanley's vision of utopia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Gerrard Winstanley was the ideological force behind the Diggers, a left-wing movement during the English Revolution. The Digger movement of 1648-1650 arose out of the juncture of three processes, notably the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
- Community Organizing in Philly and New York
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look back at the NY and Philadelphia community activist groups White Lighting, O4O, Standing Up Angry, Young Patriots, and what can be learned towards building compelling and viable alternatives to the Right.
- Comply or Die: the Police State's Answer to Free Speech Is Brute Force
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Forget everything you’ve ever been taught about free speech in America. It's all a lie.There can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.
- A Comprehensive Map of American Lynchings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at the practice of lynching in the United States through to the 1960's, where thousands of non-white Americans, mostly black, were killed in public acts of terror. A new map project called 'Monroe Work Today', named after the pioneering sociologist, shows that lynching was not limited to the southern states.
- Concrete, or beaches? World's sand running out as global construction booms
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A crucial component of concrete, sand is vital to the global construction industry. China alone is importing a billion tonnes of sand a year, and its increasing scarcity is leading to large scale illegal mining and deadly conflicts. With ever more sand fetched from riverbeds, shorelines and sandbanks, roads and bridges are being undermined and beaches eroded. And the world's sand wars are only set to worsen.
- Condemnation Grows for Bipartisan Attack on Free Speech Rights of BDS Supporters
Lawmakers urged to reject bill that would punish Americans for supporting boycotts of Israel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A pair of bipartisan bills targeting boycotts of Israel and Israeli settlements appear to have widespread support in Congress, to the dismay of civil rights advocates who say the proposals are an attack on free speech.
- Confederate Monuments Down
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For the rewriters, the Civil War became a "misunderstanding" (as Donald Trump echoes today) and Confederate generals and politicians were transformed into great Southern heroes and cultural icons. African-Americans were routinely humiliated, brutalized, and mutilated.
- Confessions of a (verified) Russia-linked Twitter Bot
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Twitter's defines any user who has "ever logged in, at any time, from Russia" as being "Russia-linked." This is taking the new McCarthyism to ridiculous levels.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2017
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- Connexions Information Sharing Services - Wikipedia Article - Filipino text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- Connexions welcomes your support
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Your contribution to Connexions will help us preserve the memories, experiences, strategies, success, failures and visions of those who have worked for social justice over the years so that future generations can learn and be inspired by them.
- Consigned to the Memory Hole: The content of the DNC Leaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examining the content of the DNC data leaks during the 2016 US elections, and the efforts by the Democratic party to distract from their content.
- A Consistently Erroneous Technology
A Magician in the Lab Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at the polygraph, or lie detector technology, and why it is unreliable.
- The conspiracy to censor the Internet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The political representatives of the American ruling class are engaged in a conspiracy to suppress free speech. Under the guise of combating "trolls" and "fake news" supposedly controlled by Russia, the most basic constitutional rights enumerated in the First Amendment are under direct attack.
- Coopting the language of the left at the pro-life march on Washington
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examining the use of left wing rhetoric by a participant of the pro-life match on Washington to justify right wing ideologies and policies, and the broader impliciations of such tactics.
- Corporate America Unmasked
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While US public views seem generally favourable about American corporations, an extensive study by psychologist Dr. Gary Brumback concludes that leadership, particularly in large corporations, is found to be morally depraved and their organizations often dysfunctional.
- Could Punching Nazis Have Prevented Hitler From Taking Power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There have been repeated references to how Nazism could have been stopped by street-fighting, with almost no attention paid to the concrete socio-political conditions of Germany between 1920 and 1933. For many of those who think that physical force was the key to stopping Nazism, the viral video of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face was far more important as a guide to action than understanding the tragic history of the German left.
- Counter Mobilization: an Effective Response to Right Wing Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As the effects of the Great Recession linger, the ruling rich are making every effort to ensure that the working class bears the brunt of the economic crunch. In this atmosphere, elements of the extreme right feel emboldened to promote their reactionary wares. From the increasing visibility of right wing websites like breitbart.com, to well-publicized speaking tours by conservative ideologues like Milo Yiannopoulos and others, to former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon attaining the status of presidential advisor – the message from the top is clear: racism, sexism and xenophobia will all be used to divide and oppress the 99%. Meanwhile, these same poisonous sentiments are used to divert attention from those actually responsible for and benefiting from the current crisis.
- Cowardly New World: Alternative Media Under Attack by Algorithms
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An insidious assault is underway against alternative media on the internet. Leftist and progressive websites have been suffering significant declines in traffic. Some have had online income sources cut. Many others have been publicly defamed.
The only voices speaking the truth, says Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, are those on the fringes and we must amplify them however we can. Some suggestions:
* Read/view alternative media stories and share them in whatever venues you can.
* Stop consuming mainstream media and stop posting links to it.
* Actively support alternative media by donating money, time or other resources.
* Stop using Google as your search engine; I recommend DuckDuckGo. You will be surprised at how much you've been missing.
* Become the media: take your own photos or video and write up stories yourself for whatever outlet will take your work, even if that's only your own blog.
- CRAC-PC: take the arms and the destiny of our lives in Guerrero, Mexico
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 A documentary on the CRAC-PC (Regional Coordinator of Communitary Authorities - Communitarian Police), a police force of community volunteers elected by regional assemblies, operating in the Guerrero state in Mexico.
- Creating a Socialism that Meets Needs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is widespread and growing understanding that the current social order cannot continue without catastrophe occurring - yet we lack a vision of what might replace it.
- Creating an Ecological Society
Toward a Revolutionary Transformation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Because it aims squarely at replacing capitalism with an ecologically sound and socially just society, Creating an Ecological Society is filled with revolutionary hope. Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, who have devoted their lives to activism, Marxist analysis, and ecological science, provide informed, fascinating accounts of how a new world can be created from the ashes of the old.
- A creeping quiet in Indian journalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How a combination of government pressure, harassment by political activists, commercial actors including both advertisers and some media owners, is exercising a chilling effect on Indian journalism.
- The Crimes of Seal Team 6
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6 is today the most celebrated of the U.S. military's special mission units. But hidden behind the heroic narratives is a darker, more troubling story of "revenge ops," unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities -- a pattern of criminal violence that emerged soon after the Afghan war began and was tolerated and covered up by the command's leadership.
- Cultural Appropriation and Secular Blasphemy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On the controversies over 'cultural appropriation'.
- Cultural Imperialism and the Seeds of Catastrophe: Ripping Up The Social Fabric of India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Foreign capital is dictating the prevailing development agenda in India. The aim is to replace current structures with a system of industrial agriculture suited to the needs of Western agribusiness, food processing and retail concerns.The plan is for a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and large chain supermarkets offering a diet of highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food based on crops soaked with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security.
- Cutting Cords to Kurds: Facebook's Foreign Policy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The recent deletion and suspension of Facebook accounts of Kurdish supporters provides further troubling evidence that the popular social media company has been censoring the Kurdish resistance for the past five years.
- Dakota Access-Style Policing Moves to Pennsylvania's Mariner East 2 Pipeline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examination of the troubling fusion of private security, public law enforcement, and corporate money in the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline.
- The danger of the white American liberal
What a team of 10-year-olds building a robot can teach us about sexism and racism in the US. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Liberal white American reaction to the sexism and racism exeplified in the Google manifesto and the killing of nine innocent people at Emanuel AME church in Charleston shows how remarkably how easy it is to condemn the evil other when we can use that to avoid facing our responsibility for the society we ourselves have created and work to maintain.
- The Dangerous Academic is an Extinct Species
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Nair analyzes current academia and the structures in place that prevent academics and students from putting forth ideas that challenge the status quo.
- Dangerous Grounds
Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 As the Vietnam War divided the nation, a network of antiwar coffeehouses appeared in the towns and cities outside American military bases. Owned and operated by civilian activists, GI coffeehouses served as off-base refuges for the growing number of active-duty soldiers resisting the war.
- The Dangers of Salting Under Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Johnson analyzes the legal rights that a labour union 'salt' has -- or doesn't have -- in the wake of the anti-union of the U.S. government.
- Davis Day: Coal Miners & Community Connection
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An historical look at tragic events in the Cape Breton coal mining community, highlighting mining companyies' greed that led to unrest and disaster.
- Dawn of "Total War" and the Surveillance State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In its efforts to mobilize society for "total war," a still nascent corporate liberal state expanded its scope and authority and in doing so laid foundations and set precedents for the expansion of executive power and the rise of the national surveillance state.
- A Day in the Life of a Day Laborer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at day labourers in Chicago, many who work precariously, under dangerous conditions and sometimes without getting paid.
- DEA Lied to Congress About Deadly Raid That Killed Four Hondurans, Government Report Says
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Drug Enforcement Administration repeatedly lied to Congress about fatal shooting incidents in Honduras, including the killing of four civilians during a DEA-led operation, according to a devastating 424-page report released today by the inspectors general for the State and Justice departments.
- The Dead Don't Rest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Rodgers reviews two novels by Han Kang, "The Vegetarian" and "Human Acts", and analyzes their shared themes dealing with humanity's struggle against its own most destructive qualities.
- Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Martin Empson reviews an important book (DEAD ZONE: Where the Wild Things Were
by Philip Lymber,Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) for activists, a frightening examination of the impact of industrial agriculture on the environment, and particularly biodiversity.
- Death of an Activist in Venezuela: In Memory of Orlando Figueroa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Highlighting the death of a political activist in Venezuala by the utra-right, which uses brutality, murder and ecological destruction to pursue their goal of recuperating control over the oil producing nation.
- The Death of Liam Tumilson, an Irish Anti-Fascist in Spain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Murphy commemorates the life of Liam Tumilson, who fought against facism in the Spanish Civil War.
- Debating the world revolution
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of "To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International", edited and translated by John Riddell.
- Debunking the 2 claims: anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and BDS unfairly singles out Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author points out the falsehoods surrounding the two most common claims by those who oppose actions in support of Palestinian rights.
- The Decertification of Iran Speech: Refuting Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring each time it has reported - most recently in August 2017 - that Iran is in total compliance with its agreements in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Donald Trump has now carried through on his threat to decertify Iran.
- The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is a real danger here that this maneuver could harshly backfire, to the great benefit of Trump and to the great detriment of those who want to oppose him. If any of the significant claims in this “dossier” turn out to be provably false -- such as Cohen’s trip to Prague -- many people will conclude, with Trump’s encouragement, that large media outlets (CNN and BuzzFeed) and anti-Trump factions inside the government (CIA) are deploying "Fake News" to destroy him. In the eyes of many people, that will forever discredit -- render impotent -- future journalistic exposés that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing.
- The Deep State is the State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Like all elements of the state, the so-called deep state exists to enforce the economic supremacy of US capitalism.
- Demythifying Native Americans
"All the Real Indians Died Off" And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's and Dina Gilio-Whitaker's "All the Real Indians Died Off" And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans.
- Depraved Treatment of Drug War Captives on US Coast Guard Ships
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Wessler provides details in an interview transcript on how the United States Coast Guard routinely subjects individuals alleged to be involved in the transport of cocaine between South America and Central America to such conditions.
- Deranged and Deluded: The Media's Complicity In The Climate Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In an important recent book, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh refers to the present era of corporate-driven climate crisis as 'The Great Derangement'. For almost 12,000 years, since the last Ice Age, humanity has lived through a period of relative climate stability known as the Holocene. When Homo sapiens shifted, for the most part, from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to an agriculture-based life, towns and cities grew, humans went into space and the global population shot up to over seven billion people.
- Despair is Not a Strategy: 15 Principles of Hope
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Brockman lists various methods to prevent feelings of cynicism, frustration, and grief for social activists and to inspire renewed hope in their efforts.
- The Destruction of Inlet Beach
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As Inlet Beach undergoes development to turn the site into a tourist vacation spot and with no support from the county government or develepment laws, the local community is slowly driven away.
- The Destructive Power Trips of Amazon's Boss
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Pointed criticism of online retailer Amazon and its Boss Jeff Bezos, whose practices include avoiding state taxes, erosion of traditional retail and small business, and undermining the tax base in communities.
- Detroit Radicals' Odessey
In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James & Grace Lee Boggs Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Stephen M. Ward's In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James & Grace Lee Boggs.
- Detroit's Rebellion and Rise of the Neoliberal State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In 1967 hundreds of uprisings circulated across U.S. cities with unprecedented power and intensity. Almost always the provocation was racist police violence - ranging from arrests to beatings to shootings.
- Detroit's Rebellion at Fifty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 From the days of the Marcus Garvey nationalist movement in the early decades of the century, to Malcolm X, revolutionary autoworkers and the Black Power movement in the 1960s, Detroit was front and center in debates on strategy and tactics to win Black freedom.
- Detroit's Underground Economy: Where Capitalism Fails, Alternatives Take Root
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Detroit's economic comeback is greatly overstated, while many residents survive through informal business arrangements and bartering.
- Dialectics and Difference: Against the 'Decolonial Turn'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 "Decolonial" criticism is an example of vogue academic approach, which can be grafted onto preexisting disciplines and practices with relative ease. Still further, in so doing, it offers the semblance of radicalism, because it appears to challenge the tacit erasures and hidden presuppositions of prior revolutionary perspectives.
- Did Scandal Tip the Balance?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In 2014 a rumor circulated in UAW plants even beyond the Detroit area that UAW Vice President General Holiefield had been "on the take." He suddenly resigned, his administrative assistant was let go and within months Holiefield died from cancer. Then silence.
- The Dirty Secret of the Korean War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is a much darker denial at work in forgetting the specifics of history, and this unwillingness to honestly examine the Korean War is at the root of our ongoing conflict with North Korea.
- Disappeared on the Border: "Chase and Scatter" -- to Death
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The inhuman tactics used by US Border Patrol Agents against people corssing the border are causing untold numbers of migrants to die in the desert.
- Disaster at Arm's Length
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Grenfell Tower disaster in London exposes the class violence embedded in London's gentrifying neighbourhoods.
- Discovery of mass graves highlights bloody scramble for Congo’s resources
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Last week, a team with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights together with personnel from the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) discovered scores of mass graves in Kasai Province, a south central region of the Congo currently wracked by bloody conflict between the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and Kamuina Nsapu, a local tribal militia.
- Disobeying Spain: the Catalan Referendum for Independence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On October 1, 2017, all across Catalunya ballot boxes were ripped from people's hands by masked police and a dangerous violence was unleashed, at random, upon some of the 2,262,424 people who stood in long lines to cast their vote. The repression dealt by the Spanish State to prohibit the Catalan Referendum, in every bloodied baton and ever rubber bullet, transformed the day from a question of independence to a question of democracy.
- Divine ecstasy of Nature: Selected Writings by John Muir
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A new collection of John Muir's (1838-1914) writings promises to inspire another generation to fall in love with wild nature, to care for it, to know that wilderness is not optional but central to our survival in the centuries to come. His words survive him. "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."
- Do you know a community that might like a new newspaper?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 At least 171 media organizations in 138 communities closed between 2008 and this January [2017]. However, Canadian communities still should be able to have reliable newspapers. They need to explore creating community-controlled not-for-profit papers.
- Do You Socialists Have Any Plans?
Why we need socialist architects Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Bruce Lerro claims that the only way 21st century socialism is going to get any traction or respect from the working class is if socialists collectively develop blueprints for socialism: five years, ten years, fifty years down the road.
- Doctors in Denial
Why Big Pharma and the Canadian medical professionals are too close for comfort Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A look into the disturbing relationships between medical doctors and Big Pharma, which has influenced what medical students learn and the interactions doctors have with their patients.
- Document Trove Details Bradley Foundation's Efforts to Build Right-Wing "Infrastructure" Nationwide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Documents examined by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) expose a national effort funded by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to assess and expand right-wing "infrastructure" to influence policies and politicians in statehouses nationwide.
- Does Freedom of Speech Include Fascists?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There are two concepts on how to deal with fascism. One is fighting; the other is running away.
- Dolores
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 Dolores is a 2017 documentary directed by Peter Bratt on the life of activist Dolores Huerta. The film focuses on Huerta's work to organize farmworkers in California to form the United Farm Workers (UFW), in alliance with such movements as the Chicano Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, LGBTQ social movements, and the late 20th century Women's rights movement.
- Don Draper Rules: Russian Ads and American Madness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 So we've finally seen some of the social media ads which we are told skewed the entire election in 2016 and constituted a key part of the internet assault on America launched by Vladimir Putin's "troll army." Scary stuff blazoned across front pages and screen scrolls everywhere. But before going on, perhaps we should find out what makes a social media account part of Putin's invasion force?
Well, according to Twitter, it is ANY account created in Russia.
- Donald Trump and the death of the two-state solution
The demise of the two-state has been evident for some time. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 At his meeting with the US President Donald Trump at the White House on February 15, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scored what in his eyes must be a spectacular diplomatic success: he got the new president to reverse the US' long-standing support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to give him a free hand to do more or less whatever he likes with the West Bank.
- Donald Trump Has Been a Racist All His Life -- And He Isn't Going to Change After Charlottesville
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Consider the first time the president's name appeared on the front page of the New York Times was an article which pointed out that the Department of Justice had sued the Trump family's real estate company in federal court over alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act because of anti-black bias. Over the next four decades, Trump burnished his reputation as a bigot.
- Don't Call the Cops If You're Autistic, Deaf, Mentally Ill, Disabled or Old
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 When people entering the police service are trained to be military warriors instead of peace officers, tense situations involving some of our society's more vulnerable people will more likely end violently.
- Don't tell me that working-class people can’t be articulate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 When writing dialogue, the idea that a drug dealer must be portrayed as verbally hesitant is daft -- language is not a tool issued by the nobility.
- Double standards: Do all journalist lives matter?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Little attention is paid to reporters from the Global South who are killed, abused, or left stranded by foreign media.
- Down on the Seed: The World Bank Enables Corporate Takeover of Seeds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Exposing how the World Bank's policies ignores and undermines farmer-managed seed systems and enables profiteering by agrochemical companies.
- Driverless Cars: Hype, Hubris and Distractions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The driverless personal car is quickly emerging without a legal, ethical and priorities framework, when priorities should be placed on safer, more efficient and less polluting means of transport.
- Drowning in the waste of Israeli settlers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Several decades ago, the al-Matwa spring in Salfit city would often be crowded with Palestinians hiking in the valley and families picnicking alongside the clear, flowing stream. Now, however, the sewage flowing through the spring, the rancid smell that engulfs the valley, and the mosquitoes swarming the area have left the valley largely deserted.
- Dump the Guardian!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Guardian has spent the last two years relentlessly attacking Jeremy Corbyn. Only recently has it changed its tune, perhaps worried that it has alienated too many readers. Corbyn's success has been despite the Guardian and the rest of the corporate media. The Guardian will now want readers to forget its propaganda war on Corbyn. We've compiled this list so they don't. Dump the Guardian!
- The Dying Days of Liberalism
How Orthodoxy, Professionalism, and Unresponsive Politics Finally Doomed a 19th-century Project Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It's not a small thing that has fallen here, not merely the defeat of Hillary Clinton and Americans rejecting Obama’s "legacy". We are dealing with a series of institutions, an expert class, and a network of political and corporate alliances, that is being shaken beyond repair. We are in the earliest days of a historical transition, so it's not clear what is coming next, and the labels that have been proliferating demonstrate confusion and uncertainty -- populism, nativism, nationalism, etc.
- Dylan and Woody: Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Daniel Wolff's 'Grown Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913.'
- Ear Hustle: Prison podcast tells of life in San Quentin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Recorded in the historic San Quentin State Prison, the new Ear Hustle podcast paints a human image of life in lockup.
- East York Workers' Association
Connexipedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The East York Workers' Association (EYWA) was an unemployment movement that developed during the Great Depression in the township of East York, Ontario.
- Ecologist Special Report: From fish to forests and conflicts to coffee ... how humans are affected by climate-driven species shifts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Climate change has species on the move, with major consequences for biodiversity and human communities. Building resilience has never been more important and Indigenous Peoples are showing the way.
- Ecologist Special Report: Why mining and violence are inextricably linked
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The South African government is currently embarking on streamlining decision-making processes in mining. To many this sounds like more top-down decision-making at the expense of those communities that will have to host mines and paves the way for more violent conflict, warns Jasper Finkeldey.
- Ecology and value theory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital.
- The Economy of an Ecological Society Will Be at the Service of Humanity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What would a truly just, equal and ecologically sustainable future look like? Why would it require a change in our economic system, namely the end of capitalism? Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams answer these questions in Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation.
- The Ecosocialism of Joel Kovel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Joel Kovel has been a prestigious and best-selling writer on psychotherapy, a militant left activist from the middle 1960s onward, an eco-theorist and an explorer of the world just beyond our sense perceptions.
- Ecuadoreans Won't Back Down in Fighting Chevron-Texaco Over Amazon Oil Disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A class-action lawsuit first filed in 1993 against Chevron-Texaco has taken its toll on the lawyers and Ecuadorean people seeking justice for environmental damage. Hope for justice and healing drives people to not give up.
- EducationSources.ca
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 Web portal with sources of information about education and academia, including articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Edward Snowden Has Some Advice for Donald Trump About Surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Emmons interviews NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about Trump's skewed priorities.
- Election Con 2016: New Evidence Demolishes the Myth of Trump's "Blue-Collar" Populism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Evidence indicates that Donald Trump's popularity among working class voters had less to do with economic insecurity and more to do with embracing support for elitist, pro-corporate, and reactionary social agendas.
- Election Interference Hypocrisy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While Canadian and Western media pursue Russian election meddling they ignore clear-cut Canadian meddling elsewhere, and the Unites States' long history of interference in elections around the world, including in Canada.
- Empire Abroad, Empire At Home
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The institutions and ideas U.S. elites used to project "full spectrum dominance" onto the global stage have eventually become part of the political order in the U.S. It is empire -- most of all -- that dooms democracy. As corporations have an insatiable drive for profit, empires have an insatiable drive for power.
- Empire of Destruction
Precision Warfare? Don't Make Me Laugh Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade and a half: rubble. It's been a painfully apt term since September 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of such war in this century, two new words might be useful: rubblize and rubblization.
- Endarkenment: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and the Attack on Free Speech
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2017 Many today find the idea of free speech appalling -- an awful fact to those who believe in freedom, quaint as it sounds. Left-liberals agitate to prevent disagreeable expression. Their masked street allies physically attack those who engage in it.
- Endarkenment: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and the Attack on Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Both postmodern thinking and identity politics, towards overthrowing their respective enemies, use ideological forms that mirror or caricature those of their enemies. identity politics adopted a basic characteristic of racism and bigotry (essentialism) in order to attack racism and bigotry.
- Endless Atrocities: The US Role In Creating The North Korean Fortress-State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An overview of the history that informs North Korea's relations with the United States and "drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat".
- Enemies of the People
How hatred of the masses bridges our partisan divide Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As we veer into a brave new age of right-wing populism, a restive mood of contempt for the masses has seized the opposition. Demoralized liberals, still reeling from the debacle of the 2016 presidential ballot, are salving their wounds with reveries of metaphysical superiority.
- Engels, Neanderthals and the origins of the family
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Based on concrete evidence from genetics and archaeology, Friedrich Engel's theories well over a hundred years ago are still relevant to current disputes about the origins of the human family.
- EnvironmentSources.com
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 Web portal with information about environmental issues and resources, with articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- E. P. Thompson's Socialist Humanism
E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Cal Winslow's E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics.
- The erasure of Syrian voices in Western media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Trapped between a police state and Al Qaeda, average Syrians explain why they fear regime change.
- Essential Debates at the Intersections of Science and Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the introduction to his new book "A Redder Shade of Green", Ian Angus says ecosocialism must be based on a careful synthesis of Marxist social science and Earth System science -- a twenty-first century rebirth of scientific socialism.
- Europe: Reactionary Working Class? "Could it be that the Left have failed their constituencies"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is no lack of condemnation and moralizing to those who go to the far right. An increasing number of commentators, however, are now beginning to suspect that the march of large groups of workers toward the far right can be an expression of protest against the prevailing social development. Not all have received the benefits from the globalization success story.
- Evicting the Underclass
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A Chinese government campaign to expel migrant workers from Beijing is designed to reap greater profits from urban land and reserve the city for elites.
- Evictions, trials as Russian Church claims property
With the resurgence of a Kremlin-endorsed monastery, islanders on Valaam have endured trials, evictions and arson. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With the resurgence of a Kremlin-endorsed monastery, islanders on Valaam have endured trials, evictions and arson.
- Expansion of Renewable Energies in Mexico Has Victims, Too
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An account of the impact of wind and solar projects in the Yucatan state of Mexico on the nearby communities, in particular farmers, and the failures of the government to consult or inform the community on the environmental impacts and contract terms.
- Expert panel identifies unacceptable toll of food and farming systems on human health
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The UN Committee on World Food Security in Rome has today launched a new report examining the impact of chemical intensive, industrial food system on human health.
- The Extraordinary Lynne Stewart
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Remembering Lynne Stewart, who died on March 12, 2017.
- Eyewitness at Standing Rock
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Interview with Rebecca Kemble.
- The Facts Proving Corbyn's Election Triumph
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Corbyn has proved himself the most popular Labour leader with the electorate in more than 40 years, apart from Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.
- Fair Play for Cuba Committee
Connexipedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- Fake news about the Rojava revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Sharply different opinions have developed among the radical left in recent years towards the Syrian radical democratic movement led by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) -- an initially Kurdish-based force which through a series of political and military struggles and alliances has recently formed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, as a model for a multi-ethnic, non-sectarian, federal and socially just alternative for the nation and the region.
- Fake News about Venezuela: A Simple Recipe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 "Journalists" who want to write fake news about Venezuela, or about any other country or group that dares to stand up to US imperialism, only need to follow this simple recipe:
- Choose one or more countries/groups opposed to US imperialism
- If available, have a former official, now being paid by the US government, make the accusations
- Season well with doses of "war on terror" and/or "war on drugs"
- Sprinkle with opinions of "experts" who work in DC think tanks or US-funded NGOs
- Fake news, echo chambers and filter bubbles: Underresearched and overhyped
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the early years of the internet, it was revolutionary to have a world of information just a click away from anyone, anywhere, anytime. Many hoped this inherently democratic technology could lead to better-informed citizens more easily participating in debate, elections and public discourse.
- Fake News Inquiry: Old Wine in New Bottles
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A criticism of a recent investigation by the UK's Culture, Media and Sports committee into 'fake news' and public persuasion by false propaganda, describing the challenges of identifying or preventing the dissemination of fake news.
- Fake News on Russia in the New York Times, 1917-2017
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Fake news on Russia is a Times tradition that can be traced back at least as far as the 1917 revolution.
- 'Fake news' or free speech: Is Google cracking down on left media?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Left leaning progressive websites say they are being unfairly penalized by Google's efforts to stamp out fake news.
- Fake News: the Unravelling of US Empire From Within
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A war of opposing certitudes and denunciations is waged day to day between the long-ruling US corporate media and the White House. Both continuously proclaim ringing recriminations of the other's 'fake news'. Over months they both portray each other as malevolent liars.
- FAO: Plantations are not forests!
Since 1948 the UN's Food and Agriculture has been clinging to an outmoded definition of 'forests' that includes industrial wood plantations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The FAO definition considers forests to be basically just 'a bunch of trees', while ignoring other fundamental aspects of forests, including their many other life-forms such as other types of plants, as well as animals, and forest-dependent human communities. Equally, it ignores the vital contribution of forests to natural processes that provide soil, water and oxygen.
- Fascism and the far right; twenty years on
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Author Dave Renton revisits his book Fascism: Theory and Practice, and examines how his perspectives would change if he was to think today about the same questions raised 20 years ago.
- Fascism and anti-fascism in 1930s Manchester
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An account of the growth of fascism in Manchester in the early 1930s, and working class resistance to it.
- Fast food rights: organising the unorganised
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The experience from the examples of organising the unorganised both in the US and UK demonstrate that it is possible to develop union organisation; significant examples are discussed in this article, particularly in a British context.
- Fast and Furious: Now They're Really Gunning for Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Allegations about President Donald Trump revealing highly classified intelligence are intended to bring him down.
- The FBI: Silent Terror of the Fourth Reich
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Lately, there's been a lot of rhetoric comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. The concern is that a Nazi-type regime may be rising in America. That process, however, began a long time ago.
- The FBI's Forgotten Criminal History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The FBI has a long record of both deceit and incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was teaching its agents that "the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others." This has practically been the Bureau's motif since its creation in 1908.
- The FBI's Perjury Trap of the Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 John Brennan, Jim Comey, Sally Yates, Peter Strzok and a passel of deep state operatives -- all of whom baldly abused their offices, set a perjury trap designed to snare Mike Flynn as a first step in relitigating and reversing the voters' verdict.
- The FBI's Secret Rules
President Trump has inherited a vast domestic intelligence agency with extraordinary secret powers. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A collection of articles exploring the contents and implications of a cache of internal FBI manuals, offering a rare window into the FBI’s quiet expansion since 9/11.
- Fear and Trembling in the Workplace
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Organized labour is desperately in need of a major facelift. The AFL-CIO needs to hire the best public relations firm in the land, pay them what they ask, do exactly as they say, and get busy educating the American public.
- A Few Things About Nonviolence: A Response to Yoav Litvin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The goal of a true movement opposing American fascism should not be adrenaline-boosting brawls, it can only be the long and dedicated work of dismantling various engines of white supremacy within our socio-political landscape.
- Fighting Back for Survival
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The editors reflect on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
- Fighting Fascism: the Irish at the Battle of Cordoba
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A history of the role played by Irish citizens who enlisted to fight against General Franco's fascist forces in Spain in 1936.
- Fighting for climate justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Climate change is a key factor in oppression of the poor worldwide.
- Fighting for Their Water and Their Lives, Communities Take Direct Action Against Barrick Gold in the Dominican Republic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 People who live near the Pueblo Viejo gold mine iin Dominican Republic struggle to gain accountabilty from the Canadian-owned companies running it. Their environment has been poisoned and they want funds for 600 families to be relocated.
- Fighting Franco: the First Irish Casualties of the Spanish Civil War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A brief biography of Tommy Patten and Jack Barry focusing on their involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
- Fighting the Wrong Enemy: Why Americans Hate Muslims
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Certainly, anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments in the US have been around for generations, but it has risen sharply in the last two decades. Arabs and Muslims have become an easy scapegoat for all of America's failed wars and counter-violence.
- Finance as Warfare: the IMF Lent to Greece Knowing It Could Never Pay Back Debt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An interview with economist Michael Hudson, who argues that the International Monetary Fund provided loans to Greece with the deliberate intention that the country be forced to go into default and be forced to sell public assets and land.
- Finland: 100th anniversary of workers' revolution drowned in blood
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at the Workers' Revolution in Finland, a source of inspiration and a powerful example of the strength of collective struggle.
- First of Its Kind Study Shows 55,400 People Hospitalized or Killed by US Cops in a Single Year
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The authors of a study which examined police interactions with the public conclude that alarmingly high numbers reflect an "excess exposure" of people to police violence.
- The Flint Militants
Eighty years ago, the Flint Sit-Down Strike showed the power of a determined rank and file and a class-conscious leadership Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In 1937 hundreds of autoworkers seized two General Motors (GM) plants in Flint, Michigan, paralyzing the massive corporation's production line. The workers' new tactic - the sit-down strike - threatened to fundamentally change the balance of power between workers and management.
- Florynce Kennedy & Black Feminism
Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Sherie M. Randolph's Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical.
- Following the Levellers, volume One
Political and Religious Radicals in the English Civil War and Revolution, 1645–1649 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 This book reinterprets the Leveller authorships of John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn, and foregrounds the role of ordinary people in petitioning and protest during an era of civil war and revolution.
- A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Capitalism drives our global food system. Everyone who wants to end hunger, who wants to eat good, clean, healthy food, needs to understand capitalism. This book will help do that.
- Forest Service's 'Independent' Report on Atlantic Coast Pipeline Written by Pipeline Company Contractor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The U.S. Forest Service recently published an assessment of the proposed Atlantic Coast pipeline, calling the report "independent." In reality the assessment was performed and written by none other than a contractor working for the pipeline company.
- The Fort Hood 43
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A history of the 43 infantrymen who refused to be deployed against protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
- Forty Questions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An excerpt from Valeria Luiselli's book "Tell me How it Ends", a damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children in the United States.
- Fracking kills newborn babies - polluted water likely cause
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A new study in Pennsylvania, USA shows that fracking is strongly related to increased mortality in young babies. The effect is most pronounced in counties with many drinking water wells indicating that contamination by 'produced water' from fracking is a likely cause. Radioactive pollution with uranium, thorium and radium is a 'plausible explanation' for the excess deaths.
- Frantz Fanon: Decolonisation through revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015); Lewis R Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015); and Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution (I B Taurus, 2016). The three books illustrate a renewed interest among activists and within academia in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. The three highlighted works demonstrate that Fanon has many lessons for current movements against racism, imperialism and capitalism.
- Franz Kafka: In His Times and Ours
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Michael Lowy's Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer.
- Free Speech for the Right? A Primer on Key Legal Questions and Principles
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The rise in national attention to the "alt-right" and fascist-white supremacist protesters has raised questions about the parameters of free speech in America. When can free speech be limited, if ever? What are the implications of attempting to limit controversial speech? And what precedents has the Supreme Court set regarding free speech?
- Free Speech and Unsafe Spaces
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Malik criticizes "the blinkered, self-centred, indeed narcissistic, attitudes that shape much contemporary discussion on speech and its limits. Free speech, from this perspective, requires not a robust exchange of ideas but the validation of my views. I should have the right to denounce anyone I wish, but criticism of my views is a denial of my free speech. Vigorously defending oneself against criticism is to deny safe space for one's critics."
- Freedom for the Speech We Hate: a Legal Guide to Your Protest Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A list of Constitutional questions and answers, including laws and guidelines for peaceful protesting, aimed at promoting the effectiveness of the First Amendment.
- The Freeland-Chomiak Connection: "It takes a village to raise a Nazi"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Sanders uncovers Chrystia Freeland's, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, own personal and professional connection with fascist groups and publications.
- From an Open Internet, Back to the Dark Ages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the "democratic" west, it is being done differently. The state does not have to interfere directly -- it outsources its dirty work to corporations.
- From Left Radicalism to Radical Islamism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The current preoccupations of Islamic youth in Britian are much different from the anti-racist activism and political radicalism of the author's generation.
- From the Editors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Beyond the specifics of the disagreements regarding the election results, it also became clear that political support for the Insurgent Notes project, as it had evolved within that small group was not as deep-seated as needed to allow for coherent decision-making about how we should proceed. We are in the process of forming a new editorial group that we hope will address that fundamental challenge.
- Fury at Azaria Verdict is Israel's Trump Moment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examining the popular reaction to the conviction in military court of Elor Azaria for manslaughter as demonstrating a deep social divide in the vein of Trump's election in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK.
- The Future Belongs to the Blasphemers
A message from ex-Muslims to mark International Blasphemy Day Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Some people believe that disagreeing with deeply held beliefs is hate. It is not. I want to remind you that many of the most powerful ideas, ideas that changed our world were once heretical. I want to remind you that many of the most radical thinkers and reformists in past eras were blasphemers against the established order of their day.
- Gaza's women of steel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Gadzo interviews three different women in Gaza who have taken on difficult, yet culturally progressive, employment in the wake of the region's economic devastation.
- Gender segregation is humiliating and damaging
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author looks at gender segregation, drawing on her own personal experiences in Iran but also in a broader context and the resulting psychological damage done to girls from a very young age.
- Gene Drives: A Scientific Case for a Complete and Perpetual Ban
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 One of the central issues of our day is how to safely manage the outputs of industrial innovation. Novel products incorporating nanotechnology, biotechnology, rare metals, microwaves, novel chemicals, and more, enter the market on a daily basis. The majority of products receive no regulatory supervision at all.
- The Genocide of the Rohingya: Big Oil, Failed Democracy and False Prophets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 To a certain extent, Aung San Suu Kyi is a false prophet. Glorified by the west for many years, she was made a 'democracy icon' because she opposed the same forces in her country, Burma, at the time that the US-led western coalition isolated Rangoon for its alliance with China.
- Gentrification Represents a Geography of Inequality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What does gentrification mean for the future of American cities? It means more than the arrival of trendy shops and expensive coffee. Peter Moskowitz intertwines human narratives with incisive analysis of the systemic forces contributing to America's crises of race and inequality, in How to Kill a City. Click here now to order this book with a donation to Truthout!The following is a Truthout interview with Peter Moskowitz, author of How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.
- Geri Allen: A Tribute
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 By the time Geri Allen, the pianist, composer and Detroit native who died June 27, 2017 at the age of 60, arrived in New York City in 1984, she had finished one of the most rigorous formal educations then available for an aspiring jazz musician, and it showed
- The German Revolution (World Revolution for Beginners Part III)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It's really important to understand that the Nazis made real appeals to the working class, not very successfully, but they considered themselves to be a party that was for a workers' revolution, but for a German Workers Revolution. So, that’s something often lost in translation when people just say "Nazis" or "National Socialists".
- Germany's Network Enforcement Act: Legal framework for censorship of the Internet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On October 1, 2017, the Network Enforcement Act took effect in Germany. Under the cover of a fight against "fake news" and "hate speech," it creates a legal framework for censorship of the Internet.
- Getting Assange: the Untold Story
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The witchhunt against Wikileaks founder Jullian Assange.
- Ghost Nation
An ethnic-cleansing campaign by the government threatens to empty South Sudan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Reporter Nick Turse provides a first hand acount of his time spent covering a refugee crisis in Southern Sudan, where the government's Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is committing atrocities that include mass rape, mutilation, torture, and the burning down of villages.
- The Ghosts of St. Louis Future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Maxwell provides an analysis of the court decision by Judge Timothy J. Wilson's acquital of Jason Stockley, the white St. Louis cop charged with the first-degree murder of Anthony Lamar Smith (a 24-year-old African American).
- Gig Economy or Odd Jobs: What May Seem Trendy to Privileged City Dwellers and Suburbanites is as Old as Poverty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The rise of precarious employment is not a stimulus to "creativity" but a long-established way of explloiting the poor.
- Gilroy and Reed on Race, Class & Culture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The common theme has been the way that those who call themselves 'progressive' or 'anti-racist' often draw upon ideas that are deeply regressive and rooted in racial ways of thinking; and that the consequences of identity politics and of concepts such as cultural appropriation is to bring about not social justice but the empowerment of those who would act as gatekeeprs to particular communities. The articles have inevitably drawn much hostility, especially from would-be gatekeepers, who insist that to challenge such ideas is to challenge antiracism, even to 'defend white supremacy'.
- Giving a Voice to Local NGOs in a Flawed Global Aid Environment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Driven by wealthy donor countries, the global aid environment is flawed and unbalanced, and evidence suggests it is taking advantage of the regions they are supposed to be helping.
- A Global Matrix of Control
War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Jeff Halper's War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification.
- Globalization vs. Empire: Can Trump Contain the Growing Split?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A brief history of US policy supporting globalization and the growing divide it has created between US hegemony and global capitalism, and criticism of the Trump administrations capability to deal with the impacts of this divide.
- Globe and Mail promotes Controversial Mining Magnate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How close is too close when it comes to media outlets working with institutions set up by wealthy individuals to influence the news? The question becomes important to ask when Canada's "national newspaper" promotes a worldview paid for by one of the planet's most controversial mining magnates. The Globe and Mail's close ties to the Munk Debates and University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs should worry journalists and everyone who cares about foreign policy discussion in this country.
- God: A Human History - a rescue attempt by Reza Aslan
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Gods and religions have caused so much distress that even those who have spent a lifetime apologising for and ignoring the doctrinal foundations of their abuses must make a rescue attempt.
- Goddess of Anarchy
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Biography of Lucy Parsons.
- Good To Know You! - John Berger's ways of seeing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A tribute to the life and work of John Berger, author of the influential 'Ways of Seeing'.
- Goodbye to Golden Rice? GM Trait Leads to Drastic Yield Loss and "Metabolic Meltdown"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While proponents of Golden rice have blamed its failure to reach the market on "over-regulation" of GMOs and on "anti-GMO" opposition, the latest research suggests that problems intrinsic to GMO breeding are what have prevented researchers from developing Golden Rice suitable for commercialization.
- Google Is So Big, It Is Now Shaping Policy to Combat the Opioid Epidemic. And It's Screwing It Up.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A snap decision by Google has begun to reshape the drug treatment industry, tilting the playing field toward large conglomerates-- the precise opposite outcome Google had hoped to achieve.
- Google's Eric Schmidt admits political censorship of search results
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Recent remarks by the Executive Chairman of Google's parent company confirm charges that the company has been deliberately altering its search algorithms and taking other measures to prevent the public from accessing information that is critical of the US government.
- Google's new search protocol is restricting access to 13 leading socialist, progressive and anti-war web sites
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 New data suggests that the implementation of changes in Google's search evaluation protocols resulted in a massive loss of readership of socialist, anti-war and progressive web sites.
- The Government Is Trying to Make It Impossible For Reality Winner to Defend Herself in Court
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Justice Department is engaged in a multi-pronged effort to hamstring Reality Winner's defense against charges of violating the Espionage Act behind cumbersome classification rules.
- Grasping Diversity, Embracing Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Can Diversity Embrace Democracy? Can Democracy Acknowledge Diversity?
- The Great American Sex Panic of 2017
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What interest of sanity or reason is served by this reckless lumping together of flicks of the tongue and forcible rapes into the single broad-brush term “sexual misconduct,” as though there is no important difference between an oafish pat or crude remark at an office party and a gang rape?
- The Great Power Shift: a Russia-China Alliance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A significant powershift in the triangular relaionship between the US, Russia and China is occuring as Sino-Russian relations are improving.
- The Great Unraveling: Using Science and Philosophy to Decode Modernity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 All of this ecological destruction has been driven by America’s most popular exports: capitalism and imperialism. William Hawes talked about using science and philosophy to decode modernity.
- Greece mourns slain anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A self-professed Golden Dawn member stabbed leftist rapper Killah P to death in Piraeus on September 18, 2013.
- Green nationalism? How the far right could learn to love the environment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Myths of a pagan past in harmony with nature have been a feature of green nationalism, from its beginnings through to the Anastasia ecovillages in contemporary Russia where - unlike their equivalent hippy communes found in the West - sustainable living is combined with a 'reactionary eco-nationalism'. Could it happen here too?
- The Green Party After the Election
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Until the Green Party has built a real power base of well-organized, dues-paying members and elected Green caucuses in city councils, state legislatures and the U.S. House, it will not be taken seriously in a presidential run by most media and most voters
- Grenfell Tower: A Disaster Waiting to Happen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Grenfell tower disaster is a consequence of social housing policies dating back to the 1980's.
- Grenfell Tower fire: anger rising
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Four days after the raging inferno that criminally took the innocent lives of so many, survivors and friends and families of the missing are still not only without the support from the authorities that they need, but are suffering an unacceptable lack of information and coordination. It is fair to say, that despite the Tory insistence that all is hand and all that can be done is being done, in reality, all that is being done, is being done by community brothers and sisters and a wider volunteer force. Lacking a central command, people are being fed, clothed and comforted from within the community, organised by those of the community. And while the community has so far largely remained peaceful, united by loss and grief, anger is bubbling.
- Grenfell Tower Fire: Corporate Manslaughter in London
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A massive fire engulfed Grenfell Tower in the early hours of June 14th. Grenfell Tower is a 24-storey building of public housing flats in the North Kensington area of London. Over 600 people were believed to be inside the building and there are fears that the death toll, currently at 58, will rise to over a 100. This incident generated a wave of public anger over ignored safety warnings, an inadequate response from authorities, and most of all about the (housing) policies that safeguard corporate greed over the rights of the poor and working class, in this case their very lives. This was no accident – it was corporate manslaughter.
- The Grenfell Tower fire could have been avoided: this government must be held responsible
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- Grenfell Tower: the Tragic Price of the Rolled-Back State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The British state used to be better organised and effective, but self-interested denigration of the state over the past 30 years has helped erode these strengths, leaving authorities less equiped to handle emergencies such as Grenfell tower disaster.
- Guardian Sells False Image of an Open Jerusalem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A Guardian essay on a new Israeli open-rooftops project in Jerusalem, part of a Season of Culture, sadly falls into a standard trap for feelgood articles of this kind. It fails to provide the main context for Jerusalem: that the native Palestinians live under a belligerent Israeli occupation that is ultimately trying to evict them from the city.
- The guardians of the Andean potato
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 More than 2,800 types of potatoes are known to have originated in Peru. The existence of these varieties can be attributed to the high value the Quechua people place on their cultural traditions and biological diversity.
- Guardian's day of shame, and the dark depths of liberal McCarthyism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The liberal 'resistance' to Donald Trump has revealed a service media now plumbing its own dark, reactionary depths. A Guardian editorial has welcomed back to public prominence none other than George W Bush. Even for the Blair-protecting, war-apologising Guardian, it's a landmark day of shame.
- Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth and Morality
Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Observations on Hannah Arendt's 1951 book "Origins of Totalitarianism" on the nature of Totalitarianism and the role of propaganda in its rise and support within societies.
- The Harmful Effects of Antifa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An historic opportunity is being missed. The disastrous 2016 presidential election could and should have been a wakeup call. A corrupt political system that gave voters a choice between two terrible candidates is not democracy.
- Has the meaning of "organizing" been forgotten?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Rising inequality, US anti-union laws crushing organized labour south of the boarder, and the slow unrelenting decline of union density here in Canada has renewed the focus on labour union organizing. The response from the leadership of the movement has been focused -- rightly -- on changes to law regulating labour unions that make it harder to organize. However, changing labour laws will not undo the slow decline in union density alone. Unions will also have to actually go out and talk to workers, sign them up, establish a local, bargain a first agreement, and enforce those terms.
- HealthSources.ca
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 A web portal featuring information and resources about health, with articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Healthy soil is the real key to feeding the world
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Some of the more common myths regarding the modern agricultural industry are outlined, notably that large scale commercial farming provides higher yields and greater diversity of products. Indeed the author contests the coversation should move beyond conventional farming vs organic, and that it is regenerative farming practices that concentrate on soil health that will provide the best solution.
- Heatwave frequency rises twice as fast in the poorest countries
New research proves that the countries least responsible for global warming, those least able to adapt, have already been hit much harder by Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A feature of most statements about climate change is the use of the future tense: the poorest countries will be worse-hit than the rich ones. But new research shows that the predicted unequal climate future has actually been with us for decades. The poorest countries have already experienced twice as great an increase in extreme temperatures as the rich ones, and the gap has been widening for more than thirty years.
- Hegemony How-To
A Roadmap for Radicals Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Hegemony How-To is a practical guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about questions of power, leadership, and strategy.
- "Hegemony How-To": Rethinking Activism and Embracing Power
A review of Hegemony How-To: a Roadmap for Radicals, by Jonathan Smucker Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 "How many times, I wondered, had I favored a particular action or tactic because I really thought it was likely to change a decision-maker’s position or win over key allies, as opposed to gravitating toward an action because it expressed my activist identity and self-conception? How concerned were we really, in our practice, with political outcomes?"
- Here's the PR Firm Behind ‘Your Energy America’ Front Group Pushing Atlantic Coast Pipeline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A newly formed front group called "Your Energy America" is pushing Dominion Energy's Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline; evidence points to DDC Advocacy as the PR firm behind the group, which has known ties to the Republican Party.
- Here's why papers don't deserve support; money should go to committed Internet sites
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Governement funding should not go toward propping up mainstream print media, but rather towards access to information in communities where it is currently lacking.
- Hersh's New Syria Revelations Buried From View
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at veteran journalist Seymour Herst's latest investigation, which questions whether Syrian President Assad was responsible for another alleged gas attack at Khan Sheikhoun.
- The Hidden History of the SNCC Research Department
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 SNCC may have been the most important organization of the postwar civil rights movement. It grew out of the wave of sit-ins in 1960 and was guided initially by Ella Baker, the foundational organizer whose emphasis on bottom-up organizing and democracy deeply shaped SNCC’s vision and methods.
- Higher Education for Hire
The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Henry Heller's The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945.
- Hillary Clinton Just Told Five Blatant Lies About WikiLeaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 During an interview with ABC's Sarah Ferguson, while promoting her new book about her loss in the 2017 presidential election, Hillary Clinton told five lies about the WikiLeaks.
- Hippies, Yippies, Radicals and Pranksters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Review of the book entitled "Did iT! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary," by Pat Thomas.
- Historic Settlement Reached on Behalf of CIA Torture Victims
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Details on the legal settlement between the U.S government and the victims of a CIA torture program in 2002.
- Historic Speaker's Corner Becomes Site of Anti-feminist Silencing and Volence
Efforts to silence feminist speech have taken a violent turn Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The "What is gender" debate at the historic Speaker's Corner in London turned vitriolic and violent when opposing organizations accused the discussion of potentially inciting "transmisogyny."
- The History Channel Is Finally Telling the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The US government's involvement with the drug cartels is examined in a new documentary on The History Channel.
- History and Hypocrisy: Why the Korean War Matters in the Age of Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The DPRK's recent missile test is a "provocation" according to US state sources. A provocation indeed. Firing things into the air that go bang is clearly not a nice thing to do. People really should ease up on things that explode. I mean somebody could get hurt.
- A history of American anti-immigrant bias, starting with Benjamin Franklin’s hatred of the Germans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the 1750s, the United States of America was not yet a country, but its trouble with immigrants already had begun. People of non-WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) descent were crossing the ocean to start new lives in the new world, and earlier Colonial settlers were none too happy about it.
- A history of American lynchings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A soil collection project is commemorating the forgotten victims of lynching and helping to tell their stories.
- A History of Women's Rights in Toronto
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Whether they were marching in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington or commemorating International Women's Day, women in Toronto have a longstanding tradition of advocating for gender equality across Canada.
- Hollowing out democracy and law
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The recent actions of the Catalan government are not those of politicians respecting democracy. The reaction of the Madrid government, which criminalize political dissent, are equally disturbing.
- Honduras Since the 2009 Coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As this is being written, news arrives of arrests and serious charges filed against 14 community members of a poor area of Choluteca for opposing land grabs to build a solar energy plant; 28 small farmers in the northern Agujn Valley criminalized for trying to keep and work their land; and 31 university students and three human rights defenders facing jail after government attacks on student protests in Tegucigalpa.
- Hope in Dark Times
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The most dynamic and emergent forces in U.S. politics today are on our side, and possibilities for a radical transformation of the system have not yet been foreclosed. Whether we make good on them is up to us.
- How American History Erases Mass Killings Against Native Americans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the wake of recent American mass killings, the author reminds us of mass murders of indigenous people in American history.
- How 'Antifa' Mirrors the 'Alt-Right'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Behind the rhetoric of the "alt-right" about white nativism and protecting American traditions, history and Christian values is the lust for violence. Behind the rhetoric of antifa, the Black Bloc and the so-called "alt-left" about capitalism, racism, state repression and corporate power is the same lust for violence.
- How are you going to pay for it?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Debates on how government will pay for new programs suffer from a fundamental fallacy: the assumption that the government spends other people's money. It doesn't.
- How Big is My Tribe? The Crisis in Catalonia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at recent divisive events in Catalonia, Britain and the US, proposing that we should really be concentrating more on important universal issues such as inequality, influence peddling, profit-only deregulation, and offshore tax havens.
- How Bosses Use 'Open Shop' Campaigns to Crush Unions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Chad Pearson's book "Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement" and Lane Windham's new book "Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970's and the Roots of a New Economic Divide", take a historical look at anti-union tactics through the 20th century, and demonstrate how Unions can regroup, reform and fight back.
- How Brazil's Sex Workers Have Been Organized and Politically Effective for 30 Years
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Sex workers in Brazil have been organizing for 30 years and have influenced politics to the extent that the government recognizes sex-work as an official occupation. They are celebrating the anniversary in part with an exhibit of photographs taken by sex-workers.
- How Brazil’s Sex Workers Have Been Organized and Politically Effective for 30 Years
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In Brazil, sex work remains politically and socially contentious. But thanks to a staunch sex worker movement in the country, the people who actually do the work have made themselves key contributors to the debate.
- How Churchill Broke the Greek Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On May 8, 1945, Hitler’s successors signed Germany's capitulation. By that point, Greece had already been liberated for six months. Across more than three years, the Greek people had waged a mass resistance against the fascist occupiers -- the Italians, the Bulgarians, and above all the Germans -- in which they had shown heroic courage in the face of a boundless terror.
- How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The motley array of candidates who ran for the Republican presidential nomination was divided on many things, but not on climate change. None of them was willing to take the issue seriously.
- How Culture Came to Appropriate Race
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Racism has historically played a major role in shaping adoption practices.
- How Did It Start?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Every serious debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raises the question: "When did it start?" Each side has its own date, proving that the other side started it.
- How Do We Organize A Hundred Million?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The strategic considerations discussed in this series of posts assumes that it will take a hundred million activist in the US and many hundreds of millions more worldwide to make revolution. Real politics begin where there are millions, many millions.
- How Financial Transaction Taxes Make the Economy More Efficient
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The efforts to implement a financial transactions tax (FTT) within the European Union (EU) seem to be finally coming to a head. While the EU is far from unanimous in support of a FTT, an effort to implement a joint FTT has been moving forward for the last six years under a provision that allows ten or more countries to act collectively.
- How French 'Intellectuals' Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself.
- How Fukushima gave rise to a new anti-racism movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Shaw examines the rise in anti-discrimination social activism in Japan after the environmental disasters in 2011 and lack of support from the government towards its non-Japanese citizens.
- How I Learned Courts are Off-Limits to the 99 Percent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Rall discusses the expenses of the American justice system that benefit large corporations and the wealthy.
- How Immigrants Built the American Left -- And Can Build It Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The energy and upheaval unleashed by the Trump administration's assault on Muslims, Latinos, and other immigrants, documented or not, has been directed toward a restoration of their rights and dignity, toward the family reunions and free passage into our country that have been happily broadcast from airports all across the country -- and rightly so. But if our ambitions are simply to restore the old status quo or even recreate a liberalized version of the policies extant under President Obama, then we will be selling short the possibilities inherent in this moment.
- How Imperialism Works Today
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism's Final Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism's Final Crisis.
- How Inequality Kills
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Global March of Neoliberalism: The World Inequality Report 2018
- How Israel is digitally policing Palestinian minds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Israeli authorities have been arresting and holding hundreds of Palestinians it accuses of fanning the flames of violence in the occupied West Bank and Israel.
- How Labor and Climate United Can Trump Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Co-operation between labour and climate groups may be possible in the Trump era.
- How many British MPs are working for Israel?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Investigating the revelations that UK embassy staff in Israel are cooperating with Israeli political parties to influence UK policy making.
- How Media Bias Fuels Syrian Escalation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The mainstream U.S. media now reports as "flat-fact" the Syrian government's guilt in the April 4, 2017 chemical weapons incident, but the real facts are less clear and some point in the opposite direction.
- How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As white nationalism and the so-called "alt-Right" have gained prominence in the Trump era, a bipartisan reaction has coalesced to challenge these ideologies. But much of this bipartisan coalition focuses on individual, extreme, and hate-filled mobilizations and rhetoric, rather than the deeper, politer, and apparently more politically acceptable violence that imbues United States foreign and domestic policy in the 21st century.
- How Paul Robeson found his political voice in the Welsh valleys
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Acclaimed stage actor, American football player, and political activist Paul Robinson became invovled with the Welsh mining labor movement in Rhondda Valley.
- How Propaganda Works to Divide Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Political propaganda employs the ideals of liberal democracy to undermine those very ideals, the dangers of which, not even its architects fully understand.
- How "Race Neutral" Policy Failed
Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review ofKaren R. Miller's Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit.
- How Right-Wing Extremists Stalk, Dox, and Harass Their Enemies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How neo-Nazis in the U.S use the online chatroom Pony Power to harass anti-facist activists.
- How Russia Became "Our Adversary" Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How did Russia, which has been a capitalist state for a querter of a century, become "our adversary" to the United States?
- How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Russia-gate hysteria has spread beyond simply a strategy for neutralizing Donald Trump or even removing him from office into an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges the New Cold War, reports Joe Lauria.
- How Seattle Voted to Tax the Rich
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Seattle further cemented its reputation as one of the most progressive cities in the U.S. last week, when its City Council passed a law to tax the rich, sponsored by socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant along with Councilmember Lisa Herbold.
- How the 1989 War on Manuel Noriega's Panama Super-Charged US Militarism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Manuel Noriega is dead at 83. He seems like a sad footnote to the last disastrous quarter century, but the December 1989 US invasion of Panama really was a permission slip for Washington -- led by both Republicans and Democrats -- to waste whatever potential benefits the end of the Cold War might have brought.
- How the aristocracy preserved their power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 After democracy finally shunted aside hereditary lords, they found new means to protect their extravagant riches. For all the modern tales of noble poverty and leaking ancestral homes, their private wealth and influence remain phenomenal.
- How the Nazis Used Jim Crow Laws as the Model for Their Race Laws
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An interview with James Q. Whitman about his new book "Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law".
- How the tiny fishing village of Pugwash tried to stop a nuclear war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Pugwash Conference in Nova Scotia, a gathering of leading scientists to help thwart nuclear war, is the inspiration for a new play by Vern Thiessen.
- How the UAW Lost at Nissan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In early August, the UAW's union recognition campaign at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi ended in a disastrous 63% "no" vote - 10% greater than the loss at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee three and a half years earlier.
- How to Escape the Present
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Naomi Klein's book "No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need". Klein's focus is the global economy and the deeply flawed value system it creates, at the expense of people and the environment.
- How to Fight a Giant: Militant Labor Organizers Catch PepsiCo Off Guard
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The sudden closing of a factory by PepsiCo, the world's second-largest snacks producer, leaves hundred's of workers in Argentina without jobs or sucurity, resulting in a massive demonstration of solidarity for worker's rights.
- How Workers Made May Day Theirs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The extraordinary thing about the evolution of this institution is that it was unintended and unplanned. To this extent it was not so much an ‘invented tradition’ as a suddenly erupting one.
- How Zionist terrorism determined Palestine's fate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A book review on State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Thomas Suárez, Olive Branch Press (2017).
- Hue 1968
A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Hue 1968 is the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a turning point in the American War in Vietnam.
- Human Rights: the Latest Weapon Against Venezuela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Non-governmental organizations are using false information to charge Venezuela with "human rights violations." These are merely extensions of the US and western foreign policy apparatus, working as the local infrastructure that is necessary in regime change operations as well as a source for the media to build its biased narrative.
- Humans and Subhumans: Weill Cornell and the Death of the American Soul
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 All patients that walk through the door of Weill Cornell are put into two categories: the humans, who are deemed by Cornell to have "good insurance," and the subhumans, who are deemed by Cornell to have "bad insurance." If you fall into the category of the former, they will generally make a grudging effort to provide you with good care. If you fall into the category of the later, they will literally bend over backwards to see to it that you are provided with truly awful and atrocious care.
- Hurricane Harvey and the Dialectics of Nature
Houston is the city where capitalism's victory over nature is the most complete - and also where nature takes its ultimate revenge Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Proyect argues that historically the shortsighted nature of capitalism has led to natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey. To understand nature, the ripple effects of its manipulation and to implement laws that protect it is in our only hope to prevent catastrophes such as Hurricane Harvey in the future.
- I Am Not Your Negro
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 I am Not your Negro explores the history of racism in the United States through James Baldwin's reminiscences of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr, as well as his personal observations of American history.
- I wanted to understand why racists hated me. So I befriended Klansmen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Daryl Davis befriended Ku Klux Klan members in order to gain some understanding of the organization, their beliefs and hatred.
- ICIJ Releases Paradise Papers Data From Appleby
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at data released from the Paradise Papers investigation, a global journalistic collaboration that exposed offshore deals of political players and corporate giants. A team of journalists explored a trove of 13.4 million records from two offshore firms and 19 secret jurisdictions.
- Identities and Solidarity
On Anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of On Anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice, published by Jewish Voice for Peace.
- Ideological Violence and Sociopathic Rage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 ‘How can we distinguish violence driven by ideology from sociopathic rage?
- Idylls of the Liberal: The American Dreams of Mark Lilla and Ta-Nehisi Coates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Social change is not made by noble heroes, even if they find themselves in the right place at the right time to take the credit. It is made by the commoners -- by those who remain nameless and faceless in the legends, and in the political ideologies of Lilla and Coates.
- If China Can Fund Infrastructure With Its Own Credit, So Can We
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What the US could learn from China about funding infrastructure initiatives.
- If this is feminism...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Part of the problem with the response to Tuvel's article is that some seem to feel that they are the only ones who have the legitimate right to talk about certain topics. At best, this is identity politics run amok; at worst it is a turf war.
- Imagining a New Social Order: Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin in Conversation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin discuss how the left can save the US from neoliberal excesses.
- Immanuel Kant on Electoral Interference
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Historically the United States has been far more inclined to engage in politcal interference than Russia.
- Immigration's Troubled History
Immigration and the Decline of Internationalism in the American Working Class,1864-1919 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Charles R. Leinenweber's Immigration and the Decline of Internationalism in the American Working Class,1864-1919.
- Impacts of mass coral die-off on Indian Ocean reefs revealed
Warming sea waters - caused by climate change and extreme climatic events - threaten the stability of tropical coral reefs, with potentially Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 New research by the University of Exeter shows that increased surface ocean temperatures during the strong 2016 El Niño led to a major coral die-off event in the Maldives, and that this has caused reef growth rates to collapse. They also found that the rates at which some reefs species, in particular parrotfish, are eroding the reefs had increased following this coral die-off event.
- Impeach the U.S. Constitution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This article explains that democracy was the last thing the U.S. founding fathers wanted to see break out in the new republic, and the Constitution was carefully crafted by propertied elites to protect the privileged from the 'wicked' masses.
- Imperialism and the Logic of Mass Destruction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As throughout much of its war-obsessed history, the United States is currently engaged in military conflict – or threatening such action – across a broad contested terrain. In the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, Washington has resorted to its familiar global modus operandi: sending off barrages of missiles and bombs, much of it hitting civilian populations and resources needed for their survival. Death tolls mount, the largest numbers lately in the protracted battle for Mosul. Heavier casualties are being visited upon non-combatants in Yemen, thanks to U.S.-backed Saudi aerial savagery.
- Import and Die: Self-Sufficiency and Food Security in India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While there are clear signs that India needs to achieve greater food self-sufficiency, there is also a World Bank-backed agenda for the future of India where the majority of farmers don't have much of a role.
- In Defense of Cultural Appropriation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It is just as well that I’m a writer, not an editor. Were I editing a newspaper or magazine, I might soon be out of a job. For this is an essay in defense of cultural appropriation. In Canada last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense.
- In India Any Social Activist Can Be Arrested, Charged And Tried - Sans Evidence - For Terrorism: Kobad Ghandy's Case - Part II - The Punjab Trial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In a follow-up to an article detailing how Delhi's legal system was able to detain Kobad Ghandy in Tihar Jail for engaging in supposedly communist activities, this article discusses a separate attempt to prosecute Ghandy for his social activism.
- In Memoriam: Bobby Lee, Black Panther
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Hy Thurman remembers Bobby Lee.
- In Myanmar, Anti-Terrorism Is Cover for Ethnic Cleansing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A brutal crackdown in Myanmar under the guise of anti-terrorism is really ethnic cleansing against a long-persecuted Rohingya minority.
- In Search of Los Angeles' Lost Socialist Colony, Llano del Rio
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In search of the ruins of Llano del Rio, a socialist colony founded in 1914 by Job Harriman, looking to create a utopian community.
- In search of the common good
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This essay examines the historical change in the meaning and understanding of the 'common good', particularly between ancient times and the modern world, and also takes a look at the social and political changes of recent decades that have shaped how we look at the issue.
- In Search of the Lost Chord
1967 and the Hippie Idea Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 An extensive look into the social and cultural events that shaped 1967. Golberg touches on influencial musicians such as the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as well as LSD, the Summer of Love and the Vietnam War.
- In Syria, Western Media Cheer Al-Qaeda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Khalek criticizes Western media for their failure to report on attacks in Syria because to do so would highlight how the West has been responsible for prolonging Al-Qaeda's bloodshed.
- In the 19th and 20th centuries, Mexico proved that debt can be repudiated
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Mexico's past demonstrates that despite the domination of the major powers and international finance, a country can make major social advances.
- In the Shadow of the Revolution
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 In the Shadow of the Revolution provides alternative perspectives on Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. Through interviews with academics, journalists and socal activists the film helps explain the rebellion against the corrupt authoritarian government that created a catastrophe in Venezuela.
- 'Inappropriate Behaviour' - Michael Fallon, Yemen, And The 'Mainstream' That Is Anything But
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at 'mainstream' journalism, a product of corporate conformity and a deference to power that is anything but mainstream.
- India: Why are Suzuki automobile workers in jail?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Why are automobile workers being jailed for murder? The story at Maruti is a familiar one in India's industrial scene.
- Indigenous resistance: my fight for land and life in Colombia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On World Day of Indigenous Resistance, Wayúu woman ANGELICA ORITZ shares her experience as a human rights defender, living and fighting for the future of her community in the shadow of the largest opencast mine in Colombia.
- Indigenous Women: The Frontline Protectors of the Environment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Indigenous women, while experiencing the first and worst effects of climate change globally, are often in the frontline in struggles to protect the environment.
- Industrial Production of Poultry Gives Rise to Deadly Strains of Bird Flu H5Nx
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Debunking the claims of industrial poultry producers that multiple outbreaks of bird flu are due to wild waterfowl, instead providing evidence that industrial farming practices are responsible for the outbreak.
- Ineffective 350.org divestment campaign should give way to direct corporate actions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While 350.org runs a number of important campaigns, such as "Resist Trump's Climate Agenda" , there are serious questions about whether divestment campaigning is effective or whether it should be replaced by direct action campaigning.
- Informal Labour, Another Wall Faced by Migrants in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A large proportion of the 4.3 million migrant workers in Latin America and the Caribbean survive by working in the informal economy or in irregular conditions. An invisible wall that is necessary to bring down, together with discrimination and xenophobia.
- Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Shashi Tharoor's book "Inglorious Empire", which is a scorching indictment of British rule in India and British imperialism in general.
- Inside Corbyn's Office
An interview with Matt Zarb-Cousin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Jeremy Corbyn’s former press officer on sabotage within the British Labour party, his relationship to the media, and how Labour can close the polling gap.
- Inside The Scorpion
A Journalist's Ordeal in Egypt's Most Notorious Prison Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The story of journalist Mohamed Fahmy's experiences during their two-year confinement in an Egyptian prison.
- IntelligentSearch.ca
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 A web portal featuring topics related to research and the Internet. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Interactive map of workers' councils (1917-1927)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This article charts the spread of the workers' council movement in the ten-year period after the 1917 revolution in Russia.
- International Olympic Committee bans Russia from 2018 Olympics in political provocation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board announced Tuesday that it had decided to ban the Russian Olympic team from participating in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
- The Internet is Already Broken
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Nick Pemberton's article on the already broken internet.
- Introduction to the Inside/Outside Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The inside/outside strategy (IOS) is an approach to organizing and movement building that emphasizes learning from and coordination with resistance movements and political positions you do not completely agree with.
- Iran: The Impact of October
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Russian Revolution had a profound influence on the revolutionary movement in the countries neighbouring the new Soviet Republic, and Iran was no exception.
- The Irish Dead: Fighting Fascism in Spain, 1937
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the springtime of 1937, Spain was in the grip of civil war which flared as intense and as hot as the sun that hung over its skies. Of the many different nationalities that went to Spain to help the Republicans defeat the fascists, it was the Irish who proved to be a dominant force, but death stalked the men from the emerald isle and many of them did not see the end of that intensely hot Summer.
- The Irish Potato Famine Was Caused by Capitalism, Not a Fungus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While the blight did strike and take down most of Ireland’s potatoes, the truth is that Ireland was exporting more than enough food to feed everyone at the same time as the famine was happening.
- Is the Vault 7 Source a Whistleblower?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Historically, the criminal justice system has been a particularly inept judge of who is a whistleblower. Moreover, it has allowed the use of the pernicious Espionage Act – an arcane law meant to go after spies – to go after whistleblowers who reveal information the public interest.
- ISIS Church Bombings Kill 47 in Egypt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Ditz details two recent ISIS attacks in Egypt targeting Christian churches and followers.
- Islamophobic U.S. Megadonor Fuels German Far-Right Party With Viral Fake News
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An American website, the Gatestone Institute, is peddling fake news focused on anti-immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric that many fear will influence the upcoming German federal election.
- Israel and the A-Word
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Israel's apartheid foundations were laid in its dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. They were reinforced by the immediate erection of colonial constitutional structures that cemented the exclusion of the colonised. Since then, Israeli law and policy has only deepened the state apparatus of separation and segregation, discrimination and domination. Over the years, countless activists, authors and artists, as well as leading anti-apartheid figures from South Africa, have referred to Israel’s particular brand of structural discrimination as akin to apartheid. In the last decade, international lawyers have also begun to do likewise, but with reference to the definition of apartheid under international law rather than by analogy to southern Africa.
- Israel Barring Palestinians From Entering for Medical Care Over Cellphones, Witnesses Say
Gaza women say they were turned back at border because they didn't have their cellphones, which were taken by Hamas. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Palestinians from Gaza attempting to enter Israel claim that Israel's Shin Bet security service has recently begun demanding they hand over their cellphones when being questioned and that those who refuse are barred from entering.
- Israel Continues Its Attack on Palestinian Freedom of Expression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The arrest of a teenager for voicing an opinion on a social media site raises serious concerns over freedom of expression in Israel.
- Israel maintains robust arms trade with rogue regimes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Israel's collusion with Myanmar's military is part of a pattern of military aid to rogue regimes that goes back decades, and reflects the importance of the arms trade to Israel's economy.
- Israel: Neither Democratic or Jewish
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 After 50 years of Occupation, Israel is neither democratic, nor Jewish.
- Israel put up a £1,000,000 bounty for Labour insiders to undermine Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A second release from an Al Jazeera undercover sting operation has revealed the existence of a £1,000,000 plot designed by the Israeli government to undermine Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
- Israel Seeks 'Jewish' Non-Jews in Numbers Battle with Palestnians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With a shortage of Jews to defeat the Palestinians demographically, the Netanyahu government is considering a revision to the traditional rabbinical injunction that a Jew must be born to a Jewish mother -- opening the doors to a new category of 'Jewish' non-Jews.
- Israel Steps up Dirty Tricks Against Boycott Leaders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The current obsession with the challnege posed by BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) reflects a changing political environment for Israel.
- Israel uses Palestinian land to illegally dump toxic waste
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Israel dumps unknown waste and military garbage in a disposal site in Kisan village, in the occupied West Bank.
- Israeli activists 'thought it nice' to hold BBQ near Palestinian hunger strikers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the face of increasing human rights abuses being committed towards Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, an Israeli right-wing group mocked the Palestinian mass hunger strike by hosting a BBQ outside a military prison.
- Israeli Soldiers Shut Down Media Outlets In The West Bank
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Israeli soldiers and secret security officers invaded media outlets in dawn raids in several parts of the occupied West Bank. The media outlets provide services to Palestinian TV stations such as Al-Aqsa and Al-Quds.
- Israeli torture of Palestinian children 'institutional'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Investigation of the practice of torture by Shin Bet interrogators, revealing the practice as systematic.
- Israel's Efforts to Hide Palestinians From View No Longer Fools Young American Jews
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The denial of Palestinian history by Israel is no longer accepted by many young American Jews, a community that is increasingly polarized by the issue.
- Israel's Ever-More Sadistic Reprisals Help Shore up a Sense of Victimhood
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Israel argues that a potential attacker can only be dissuaded by knowing his loved ones will suffer harsh retribution.
- Israel's New Cultural War of Aggression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A few weeks ago my book Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a Just Peace was published by Pluto in Britain. I was in London and Scotland at the time to do a series of university talks to help launch the book. Its appearance happened to coincide with the release of a jointly authored report commissioned by the UN Social and Economic Commission of West Asia, giving my appearances a prominence they would not otherwise have had. The report concluded that the evidence relating to Israeli practices toward the Palestinian people amounted to 'apartheid,' as defined in international law.
- Israel's New Land Law: Clearing the Path to Annexation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Israeli parliament passed the legalisation law on Monday night, widening the powers of Israeli officials to seize the final fragments of Palestinian land in the West Bank that were supposed to be off-limits.
- Israel's New Travel Ban
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Weir calls attention to the bizarre state of affairs in which the recent Israeli travel ban denying entry to anyone supporting Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment against Israel is denied entry to Palestine as well as Israel. What right does Israel have, asks Weir, to decide who may or may not visit Palestine?
- Israel's Ploy Selling a Syrian Nuke Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Evidence now available shows that there was no nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, and that the Israelis had misled George W. Bush's administration into believing that there was in order to draw the United States into bombing missile storage sites in Syria.
- Israel's settlements: 50 years of land theft explained
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Today, between 600,000 and 750,000 Israelis live in these sizeable settlements, equivalent to roughly 11 percent of the total Jewish Israeli population. So why have these housing compounds caused so much rancour and been called a threat to the prospect of peace in the Holy Land? Follow this journey to find out.
- Israel's Slander Network
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author responds to an article titled "It’s Time to Talk About Yves Engler", which was written by a York University student affiliated to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
- Israel’s Terrible Problem: Two States or One?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Israel has created a terrible problem which it is incapable of solving. That is why it has always been the case that the United States must pretty much dictate a solution, but it is unable to do so, paralyzed as it is by the heavy influence of Israel and America’s own apologists and lobbyists.
- Israel's first trans officer helps with ethnic cleansing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Queer and transgender activists protested an event featuring an Israeli soldier in Seattle on 5 April.The event was supported by the LGBTQ Commission, a body that advises city leaders on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.Two commissioners resigned in protest just days earlier, criticizing the group’s participation as an act of pinkwashing. Pinkwashing is a public relations strategy that deploys Israel's supposed enlightenment toward LGBTQ issues to deflect criticism from its human rights abuses and war crimes and as a means to build up support for Israel among Western liberals and progressives.
- The Issue is Not Trump, It is Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Until real politics return to people's lives, the enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves.
- Istvan Meszaros: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In memorium to Istvan Meszaros, an excerpt of his writing shows how he was one of the first Marxists to identify the global environmental crisis as a central contradiction of late capitalism.
- Istvan Meszaros and Marx's theory of alienation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The article explains how alienation can only be overcome by collective action which challenges capitalist relations of production.
- "It Is Profitable to Let the World Go to Hell": Will Capitalism Doom the Planet?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Disaster, poverty and misfortune have become great ways to make a fortune. From Afghanistan to Haiti, Pakistan to Papua New Guinea, the United States to the UK, and from Greece to Australia, journalist Antony Lowenstein uncovers how companies cash in on organized misery.
- Italy 1980-81: After Marx, jail! The attempted destruction of a communist movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Charting the repression of Italy's 1970s extraparliamentary communist movement.
- It's Not Gonna Be Okay: the Nauseating Nothingness of Neoliberal Capitalist and Professional Class Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Confronted with statements of concern and/or disgust over how they are giving the nation state away to an ever more neofascistic, white-nationalist Republican Party, "Indivisible" liberals say that "things are going to be okay" since their party will "win power back in 2018 and 2020." Paul Street begs to differ.
- 'It's okay to be racist in Israel'
An Israeli conscientious objector speaks out about racism and subjugation as the occupation enters its 51st year. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An interview with Sahar Vardi, a conscientious objector in opposition to Israel's policies in the Palestinian territories, who was sentenced to prison and detention for her defiance.
- It's Time for the Left to Ask "What Are We For?"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Sarah Jaffe interviewed Maria Poblet. Maria Poblet has been working in base building and community organizing in the Bay Area for 18 years, building Causa Justa Just Cause, a democratically held grassroots organization where she is currently transitioning out of the role of executive director.
- It's WMD all over again. Why don't you see it?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Today’s frenzy over alleged use of poison gas in Syria is the 2017 version of Anthony Blair’s WMD in Iraq. Why can you not see it? Did you think they would do it in exactly the same way again? You are being assailed through your emotions, to act first and think long after, and far too late.
- J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Michael Hudson's new book covers contemporary terms that are misleading or poorly understood as well as many important concepts that have been abandoned -- many on purpose -- from the long history of political economy.
- Jacobin and ecomodernism: Two replies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Two readers, David Schwartzman and David Walters, respond to criticism of Jacobin magazine's special issue on climate change.
- Jeremy Corbyn Accused of Being Russian 'Collaborator' for Questioning NATO Troop Build-Up on Border
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The armed forces minister for Britain's right-wing government, Mike Penning, accused Corbyn of being a collaborator with the Kremlin.
- Jeremy Corbyn Wants to Requisition Homes of the Rich for Fire Survivors - Like Churchill Did in WWII
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has a bold proposal to house the survivors of a devastating fire at London's Grenfell Tower apartment complex in empty luxury homes.
- A Jewish Atonement for Zionism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of “Not by Might, nor by Power": The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism, by author Moshe Menuhin. Drawing from personal experience, the book is a methodical and chronological survey of Jewish nationalism.
- Jewish Currents goes to heaven, Jewish Currents goes to hell
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A collection of writings, poems and images reflecting the traditions of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.
- Jewish National Fund: Teaching Children an Exclusive, Religious/Ethnic Nationalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The JNF has produced puzzles and board games as well as organizing a Youth Summer experience program. According to JNF Canada's Education Department, the group "educates thousands of young people in Israel and abroad, helping them forge an everlasting bond with the Land of Israel."
- Jobs for Climate and Justice: A Worker Alternative to the Trump Agenda
A working paper from the Labor Network for Sustainability Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Jobs for Climate and Justice exposes and challenges the Trump agenda and proposes the kind of economic program we must fight for. It also offers examples of the great organizing efforts around the country – led by working people – that provide the foundation for the a transition to a just and climate-safe economy.
- Jobs and industry in the Hunter Valley: Context for a conversation about a Just Transition away from coal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The development of employment opportuniteis outside the coal miniing industry is both possible and necessary.
- John Bellamy Foster answers five questions about Marxism and ecology
Can Marxism strengthen our understanding of ecological crises? The author of Marx's Ecology replies to a critic on metabolic rift, sustainab Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the Anthropocene, we are faced with the eventual prospect, if society continues to follow the path of business as usual, of the end of civilization (in the sense of organized human society) and even potentially of the human species itself. But well before that hundreds of millions of people will be affected by increasing droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events of all kinds.
- John Berger (1926-2017)
"He helped form a generation for whom he made it possible to discover a different, critical way of seeing" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 John Berger's revolutionary insistence was that our reality could be seen differently, and altered by our intervention.
- Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA: Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Review of A Great Plaave a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA, by Joshua Kurlantzick.
- Journalism as We Knew It Is Never Coming Back
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It’s old news that Donald Trump abuses reason, knowledge, decency and dark-skinned people. If you are paying attention, each one of his assaults on decency, intelligence and knowledge will feel urgent, ridiculous or both. Each day he threatens grave damage to actual human beings and the rest of Planet Earth, and each day he demonstrates his incapacity to do anything but inflict more damage.
- Journalism, History and War: Sit, Type and Bleed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There are millions of victims throughout the Middle East region, that cannot be understood or expressed through typical media narration: a gripping headline, couple of quotes and a paragraph or two by way of providing context.The price is too high for this kind of lazy journalism.
- Journalism and Pornography
Real crime is always organised Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As long as we cannot name something that is bothering us, we have an enormous if not insurmountable impediment to action. The capacity for titillation, for erotic stimulation even with simultaneous pain, is enhanced by suspension of belief or cognition. This is what pornography does and it is also the function of compatible journalism.
- JournalismSources.com
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 A portal featuring news, articles, and resources about journalism, press freedom, free speech, censorship and related topics. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Journalistic Integrity: Allan Nairn vs. Julian Assange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 I've been really upset since the inauguration and trying to cope with the emotions I am encountering daily. It is pretty obvious that a successful meme has been implanted in the progressive mindset that will have as much impact as the claim Ralph Nader gave the 2000 election to Bush. By this I mean that people are extremely pissed off at me for having backed the Green Party and Jill Stein and seem to say with almost a psychic vitriol that it is somehow my fault that Trump got elected. Didn’t you throw your vote away on the Greens? Didn't you say awful things about Hillary?
- Journalists allege threat of drone execution by US
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Fearing assassination, Al Jazeera's Ahmad Zaidan and independent journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem file US legal complaint.
- The Journeys of Julia de Burgos
Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Vanessa Perez Rosario's Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon.
- Joy Kogawa in conversation with Ulli Diemer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Ulli Diemer spoke with Joy Kogawa in Toronto on March 14, 2017. Joy Kogawa is the author of Obasan, Gently to Nagasaki, and other works of fiction and poetry.
- Julius Nyerere: Legacy and defeated dreams in Tanzania
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Julius Nyerere is regarded as one of the greatest African political leaders. He was a visionary for African unity, socialist development and self-reliance in the aftermath of colonialism, and still commands great respect. Though much of his vision failed to materialise he leaves a legacy of ethnic and religious tolerance and peace in his East African country, Tanzania.
- The Just Society Movement
For the Poor by the Poor - A Model for Grassroots Activism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Just Society Movement (1968 - 1972) was a short-lived but remarkably successful Toronto based grassroots social and political advocacy network run by and for Toronto’s poorest residents.
- Just Wait Until I Get Tenure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A Facebook friend, Steven Salaita, recently wrote a post about academe arguing that tenure-track professors are kidding themselves if they say they will become more radical once they get tenure. I agreed with his post, and I made a long reply. Here, I incorporate what I said into a more coherent commentary.
- Kansas Is Punishing a Teacher for Following Her Church's Guidance to Boycott Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As part of her employment with a state program in Kansas a woman was asked to sign a statement proclaiming she not boycott Israel, a clear violation of her first amendment rights says the American Civil Liberties Union.
- Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, nature, and the unfinished critique of political economy
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A re-evaluation of Karl Marx's views on ecology.
- Kenyans Forced Off Tea Highlands By British Colonialists Seek Justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Kericho -- One of hundreds of elderly Kenyans seeking to sue the British government for alleged displacement and torture by its colonial predecessor in 1934 to plant tea on their family land, in a case that could encourage other former colonies to press similar claims.
- The Killing of History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Pilger examines Ken Burns' documentary about the Vietnam War and the ongoing revisionist history it presents, as well as the acquiescence of the American 'left' in the era of Trump.
- Killing 'Schizophrenics': Contemporary U.S. Psychiatry Versus Nazi Psychiatry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the United States in the earlier part of the twentieth century, there was widespread compulsory sterilization of those diagnosed with serious mental illness; and from the 1970s through the early 1990s, dehumanizing experiments that ignored the Nuremberg Code of research ethics were administered on this population by prominent American psychiatrists.
- Kathe Kollwitz
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The life of the German socialist artist Kathe Kollwitz.
- The Kurdish struggle - An interview with Dilar Dirik
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Dilar Dirik interviewed by George Souvlis.
- Labor's Schoolhouse
Lessons from the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author recounts the Paterson Silk Strike, a 1913 labour dispute organized by mill workers and noted for its large size, duration, and non-violence. Central to the dispute was the requirement by overworked weavers to start running four large looms instead of two, an appropriation of technolgy for the bottom line which has particular relevance for us today.
- Land Day 2017: Israel's relentless land grab continues
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As Israel resumes its settlement expansion with impunity, Palestinians have plenty to protest at this year's Land Day.
- Land and Racism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization subsidized by Canadian taxpayers, and its exclusionary land policies.
- Language Wars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Issues of language are examined, in particular the maintenance of power by a linguistic or political majority through imposition of linguistic norms and beliefs on a minority.
- Latin America: A Conservative Restoration?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 After a decade of the left's near-hegemonic control over government structures throughout Latin America, previously discredited conservative politicians who favour a return to the capitalist neoliberal polices of privatization and austerity are staging a comeback.
- Laughing on the Way to Armageddon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Roberts argues that he real threat is not from foreign powers like Russia, but from corruption and power games within US politics, and the military/security complex that truly undermine democracy.
- Learn from Malcolm X
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It's time to re-learn lessons from Malcolm in the Black community - nationalism and pride, solidarity and militancy, and a worldview that African Americans are part of a global community in struggle against the injustices of capitalism.
- Lebanon and Middle East: On the Hezbollah and fundamentalism - "We need a large movement from below!"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Interview with Joseph Daher on his new book on the political economy of the Hezbollah.
- The Left needs to "find common ground" with Evangelical Christians
"There's no point arguing that it can't be done because the cultural differences are too great," says Chomsky Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A discussion between Noam Chomsky and Charles Derber excerpted from the novel by Derber entitled, "Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Democracy for Social Justice in Perilous Times."
- Left reformism, the state and the problem of socialist politics today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The recent calls for the British left either to “reclaim Labour” (Len McCluskey) or to build a new party capable of emulating Syriza’s successes in Greece (Ken Loach) demand serious consideration on these pages. At their core these proposals reflect a widespread desire, shared by members of the Socialist Workers Party, to fight the cuts, alongside revulsion at the Labour Party’s failure to do so. They also reflect a genuine excitement across the left about the prospects for new left formations such as Syriza and France’s similar Front de Gauche.
- The Left/Right Challenge to the Failed "War on Drugs"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 More and more conservatives and liberals, from the halls of Congress to people in communities across the country, are agreeing that the so-called "war on drugs" needs serious rethinking.
- The left wing opposition in Italy during the period of the Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An account of the groups to the left of the PCI, during WW2 by independent Marxist historical researcher Arturo Peregalli. It was first published in 'Revolutionary History, Vol.5, No.4', and translated by Barbara Rossi and Doris Bornstein.
- Left-Wing Drexel Professor Who Opposes Free Speech Has His Curtailed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Outspoken Drexel University associate professor George Ciccariello-Maher has been put on-leave by his employer, stiring the debate about academic freedom and free speech.
- Lenin and Luxemburg (World Revolution for Beginners, Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Both of these people are great revolutionaries and there are libraries of books written about them. So in two hours, I’m going to try to sort of summarize what I think is really important about them.
- Lenin's April Theses and the Russian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In 1917 Lenin arrived from exile iin Petrograd, soon to give an outline of what were to be called the April Theses. Broadly, the theses can be summarised as follows: Only the overthrow of the provisional government and the fight for soviet power could secure a state of affairs that would bring bread to the workers, land to the peasants and peace to end the imperialist war.
- Leonard Weinglass in History
Len, A Lawyer in History: A Graphic Biography of Radical Attorney Leonard Weinglass Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Seth Tobocman's Len, A Lawyer in History: A Graphic Biography of Radical Attorney Leonard Weinglass.
- Lessons from New Orleans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Interview with author Kristen Buras.
- Lessons in leftism: Pete Seeger and the black power movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The rise of "black power" led Pete Seeger to realize he had become a towering figure in a movement he didn't fully understand. The way he dealt with criticisms of him and his friends holds lessons for today.
- Let's Get to Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Instead of asking "What is to be done?", we could start with a different question: "What should I do?" As it turns out, the right-wing hecklers we've all encountered are half right: we should get jobs. And then we should do what we tell workers to do all the time: organize our workplaces. This tactic has a name and a history. It's called "salting." Salting has deep roots in the history of the labour movement and the Left.
- Letter From Mexico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The editors of Insurgent Notes sent a couple of articles on Mexico from the Financial Times to our Mexico correspondent to check their accuracy. The following is his reply.
- A Letter from North America – Our Migrant Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This is the third of Ernie Tate’s letters to Left Unity detailing and analysing the struggles against Trump as they emerge on the other side of the pond.
- 'Liberal' Libel Law: Still a Disgrace to Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the age of social media, our allegedly liberal libel laws might pose more of a threat to unfettered free speech than ever.
- Liberalism as Class Warfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Liberals, as guardians of the status quo, are class warriors on the side of economic mal-distribution and the immiseration of the labouring classes and poor for the benefit of the rich.
- Liberals Beware: Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of the dishonesty in the New York Times' efforts to undermine President Trump, and broader criticisms of other tactics used by the liberal establishment to the same end.
- Liberals' Neglect of Hassan Diab a Scar on Canada's History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An innocent Canadian citizen has been wrongly incarcerated by foreign powers and torn away from his family, but our country's leader seems unfazed.
- Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Explores the important, too often neglected left-libertarian currents that have thrived in revolutionary socialist movements. By turns, the collection interrogates the theoretical boundaries between Marxism and anarchism and the process of their formation, the overlaps and creative tensions that shaped left-libertarian theory and practice, and the stumbling blocks to movement cooperation.
- Lies That Capitalists Tell Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Counter-arguments against common beliefs of the benefit of capitalism.
- Life and Death After the Steel Mills
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In her study of a community devastated by industry's flight, anthropologist Christine Walley raises questions about how to create and support meaningful work in a postindustrial world.
Steel mills were the economic backbone of many cities across the Midwest and Northeast until the 1980s. When the industry left, former workers not only took a hit economically -- they also felt displaced and suffered disillusionment and a loss of identity.
- Linguistic data analysis of 3 billion Reddit comments shows the alt-right is getting stronger
Taxonomy of Trolls Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The alt-right isn't one group. They don't have one coherent identity. Rather, they're a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, men's rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, they’re beginning to form a cohesive group identity.
- A Little Crooked House: Trudeau, Morneau, BMO & KPMG Inc
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Canada's Finance Minister Bill Morneau has recently reinvigorated his promise to crack down on tax evasion schemes, but how can we trust him when he is himself named in the Panama Papers?
- The Lobby: Young Friends of Israel
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 In the first of a four-part series, Al Jazeera goes undercover inside the Israel Lobby in Britain. We expose a campaign to infiltrate and influence youth groups, including the National Union of Students, whose president faces a smear campaign coordinated by her own deputy and supported by the Israel Embassy.
- London Terror Attack: It's Time to Confront Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the UK people are dealing with the aftermath of yet another terrorist attack in which innocent civilians were butchered and injured, this time in London. It is time for an honest conversation about Wahhabism, specifically the part this Saudi-sponsored ideology plays in radicalizing young Muslims both across the Arab and Muslim world and in the West.
- The long ecological revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Up until the rise of the ecological movement in the late twentieth century, the conquest of nature was a universal trope, often equated with progress under capitalism (and sometimes socialism). To be sure, the notion, as utilized in science, was a complex one. As Francis Bacon, the idea's leading early proponent, put it, "nature is only overcome by obeying her." Only by following nature's laws, therefore, was it possible to conquer her.
- The Longest Occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the current maelstrom of imperialism and regional wars, Israeli military supremacy, Islamic fundamentalism and the destruction of whole societies and even civilizations in Iraq and Syria, the very possibility of any positive outcome sometimes seems remote.
- Looming Climate Catastrophe: Extinction in Nine Years?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Reports from the Arctic are getting pretty grim.
- The Looting Machine Called Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment. In other words, capitalists make profits because their costs are externalized and born by others. In the US, society and the environment have to pick up the tab produced by capitalist activity.
- The Lost History of Antifa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 72 years after the triumph over Nazism, we look back to postwar Germany, when socialists gave birth to Antifa.
- The Lost Traveller's Dream
A Memoir Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A memoir of Kovel's first 80 years, from his early Jewish upbringing, his academic career, to his embracing of Marxist political economy and commitment to radical ecosocialism.
- Lynching Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In Charlottesville, as in so many parts of the country right now, the conflict is over how to reconcile the nation's checkered past, particularly as it relates to slavery, with the present need to sanitize the environment of anything -- words and images -- that might cause offense, especially if it's a Confederate flag or monument.
- The Lynching of Ted Smith
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An account of the brutal slaying of Ted Smith, an African American teen who was burned at the stake by a mob of white men in Greenville, Texas on July 28, 1908.
- Lynne Stewart: 1939-2017
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Radical attorney Lynne Stewart died in Brooklyn on March 7, 2017 at the age of 77. The immediate cause was a series of strokes which, together with metastasized breast cancer, finally drained the life out of this tireless fighter for the oppressed. Lynne's death will be keenly felt by the incarcerated opponents of the U.S. government, for whom she fought until the end. Without her, the world is a lonelier, crueler place for these prisoners and their families.
- MA Stops Charter School Expansion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite their $24 million, the charter forces - which in March had more than a 20-point lead in the polls - lost by an amazing 24 points, 62% to 38%.
- Macaroni & Cheese and Revolution
The Anarchist Cookbook Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Keith McHenry's and Chaz Bufe's The Anarchist Cookbook.
- Mad Marx: The Class Warrior
Resource Type: Photo/Image/Poster First Published: 2017
- The Madder Trump Gets, the More Seriously the World Takes Him
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The more dangerous America's crackpot President becomes, the saner the world believes him to be. Just look back at the initial half of his first 100 days: the crazed tweeting, the lies, the fantasies and self-regard of this misogynist leader of the Western world appalled all of us. But the moment he went to war in Yemen, fired missiles at Syria and bombed Afghanistan, even the US media Trump had so ferociously condemned began to treat him with respect. And so did the rest of the world.
- The Main Issue in the French Presidential Election: National Sovereignty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The 2017 French Presidential election marks a profound change in European political alignments. There is an ongoing shift from the traditional left-right rivalry to opposition between globalization, in the form of the European Union (EU), and national sovereignty.
- Mainstream News And USA's Heroics In Vietnam
Why The Silence About The 7 Million Dead? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An account of the media's role in suppressing information about US military actions in Indochina from the 1940s and onward, and how the same tactics persist in the present.
- Major Challenges of New Orleans Charter Schools Exposed at NAACP Hearing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 New Orleans is the nation's largest and most complete experiment in charter schools. After Hurricane Katrina, the State of Louisiana took control of public schools in New Orleans and launched a nearly complete transformation of a public school system into a system of charter schools.
- Major study shows species loss destroys essential ecosystems
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Long term research by German ecologists proves that loss of biodiversity has "direct, unpleasant consequences for mankind."
- Making Nuclear Weapons Usuable Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A chilling look at the urge of both President Trump and key figures in the Pentagon to normalize nuclear weapons as a basic war-fighting tool in the American arsenal.
- The Making of the Muslim World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Review of Christopher de Bellaigue's 'The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason', Cemil Aydin's 'The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History' and Tariq Ramadan's 'Islam: The Essentials'.
- Making Their Own History
A People's History of Modern Europe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of William A. Pelz's A People's History of Modern Europe.
- Making Trump's America Ungovernable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The goal of opponents, including those of the far left, should be to make the Trump presidency ungovernable. In that struggle revolutionary change is possible.
- Manifesto for the Green Mind
Jules Pretty sets out a plan to engage people with Nature and create more sustainable and enjoyable living for everyone. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Jules Pretty sets out a plan to engage people with Nature and create more sustainable and enjoyable living for everyone. The first call to action is: "Every child outdoors every day".
- Manufactured Consent
Power, Media and Thinktanks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Corporations don't just shape our politics or economics, they also seek to change public opinion to serve their interests. Which corporations play the biggest role in shaping knowledge and news? What do they fund? Who do they represent? What role have they played in the rise of authoritarian populists? This infographic for State of Power 2017 exposes those 'manufacturing consent'.
- Marching for Science and Humanity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On April 22, 2017 the March for Science took place in Washington DC, which I attended. It was a dreary rainy day that was lit up by the large crowd of scientists and concerned citizens gathered at the Washington Monument. The atmosphere was festive and defiant despite the weather.
- Market Uber Alles
Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Lester K. Spence's Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics.
- Martin Luther the Man-Devil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of the book 'Manteuffel' by Danish author and public intellectual Peter Tudvad, a work of popular fiction that also takes on religious and social-political issues.
- Marx and Engels and the 'Red Chemist'
The Forgotten Legacy of Carl Schorlemmer Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 New studies of Marx’s long-unavailable notebooks, now being published in the massive Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (Marx-Engels Complete Works), decisively refute claims that Marx was uninterested in the natural sciences or considered them irrelevant to his politics.
- Marx and Engels on ecology: A reply to radical critics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of the book "Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique" authored by Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, who respond to critics of ecological Marxism with a comprehensive examination of what the founders of historical materialism wrote and thought about mankind's relationship to the earth.
- Marxism 2.0: New commodities, new workers?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Ursula Huws, 'Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age' and Nick Dyer-Witheford, 'Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex'.
- Marxism, the Arab Spring, and Islamic fundamentalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While Islamic fundamentalists are united by a reactionary worldview, the movements are not the same and must be approached differently. The Left must stake out an independent view based on democracy, social justice, equality, and liberation and freedom from oppression.
- Marxism and the Earth: A defence of the classical tradition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique.
- Marxism and the Earth: A defence of the classical tradition
Book review of Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Marxist analyses of the natural world have been the focus of intense debate recently, and the publication of any book that further explores what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels thought about the subject is something to be welcomed. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett have proven track records of writing some of the clearest books on the subject, and while Marx and the Earth is not a specific response to some of their recent critics, it is an important defence of Marx’s and Engels’s original work.
- Marxism, feminism and transgender politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of feminism and transgender politics through a Marxist lens.
- Marxism: an Introduction to a Misunderstood Philosophy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An introduction to fundamental principles of Marxism, and and examination of how these principles have been misrepresented by dictators and war criminals, leading to widespread misunderstanding.
- Marxist and Feminist Interventions
Marxism and Feminism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Shahrzad Mojab's edited volume Marxism and Feminism.
- Marxist Theories of the State Played out in Venezuela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The implications of Marxist state theories developed by Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband are useful for framing issues related to leftist strategy in twenty-first century Venezuela.
- Marx's Capital at 150
History in Capital, Capital in History Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at Karl Marx's historic book 'Capital' Volume 1 on the 150th anniversary of publication, its historical significance and influence, and what it means for those who read the book today.
- Mass Incarceration, Prison Labor in the United States
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Federal Prison Industries (FPI) under the brand UNICORE operates approximately 52 factories (prisons) across the United States.
- Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Analyzing land policy, labour, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor.
- Media Promote Baseless Assertions By Government Officials Of Russian Interference As Facts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The headline of a New York Times article published April 6, 2017, "C.I.A. Had Evidence of Russian Effort to Help Trump Earlier Than Believed," misleadingly implies not only that there was an effort by the Russian government to help Donald Trump win the American presidential election but that it is a settled fact that the CIA was in possession of hard evidence to that effect.
- Media Review: Fake News
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 Richard Seymour looks at the current debate around 'fake news'. What does the term refer to and is it as new as we think?
- MediaSources.ca
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 A web portal featuring resources about media and the media industry, with articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Memento Mori: a Requiem for Puerto Rico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Puerto Rico is dying. Let those words sink in.Three and a half million people are without power, water, fuel, food, and support. This isn’t some uninhabited atoll.
- Memo to Jacobin: Ecomodernism is not ecosocialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Ian Angus challenges a left-wing magazine that promotes geoengineering, nuclear power, carbon storage and other techno-fixes as solutions to climate change.
- Memory Against Forgetting: the Resonance of Bloody Sunday
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The museum John guards is a physical manifestation of the moral necessity of remembering that day’s cataclysmic violence. An attempt to remember the silences imposed on peoples’ experiences by time and traumatised memory, and, most of all, murderous rampage. And of course, if those left behind do not remember who will? It certainly will not be the guilty.
- Message from the High Court: Carry on arming the Saudis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Campaigners are furious with a High Court decision in London allowing the UK Government to carry on exporting arms to Saudi Arabia for use against Yemenis.
- Mexican Journalists Say 'No to Silence'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In Mexico powerful entities -- ranging from government officials, to law enforcement, to drug cartel leaders -- routinely and systematically intimidate journalists and media outlets to prevent them from investigating state corruption and drug-related violence. Efforts to silence media often take place in the shadows, forcing victims to choose between self-censorship, forced displacement, or risking their lives for doing their jobs.
- Militant Hope in the Age of Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Debates over whether Donald Trump was a fascist or Hillary Clinton was a right-wing warmonger and tool of Wall Street were a tactical diversion. The real questions that should have been debated include: What measures could have been taken to prevent the United States from sliding further into a distinctive form of authoritarianism?
- The Militarization of Canada: Chrystia Freeland's Budgetary Coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Canada is to increase military spending by 70% over the next ten years following Donald Trump's demand for NATO allies to increase defense spending to 2% of GDP.
- The Militarized Police State Opens Fire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Police and government agents are often left out of the conversation on gun violence, despite being among the greatest purpotrators of gun violence in America.
- The Misguided Attacks on ACLU for Defending Neo-Nazis' Free Speech Rights in Charlottesville
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 You can fight fascism by employing and championing one of its defining traits: viewpoint-based state censorship. those who favor free speech suppression, or who oppose the ACLU’s universal defense of speech rights, will create results that are the exact opposite of those they claim to want. It’s an indescribably misguided strategy that will inevitably victimize themselves and their own views.
- 'Modi is God's gift to Pakistan security establishment'
Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif talks about shrinking freedoms, liberal voices and human rights in Balochistan. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Mohammed Hanif is a Pakistani journalist and writer. In an interview with Al Jazeera he talks about the shrinking freedoms in mainstream and social media in Pakistan, the role of liberal voices and the state of human rights in Balochistan.
- Monbiot Still Can't Admit Media's Core Problem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 After more than two decades at the Guardian, George Monbiot has finally written a column in which he concedes that the entire British media has a problem, including its supposedly left-liberal elements like the Guardian.
- The Monopoly board of the city: Grenfell Tower - where was the HCA, government housing regulator??
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Homes & Community Agency(HCA) is the UK state regulatory body for social housing; its job is to monitor the performance, finances and provision of services of landlords. Missing from the media coverage of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster so far is any discussion of what relation the HCA has to this horror story of corporate murder.
- The Moral Corrosion of Drone Warfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Jerry Berrigan Brigade, named after Syracuse peacemaker Jerry Berrigan, were called to court for their nonviolent witness against drone warfare at the state-side drone base Hancock.
- More on the Red Chemist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 More on the important role that the eminent chemist Carl Schorlemmer played in the development of Marx and Engels' understanding of the natural sciences.
- The Most Moral Army?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 War is the realm of killing and destroying. How is it possible to talk about a law of war when war itself breaks all laws? An army that trains its soldiers to kill, how can it demand from them to show mercy?
- Mothers and Children First
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An interactive report on mothers and child bearing in Bolivia where deaths are highest among indigenous populations. This report looks at the efforts by doctors, indigenous midwives and healers who are collaborating in what is being called 'intercultural health care'.
- Mourn Liu Xiaobo, Free Liu Xia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Assessment of the death of Chinese political prisoner Liu Xiaobo, as well as the house arrest of his wife, Liu Xia.
- Mourn, Then Organize Again
Left Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Enzo Traverso's Left Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory.
- Murder at the Algiers Motel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The following account is abridged from an anthology, Detroit 1967, just published by Wayne State Press. McGuire has uncovered material that hadn't previously come to light.
- The Murder of Kevin Cooper
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 I, Kevin Cooper, have been on death row in the state on California for 32 years, going on 33. I came to this place in May of 1985, and I have been fighting for my life ever since.
- Music education makes for a poor commodity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Privatizing the teaching of music into a commodity and decreasing attention spans is leading to poorer music education.
- My Coal Childhood: Lessons From Germany's Mine Pit Lakes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A personal account of living near a coal mine in the Lausitz region of Germany, where extensive mining has severely damaged the environment and current 'solutions' are creating even further challenges.
- My Lai
Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Jones shows how pivotal the My Lai massacre was in galvanizing opposition to the Vietnam War, playing a part nearly as significant as that of the Tet Offensive and the Cambodian bombing. For many, it undermined any pretense of American moral superiority, calling into question not only the conduct of the war but the justification for U.S. involvement.
- My Stealthy Freedom: The Hijab in Iran and in the West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An interview with Masih Alinejad, an outspoken critic of the forced hijab policy in Iran, about how the Islamic Revolution affected women, compulsory hijab laws, and her activism.
- Myanmar Rohingya Face "Textbook Example of Ethnic Cleansing"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims flee violence in Myanmar's Rakhine State, thousands that remain in the country face mass atrocities at a scale never seen before.
- The Myth of 'Cultural Appropriation'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Arguing that certain people don’t have the right to tell certain stories is a distraction from the real menace: inequality.
- The myth of one Jewish nation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Zionism is an anti-Semitic creed. It was so right from the beginning. Already the founding father, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese writer, penned some pieces with a clear anti-Semitic slant. For him, Zionism was not just a geographical transplantation, but also a means of turning the despicable commercial Jew of the diaspora into an upright, industrious human being.
- The Nat Turner Rebellion and the Fight Against Slavery - Part 2
Black History and the Class Struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt in Virginia tears apart the myth that there is no history of slave rebellion or resistance in colonial America or the United States. This is a lie often promoted by racist apologists for American slavery. But it is also untrue to think that the U.S. has a history of slave rebellions similar to the massive uprisings that convulsed the Caribbean, most notably the Haitian Revolution.
- The Nat Turner Rebellion and the Fight Against Slavery - Part One
Black History and the Class Struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In 1831, American slaveowners learned what it means to have the fear of God put into them. In August of that year, an insurrection was launched by rebel slaves led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia. Before their suppression, the rebels killed up to 60 whites in the course of a few days -- the highest number to die in a slave uprising in the U.S. It was the unmistakable justice and vengeance of revolutionary terror. And it was met with the reactionary terror of the slaveowners.
- Nation That Says It Can't Afford Medicare for All Has Spent $5.6 Trillion on War Since 9/11
Because, as new study notes, wars force the question: "What we might have done differently with the money spent?" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A new analysis offers a damning assessment of the United States' so-called global war on terror, and it includes a "staggering" estimated price tag for wars waged since 9/11—over $5.6 trillion.
- Native Seeds Sustain Brazil's Semi-Arid Northeast
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 More than a thousand homes that serve as "seed banks", and 20,000 participating families, make up the network organised by ASA to preserve the genetic heritage and diversity of crops adapted to the climate and semi-arid soil in Brazil’s Northeast.
- Nature, Labor, and the Rise of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The nature of capitalism puts it at war with Nature.
- The Need to Radicalise the Bolivarian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Through an interview with Jorge Martín, the secretary of the Hands Off Venezuela solidarity campaign, the events leading to the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela are examined.
- The Neoliberalism Order Begins to Crack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Western ruling classes are now beginning to suffer political payback for 40 years of neoliberalism and nearly ten years of economic crisis.
- Netizen Report: Why Did YouTube Censor Your Videos? You May Never Know.
Global Voices Advocacy's Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights ar Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Amid an apparent shift in YouTube’s approach to monitoring for rules violations and staying in the good graces of advertisers, a wave of YouTube users have found their work either blocked or relegated to "restricted" mode in recent months.
- New group challenges role of Israel lobby inside Labour Party as effort to undermine Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Jeremy Corbyn's recent declaration of support for the Palestinian cause came as sections of his party's establishment demonstrated that they are determined to undermine his leadership; the issue they have selected as his Achilles' heel relates directly to the debate about the Palestinians.
- New map records sites of Australia's colonial massacres
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Map is the first to detail evidence of more than 150 massacres involving almost every aboriginal clan between 1788 and 1872.
- New Report Shows Corporations and Western Governments Continue to Profit from Looting of Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A recent report published by a coalition of African and British social justice organizations indicate that foreign corporations and governments continue to exploit the world's most impoverished continent.
- Newspaper Owned By Fracking Billionaire Leaks Memo Calling Pipeline Opponents Potential "Terrorists"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has produced a report titled, "Potential Domestic Terrorist Threats to Multi-State Diamond Pipeline Construction Project," dated April 7, 2017. The DHS field analysis report points to lessons from policing the Dakota Access pipeline, saying they can be applied to the ongoing controversy over the Diamond pipeline, which, when complete, will stretch from Cushing, Oklahoma to Memphis, Tennessee. While lacking "credible information" of such a potential threat, DHS concluded that "the most likely potential domestic terrorist threat to the Diamond Pipeline … is from environmental rights extremists motivated by resentment over perceived environmental destruction."
- 1965-1966: Files Reveal US had Detailed Knowledge of Indonesia's Anti-Communist Purge
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Declassified files have revealed new details of US government knowledge of and support for an Indonesian army extermination campaign that killed several hundred thousand civilians during anti-communist hysteria in the mid-1960s.
- No Ban! No Wall! No War?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The corporate media avoids connecting our wars to Trump's ban because war and empire is a matter of agreement among the political elites, an elite that the corporate media is very much a part of.
- No Laughing Matter: The Manchester Bomber is the Spawn of Hillary and Barack's Excellent Libyan Adventure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The jihadi bomber in Manchester and miltants in the hotel massacre in Mali were direct products of American and Western regime change in Libya, a project that was executed by the Obama administration and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton.
- No, US Didn't 'Stand By' Indonesian Genocide - It Actively Participated
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Within the coverage of the newly declassified telegram that proves the US actively participated in the Indonesian genocide the media frames Washington as a passive onlooker rather than active participant. This not only lessens the government's culpability; it also tells readers that if the US is to be faulted, it's to be blamed for not doing enough. That's a handy attitude to cultivate for the next time you want to sell a "humanitarian" war.
- Noam Chomsky And The BBC: A Brief Comparison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A recent interview with 88-year-old Noam Chomsky once again demonstrates just how insightful he is in providing rational analysis of Western power and the suffering it generates. By contrast, anyone relying on BBC News receives a power-friendly view of the world, systematically distorted in a way that allows the state and private interests to pursue business as usual.
- Noam Chomsky: Trump's First 100 Days Are Undermining Our Prospects for Survival
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 No recent US president has demonstrated such an overwhelming ignorance about governing as the current occupant of the White House. But is Trump's apparent inability to govern and conduct himself in a remotely conventional manner an innate character flaw or part of a well-conceived strategy aimed at a society that loves reality TV? In this exclusive Truthout interview, Noam Chomsky shares his views about the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
- Noam Chomsky: US Is the "Most Dangerous Country in the World"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Nuclear proliferation and climate change are subjects of acute concern in the current moment, driven into an all-out state of emergency by the new Trump administration. In this interview, Noam Chomsky discusses the media coverage of these two major issues, highlighting US tensions with Russia, Iran and North Korea, as well as discussing the recent US airstrike on Syria's Air Force base.
- Noise, the 'ignored pollutant': health, nature and ecopsychology
The sonic backdrop to our lives is increasingly one of unwanted technospheric noise, writes Paul Mobbs. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For those who like to enjoy the natural environment, noise is something to be escaped from within the relative sanctuary of the landscape. These days that's getting harder and harder to accomplish. That's not only because of noise from all around - in particular from urban areas, roads and the increasing mechanisation of agriculture - but also due to the increasing level of air traffic overhead.
- The North Korea Standoff, Like the Cuban Missile Crisis, Exposes the Reckless U.S. Worldview
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea has cooled off slightly with Kim Jong-un's announcement that, at least for the time being, he will not attack Guam with an "enveloping fire." A good place to start is with the repeated comparisons U.S. politicians have made between the situation with North Korea and the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.
- Not by Bread Alone
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War focused on people's daily needs--who doesn't love hot, buttered toast? People in Spain were starving--they needed food. People--were homeless and needed homes; people were jobless and needed something to do; people were rejected from their communities needed to be included. Anarchists focused on these practical, attainable and above all human needs. And, these are the basic rights that should undergird all human social organizations.
- Notes on a factory uprising in Yangon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examination of a recent strike and riot at a Chinese-owned H&M supplier in Myanmar (Burma), looking beyond the headlines into its local context and broader political significance.
- The NRA's Latest Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It's long past time to start understanding the giant mass shootings that have become part of the new-normal fabric of life in the United States as terrorist attacks on the U.S. populace conducted by the nation’s plutocracy through one of its key and rightward campaign funding, lobbying, and policy organizations -- the National Rifle Association (NRA).
- NSA's Cyberwarfare Blowback
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In May and June 2017, hackers took over thousands of computers around the world, encrypted their contents, and demanded ransom to decrypt them. They used tools developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) to exploit vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system.
- The Nuclear Enterprise Is on Autopilot
CounterSpin interview with William Hartung on nuclear overkill Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Janine Jackson interviewed William Hartung about nuclear overkill for the November 17, 2017, episode of CounterSpin.
- Nuclear Weapons Ban? What Needs to be Banned Is U.S. Arrogance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Nuclear disarmament will be possible only when leaders in Washington recognize that other peoples also have a right and a will to live.
- Nutrient Runoff is Killing American Waters and Voluntary Actions Aren't Working
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The ongoing causes and devastating effects of nutrient pollution on American lakes, bays and waterways is examined.
- Obama Killed a 16-Year-Old American in Yemen. Trump Just Killed His 8-Year-Old Sister.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The U.S. continues to massacre Yemeni civilians, both directly and through its tyrannical Saudi partners.
- Obama's Legacy and the Rise of Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 So much has been written about why Donald Trump won the presidency and the anger of the white working class. White supremacists are overjoyed by his victory. Much less is written or discussed about the failures of liberalism and the Obama presidency for Blacks and other minorities who voted for Hillary Clinton as a lesser evil.
- Occupation captured
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Photos of Palestinian life and Israeli occupation in the West Bank city of Hebron.
- Occupy: The Fall of the Oakland Commune
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For many people, the Occupy movement was an initiation into radical politics, an experiment in decentralized and nonhierarchical movement-building, and a glimpse at the possibility for a new kind of society. Yet the whole thing was over in just a few weeks -- a crisis quieted, a moment of hope extinguished.
- Of Hegel and Bernie Sanders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 My concern is not with Bernie Sanders (basically a New Deal liberal) but with the social dynamics of the Sanders phenomenon. What is going on when we see a surge of mass support for someone who identifies himself (however inaccurately) with socialism? What is the social process driving this unexpected shift in political goals and ideas toward the left? What lies behind the re-entry of socialism into the mass vocabulary of political life?
- The Ohio Vote in November
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Donald Trump won Ohio because the total Democratic vote declined more than the drop in the total two-party vote, and significantly more than the Republican increase.
- Oil and Water
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A collection of articles charting how leaked documents and public records reveal a troubling fusion of private security, public law enforcement, and corporate money in the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline.
- Oil's Deep State
How the petroleum industry undermines democracy and stops action on global warming - in Alberta, and in Ottawa Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 An insider's eywitness view of the oil industry, and how and why governments have failed to heed warnings despite substantial scientific evidence of global warming
- On Catalonia: Debates in the Greek Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Without the burden of self-censorship or "political correctness" on our backs, let us examine what the possible secession of Catalonia actually means and where it could potentially lead.
- On Hidden Cultural Corruptors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The educational institution and military institution both purport to be a source of the nation's highest values, yet they often corrupt and bring out the worst qualities in American citizens.
- On Movement and Freedom
Tales of Enduring Transience Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2017 Canada-based artist Gita Hashemi embarks on a ground journey from Germany to Greece along the so-called "Balkan route." In this written account Hashemi meets with others who are also on the move, as well as artists and activists who support freedom of movement and refugee rights. It is part of an art project called "On the Move" about freedom of movement.
- On the 800th Anniversary of the Charter of the Forest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A Keynote Address, Delivered in the State Rooms at the House of Commons, 7 November 2017 about the Charter of the Forest.
- On the Extreme Margins of the Centennial of the October Revolution
The Legacy of 1917 We Can Affirm Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The year 1917 is most closely associated with the Russian Revolution, but it is more important to locate that revolution in the global tidal wave of working-class struggle from 1917 to 1921 (continued up to 1927 in China), which the forced the end of the first inter-imperialist world war (1914-1918).
- On the Extreme Margins of the Centennial of the October Revolution: The Legacy of 1917 We Can Affirm
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The year 1917 is most closely associated with the Russian Revolution, but it is important to locate that revolution in the global tidal wave of working-class struggle from 1917 to 1921 (continued up to 1927 in China), which forced the end of the first inter-imperialist world war (1914–18).
- On the Grenfell Towers Fire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Still working on things in relation to Grenfell as something that belongs to a more long-term development -- if you like, a culmination of so many cover-ups since the advent of brutalised Thatcherism as the neoliberal agenda unfolded during the last 40 years or so.
- On the Intolerant Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Julian Vigo's concern with the growing pattern of intellectual and political intolerance he's witnessed within allegedly progressive circles.
- One Half-Cheer for Trump?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 June 1, 2017, Donald Trump announced that "The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord," setting off alarm bells and outraged protests in U.S. cities and around the world. We would suggest that under present circumstances, he chose the better - well, less bad - of the existing options.
- 100 Percent Wishful Thinking: the Green-Energy Cornucopia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A growing body of research has debunked overblown claims of a green-energy bonanza.
- One Hundred Years of the Balfour Declaration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Balfour Declaration then not only legitimized the Zionist project in Palestine and transformed it into a contender in international relations. It in effect precipitated the spread of Zionism among British Jews.
- One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century.
- One Palestinian Man's Mission to Make Urban Agriculture More Sustainable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Urban agriculture is playing an increasing role in helping feed communities. The article and accompanying video introduces Salim Abu Naser, a proponent of sustainable agriculture living and working in Gaza City, Palestine.
- One Palestinian Man's Mission to Make Urban Agriculture More Sustainable
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 Video that introduces Said Salim Abu Naser, a proponent of sustainable agriculture living and working in Gaza City, Palestine, along the Mediterranean Coast.
- One State: Trump Has Reminded Palestinians What It Was Always About
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For more than 15 years, the Middle East "peace process" initiated by the Oslo accords has been on life support. Last week, United States president Donald Trump pulled the plug, whether he understood it or not.
- One Taxi Driver's Story of Trying to Survive in the Age of Uber
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Since Uber and other "ride-share" businesses emerged in Chicago, the livelihood that once sustained one taxi driver's family of five has now virtually disappeared.
- One Woman Is Behind the Most Up-to-Date Interactive Map of Femicides in Mexico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The interactive 'Femicides in Mexico Map' is a "citizen-led, civic, independent initiative based on open data which, using geographical coordinates, has been mapping cases of femicide since 2016.
- Only one bear in a hundred bites, but they don't come in order
Resource Type: Videotape First Published: 2017 Bob Bossin talked about oil tanks in a Youtube video
- Ontario man publishes coal-mining novel
William Pancoast recently published his fifth book, "The Road to Matewan." Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 William Pancoast likes to call his writing working-class literature for the working class. The Galion native recently published his fifth book, "The Road to Matewan." The novel includes history from a turbulent time in West Virginia history. The Battle of Matewan, also known as the Matewan Massacre, involved a May 19, 1920, shootout in Mingo County.
- An open letter from Jewish academics and elders to McGill's administration regarding false allegations of student anti-Semitism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This letter was sent Nov. 13 to Principal Suzanne Fortier, Provost Christopher Manfredi, and Secretariat Board of Governors and Senate Maria Kontzidis.
- Open Letter to "Human Rights Defenders" on Aleppo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Syria is the legitimacy of the interventionist policies of the U.S. and its "allies", Europeans, Turkey, and the Gulf states in that country.
- Open Letter to the People of the United States from Puerto Rico, A Month After Hurricane Maria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An open letter to the people of the U.S., following the devastating effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico.
- The Ordeal of Hassan Diab
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Sociology professor and Canadian citizen Hassan Diab was wrongfully arrested and extradiated to France in 2008. To this day the Canadian government is silent on the events.
- The Ordeal of Migrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Migrants face prejudices, xenophobia and racism, besides bureaucratic obstacles that do not recognize their qualifications.
- An ordinary Labour member just gave the most moving speech of the party conference so far
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An ordinary member's speech to the Labour Party conference left the audience stunned. And it's one that everyone needs to hear, as the moving address reflects a crisis in the UK.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 22, 2017
Disobedience Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Ultimately all power structures depend on the obedience of those over whom they rule. It helps if people believe in the legitimacy of those who wield power, but the crucial thing is obedience. Once people start to disobey in significant numbers, the dynamic of power changes fundamentally. Disobedience, especially on a large scale, shakes the power of the rulers, and increases the power of those who disobey. Disobedience is the theme of this issue.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 12, 2017
Race and Class Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Class conflict - first and foremost, the relationship between the capitalist class and the working class -- is the fundamental contradiction that defines capitalist society. Class is a reality which simultaneously encompasses and collides with other dimensions of oppression and domination, such as gender and race. The relationship between race and class, in particular, is the theme of this issue of Other Voices.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 18, 2017
Public Transit Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Public transit - good affordable public transit - is key to a liveable city. Around the world, there are movements of transit riders fighting for better public transit. A key perspective guiding many of these struggles is the idea that transit should be free, that is, paid for not by fares, but out of general revenues. This is how roads are normally funded: their construction and maintenance are paid for by taxes, rarely by user fees. Free public transit by itself would not be enough, however. We also need good transit, transit that runs frequently and goes where people want to go.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 1, 2017
April 1 issue Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Other Voices always strives to present you with alternative views on important topics. This issue offers some really alternative perspectives and even some "alternative facts." As always, read critically - and enjoy.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 30, 2017
Affirming life, resisting war, reporting UFOs Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 What do we do when those in power recklessly put the future of the entire planet at risk with their acts of aggression and military provocations, while they ignore the growing disaster of climate change? We fight back and organize, on every level, wherever we are, doing whatever offers the hope of resisting and of building a movement that can stop and overturn the out-of-control monster of late capitalism.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - May 28, 2017
Resisting Injustice Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 In this issue, we look at the relentless persistence of people challenging injustice and entrenched power in places around the world, including Palestine, Korea, China, Canada, and the United States. We spotlight the hunger strike by Palestinian political prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons, workers’ strikes in China, and people in South Korea taking on a corrupt government. In the United States, the Equal Justice Initiative is collecting soil from places where blacks were lynched as a way of remembering their lives and the brutally racist society that murdered them. An article on recent terrorist attacks in Britain asks what underlies ideological violence and sociopathic rage. Ralph Nader asks why people who are supposed to be professional questioners avoid asking hard questions of those in power.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter June 26, 2017
Public Safety Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 The June 26, 2017 issue of Other Voices, the Connexions newsletter is about public safety.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 22, 2017
Secrecy and Power Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Secrecy is a weapon the powerful use against their enemies: us. This issue of Other Voices explores the relationship of secrecy and power.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - August 27, 2017
Official Enemies Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Why and how do some countries become 'enemies'? How and why do governments and media work in tandem to demonize official enemies? Who are the people who live in those countries, what are their lives like, and why should we consider them our enemies?
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 9, 2017
Meeting the Challenge of the Right Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Challenging the Right requires not only anti-fascist actions in the street, but organizing to reach those who may be attracted the the appeal of the Right and offering an alternative social vision. This issue of Other Voices offers a number of articles, books, and films offering different perspectives on meeting the challenge of the right.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 17, 2017
Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 Our society is obsessed with the short-term present. It devalues memory and the past. But there are those who do remember, and who work to preserve and share our collective memory. But they have to contend with those of us who see historical memory as a way of contributing to the struggle for a different world. For us, knowledge of history is subversive, and remembering can be a form of resistance.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 11, 2017
Left Parties Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 In recent years, there have been repeated attempts to build left political parties and coalitions, i.e. parties to the left of the established social democratic parties which have long become part of the neoliberal capitalist mainstream. Left parties have emerged out of mass movements in countries like Spain (Podemos), Germany (Die Linke), and Greece (Syriza). In Latin America, in the last two decades, left movements or parties have formed governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay. What these new left parties/movements have in common is a strategy of engaging in grassroots organizing and also running in elections. They all describe themselves as socialist, though in many cases their programs are more reminiscent of what social democrats used to advocate decades ago: reforms that would tame and manage capitalism rather than abolish it. Their ultimate vision may be a world without capitalism, but their immediate proposals are more modest and incremental, though still significantly to the left of the neo-liberal consensus.
- Over the River
Returning home to Flint Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Author Richard Manning returns to his childhood home of Flint, Michigan and recounts the city's decline from thriving industry into an economic depression, from which the city has never recovered. Flint is left with an eroded infrastructure, neighbourhoods rife with crime and public health emergencies, and the decades old question of how will it ever recover.
- Palestine: Another Desperate Cry for Help
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The National Coalition of Christian Organizations in Palestine (NCCOP) has just issued a final plea for help in the form of an open letter to the World Council of Churches and the ecumenical movement.
- Palestine Museum of Natural History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Palestine Museum of Natural History provides testimony to the Palestinian attachment to the land, for preservation of plant and animal life, as well as cultural expression and identity to the Palestinian community.
- Palestinian Human Rights Defender Arrested for a Facebook Post
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Palestinian Authority (PA) is continuing its crackdown on free speech in the West Bank, this time arresting prominent Palestinian human rights activist Issa Amro for criticizing a journalist's arrest in a Facebook post.
- Palestinian, Jewish Voices Music Jointly Challenge Israel's Past
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Baroud analyzes how Israel has appropriated the Palestinian narrative of Al-Nakba to rewrite history and place the occupation of Palestine in a positive light.
- Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle
It's time for Israel to accept that as an occupied people, Palestinians have a right to resist - in every way possible. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 International law recognises the fundamental rights to self-determination, freedom and independence for the occupied. For Palestinians that includes the right to armed struggle.
- A Partial Peace in Colombia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Colombia's peace accord serves capitalist interests, but may also open new space for the grassroots left.
- A Partisan Mayor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look back at the "French Tito," partisan militant Georges Guingouin.
- The Pentagon Says One Civilian Died in Drone Strike on Syrian Mosque. Witnesses Say It Killed Dozens.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A Pentagon review concludes that a missile strike only killed one person and was a legal attack on a legitimate target. The review did not include eye witness testimony which claims dozens of lives were lost as well as damage to a mosque.
- The People are Not the Enemy: Police Anarchy in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With alarming regularity unarmed American men, women, children and even pets are dying at the hands of police who are trained to shoot first and ask questions later, yet government seems to do little to resolve this crisis in policing.
- People are radicalizing Venezuela's Revolution: An interview with Christina Schiavoni
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In this interview Christina Schiavoni, a researcher and food sovereignty activist, provides a different view of the life of the Venezuelan people than we normally get from the media. The interview covers food and health situations as well as on-going politics and people's participation in the politics.
- The People vs. Big Oil
Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Steve Early's Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City.
- People's History, Memory & Archives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A gateway to resources on people's history and grassroots archives.
- A people's history of England
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A posting which attaches in pdf format the 1938 work by AL Morton outlining the most important turning points of British history.
- Peter Maurin's Vision for the Catholic Worker, an Idea Whose Time has Come
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Today it seems obvious that a return to the land, to a proper relationship with creation and to meaningful, productive work is integral to the aims of the Catholic Worker movement. For much of its history, however, since its beginning in 1933, this aspect of its founder's original intentions was relegated to the margins of an already marginal movement.
- Pharma Funded "Patient" Groups Keep Drug Prices Astronomical
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- The Philipinnes: War Against the Poor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 President Rodrigo Roa Duterte is responsible for a so-called "war on drugs" that is costing thousands of lives and is increasingly concentrating power in his own hands.
- Philippines: Walden Bello on fighting fascism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Walden Bello at the National Anti-Dictatorship Conference, University of the Philippines, outlines the key elements of an anti-dictatorship program.
- Philippines: when the police kill children - Kulot, Carl, Kian...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Murders of several teenagers in the Philippines suspected to have been killed as part of the government's war on drugs.
- The Plague of Nationalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Catalan nationalists insist that "self-determination" is an inalienable right and cannot be curbed by the Spanish Constitution. Well, then, why stop with an "autonomous community" as Catalonia is designated? Why don’t provinces everywhere have the right to declare their independence? How about cities? Or neighbourhoods?
- The Plant Next Door
A Louisiana Town Plagued by Pollution Shows Why Cuts to the EPA Will Be Measured in Illnesses and Deaths Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 When the Environmental Protection Agency informed people in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, last July that the local neoprene plant was emitting a chemical that gave them the highest risk of cancer from air pollution in the country, the information was received not just with horror and sadness but also with a certain sense of validation.
- Playing Chicken: Discovering a Diverse Working Class in Trump Country
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Since the election of 2016, much has been written about rural working-class voters who helped elect Donald J. Trump to the presidency. Most of those stories have assumed that the rural working class is overwhelmingly white. But if we look at one of the most significant parts of the rural economy – the poultry industry – we get a different picture. Not only do we see more workers of color, we also see more exploitation and greater potential for resistance.
- Please Stop Chanting That 'We' Won the Popular Vote!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 "We" didn’t win the popular vote, because we weren't on the ballot. We are the ninety-nine percent.
- The Plot to Scapegoat Russia
How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 An in-depth look at the decades-long effort to escalate hostilities with Russia and what it portends for the future.
- Podemos, Catalonia and the workers' movement in the Spanish state
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Following a long period of electoral upheaval and failure of the left, it is argued that the two key areas where the Spanish ruling class could have been confronted was through the workers' movement and the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, both of which were not sufficiently addressed by the Podemos campaign.
- Poison in the Fields: Agriculture as Chemical Warfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Highly poisonous chemicals ( that were originally designed as weapons of war) have been allowed for many decades, under successive Government policies, to be sprayed on crop fields all over the UK, and with literally no protection at all for the many millions of rural citizens living or attending schools in the locality of such chemically treated areas. (In fact, there is actually no protection for rural residents and communities in the majority of other countries around the world either!)
- Poison Papers Snapshot: HOJO Transcript Illustrates EPA Collusion With Chemical Industry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A commentary on the "Poison papers", chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back decades, which shed light on what was known about chemical toxicity and practices in the often-incriminating words of the participants themselves, and which still have implications for us today.
- Poland's Solidarity and Its Fate
Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution: Solidarity and the Struggle against Communism in Poland Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Jack Bloom's Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution: Solidarity and the Struggle against Communism in Poland.
- The police are not here to protect you
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It is a liberal fantasy that policing exist to protect us from the bad guys, rather it serves more to manage and suppress those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements.
- The police are not here to protect you
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The police spend little of their time making arrests, and most crimes are not solved, writes Alex Vitale - their real purpose is social control
- Policing for Profit: Jeff Sessions & Co.'s Thinly Veiled Plot to Rob Us Blind
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Commentary on 'policing for profit', or civil asset forfeiture, which allows police and prosecutors to seize property and sell it to help fund agency budgets.
- The Politcal Economy of Fascism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For all of the millions of words written about the fascist danger posed by Donald Trump, there are very few devoted to an actual analysis of fascist economics both as ideology and state policy.
- Political Prisoners Remain Behind Bars as Obama's Term Nears End
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the last full week of Barack Obama's eight year tenure as President of the United States of America, dozens of political prisoners still sit in cages across the nation's prisons, rotting away as Obama consciously chooses not to exercise the power to simply free them with the stroke of a pen.
- The Political and Rhetorical Strategies of Martin Luther King
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What we can learned from Martn Luther King about political and rhetorical strategy, as well as movement building and organizing.
- The Politics of a Punch: Richard Spencer and the Black Bloc
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Alt-right leader Richard Spencer was punched in the face by a man dressed in black bloc garb. Louis Proyect gives his interpretation of the punching incident.
- The Politics of Some Bodies
The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Holly Lewis' The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection.
- The Politics of Terror Mirrors the Politics of Heroin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While terrorist activities of ISIS in the West are describes as blowback. a more sinister connection than ‘guilt by association’ comes to the surface if we analyse Western elite behaviour elsewhere.
- Politics Without Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Jonathan Smucker's recently published book Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals offers a flawed road map for rebuilding the Left.
- Lillian Pollak
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Activist, revolutionary socialist and writer Lillian Pollak died in New York City at the age of 101.
- Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South: An Interview with Historian Keri
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Historian Keri Leigh Merritt presents a comprehensive study of this malignant and overlooked aspect of slavery in her new book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press). This is an interview with her.
- The Popular Front Didn't Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Communist Party's 1930s popular front strategy weakened the labour movement and empowered the Democratic Party, a strategy that would be even more destuctive to the socialist left today.
- The Popular Front Didn't Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This article focuses on the recent growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Through a historical overview of worker's parties in the United States, the article discusses the party's vision for the future.
- Power and Protest: The Electoral Tactics of Leftist Social Movements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The central difficulty for left social movements is determining electoral tactics that will enable them to win both in the short run and in the middle run. On the surface, it seems that winning in the short run conflicts with winning in the middle run.
- Power to the Soviets
Book Review of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of China Miéville's October: The Story of the Russian Revolution.
- Preferred Conclusions -- The BBC, Syria And Venezuela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In 2013, it was remarkable to see the BBC reporting claims from Syria on a daily basis in a way that almost always blamed the Syrian government, and President Assad personally, for horrendous war crimes. But as the New York Times reported last month, the picture was rather less black and white.
- The President of Honduras Is Deploying U.S.-Trained Forces Against Election Protesters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, using the specter of rampant crime and the drug trade, won extensive support from the American government to build up highly trained state security forces. Now, those same forces are repressing democracy.
- Presidio mutiny
Wikipedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Presidio mutiny was a sit-down protest carried out by 27 prisoners at the Presidio stockade in San Francisco, California on October 14, 1968. The stiff sentences given out at courts martial for the participants (known as the Presidio 27) attracted attention to the extent of sentiment against the Vietnam War in the armed forces.
- Pride parade in Vancouver rejects Iranian over veil float
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Iranian Shawn Shirazi and his group Cirque de So Gay were denied entry to the Pride Parade in Vancouver, Canada this year because their float criticising the veil was deemed to be 'culturally [in]sensitive'.
- Principles of Organizing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Explores the culture of organizing, the challenging and confusing dialectical tension that is every organizers terrain: change and continuity, the personal and the political, ideals and interests, planning and opportunity, and the transitions from evolutionary to revolutionary forms of unionism.
- The Prisoners' Revolt: The Real Reasons behind the Palestinian Hunger Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Gaza is the world’s largest open air prison. The West Bank is a prison, too, segmented into various wards, known as areas A, B and C. In fact, all Palestinians are subjected to varied degrees of military restrictions. At some level, they are all prisoners.
- The problem is more than integration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Polls show that minorities, and Muslims in particular, have a greater attachment to Britain than does the population at large. They also show that nine out of ten Britons think that their community is cohesive, and local area a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together. According to Casey this figure has increased (from 80 per cent to 89 per cent) since 2003. Britons, in other words, have become more positive about social cohesion in the very period in which ‘uncontrolled immigration’ has supposedly eroded peoples’ sense of community and belonging.
- The Problem Isn't Willie Pete, The Problem is War Crimes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The problem with bombarding Syrian cities, or any populated areas, isn't just that it is being done with white phosphorous, it's that it is being done at all.
- The problem with identity politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of identity politics, and how experience alone is an inadequate foundation from which to develop an analysis of oppression or to devise political strategies to end it.
- The Promises and Limitations of Radical Local Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Steve Early's most recent book, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of An American City (Beacon Press), describes the building of a what is very likely the most successful progressive political organization, The Richmond Progressive Alliance, in the United States, in Richmond, California, a blue collar city long dominated by Chevron Corp.
- Proof of concept: An insurgent left can achieve electoral success - even in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The article looks at Vancouver's current political climate on the municipal level. Jean Swanson's recent support placed her in second place in a civic election, and demonstrates the city's shift to the centre - left.
- Propaganda, Fake News, and Media Lies
The Diabolical Business of Global Public Relations Firms Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The PRP industry has experienced phenomenal growth since 2001. In 2015, three publicly traded mega PR firms -- Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic Group -- together employed 214,000 people across 170 countries, collecting $35 billion in combined revenue. Not only do these firms control massive wealth, they also possess a network of connections in powerful international institutions with direct links to national governments, multi-national corporations, global policy-making bodies, and the corporate media.
- Propaganda Feeds Fear and Loathing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The disturbing and growing trend of misinformation in news reporting.
- Propaganda and Lies, Canadian Style
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As Canadian politicians speak freely and with less accountability on international affairs, indiviuals need to educate themselves on international issues and through alternative sources of information.
- The Prophet: Deutscher's Trotsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Old Testament prophets belonged to a religious order devoted to the study of sacred texts, which they interpreted, and from which they proclaimed the obligations of the leaders of their nation to the people. From these scriptures they envisioned the coming of the Messiah, who would usher in an era of justice and goodwill toward men.
- Prosecution of Assange is Persecution of Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 US authorities are reported to have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This overreach of US government toward a publisher is another sign of a crumbling façade of democracy.
- Protest Alone Won't Stop Fascism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Desperate people are vulnerable to fascism, and the desperation is deepening: millions are eyeball deep in debt and 80% live paycheck to paycheck, while skyrocketing healthcare costs and rising rent heat up the social pressure cooker. It's this economic gut punch that the fascists hope to benefit from: as working people struggle to breathe the fascists hope to offer cheap, ready-made oxygen.
- PublicitySources.com
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 A web portal featuring publicity and PR resources, including articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Punitive Neoliberalism in Puerto Rico
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Examines current debates in Puerto Rico using two concepts, punitive neoliberalism and financial melancholia.
- Putting the Racist Flyers at University of Michigan in Context
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On Monday morning, September 26, 2017, students arrived to the U-M campus to find racist flyers plastered in Haven Hall, Mason Hall, and several other buildings
- Quantitative Easing: the Most Opaque Transfer of Wealth in History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Quantitative Easing, by 'injecting' money into the economy, was supposed to get banks lending again, boosting investment and driving up economic growth, but this has proven not to be the case.
- Quebec's Antifa movement on rise in response to growth of far-right groups
Left-wing activists grapple with tactics to fight racism, neo-Nazism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A report on anti-facist groups and their roots in Quebec, and what they are doing to counter the rise of right wing nationalism in the province.
- Race and the Real California
The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Sarah D. Wald's The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl.
- Race v. Class? More Brilliant Bourgeois Bullshit from Ta-Nehesi Coates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Coates is either flat-out lying or woefully ignorant when he argues that "the left" is disinterested in the big and significant problems of racial identity and racial justice. The longstanding legitimately Left progressive agenda addresses both race and class at one and the time. It does not accept Coates' false dichotomy between class and race.
- The racist worldview of Arthur Balfour
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour, whose Declaration of 1917 led to the expulsion of Palestinians.
- Radical Ruptures Emerging from Global Wageworkers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The following notes were the basis of a contribution to the internationalist communist summer meeting organized by TPTG, Underground Tunnel and friends, July 11–17, 2017, in Greece.
- Radical White Workers During the Last Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The long-lost story of anti-racist, radical white working class activism has been restored by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy in their invaluable book: Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times.
- Ragpicking Through History: Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Our current conjuncture invites a renewed rethinking of two historical imaginaries: first, what is class memory? To ask this question is really to reopen a discussion on what is class struggle – and, more specifically, how does our collective memorialisation of struggles past inform our relationship to struggle in the present. Second, and relatedly, who can be this struggle's archivist?
- Rahul Pandita's New India: A Hindutva India On the Ashes Of Democratic Secular India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Shamsul Islam responds to the rise of the Hindutva in India and challenges their anti-Muslim propaganda.
- Rainbow Coalition or Class War?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Is there any reason to think that Redneck Revolt and the new Rainbow Coalition will turn out differently from the People's Party? American history shows that any political group, left, right or center, that fails to challenge in practice the white community and the institutions and patterns that maintain it will reinforce an identity that has led countless potentially progressive movements to ruin and whose capacity to do harm is by no means exhausted -- no matter how vigorously it denounces “racism” and capitalism and how many coalitions it enters with non-whites. Simply put, white people organized as whites are dangerous to the working class and to humanity, and white people with guns organized as whites are doubly so -- and this is true regardless of the intentions of the organizers.
- The reactionary, class nature of left Academia today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Mellor challenges the idea that socialism is eurocentric and speaks to how capitalist exploitation and workers' resistance is fundamentally similar all over the world.
- Reactions to Manchester Bombing Show How Anti-Muslim Bigots Are 'Useful Idiots' for ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Following recent terrorist attacks in Britain, the article looks at anti -Mulsim backlash and how it is playing into the hands of ISIS.
- Reactions to Manchester Bombing Show How Anti-Muslim Bigots Are 'Useful Idiots' for ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How hatred of Muslims is unwittingly an effective tool for ISIS recuritmenent.
- The Real Dad’s Army
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Britain's wartime Home Guard is immortalized in popular culture -- but the socialists who shaped it are forgotten.
- Real-Time Face Recognition Threatens to Turn Cops' Body Cameras Into Surveillance Machines
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For years, the development of real-time face recognition has been hampered by poor video resolution, the angles of bodies in motion, and limited computing power. But as systems begin to transcend these technical barriers, they are also outpacing the development of policies to constrain them. Civil liberties advocates fear that the rise of real-time face recognition alongside the growing number of police body cameras creates the conditions for a perfect storm of mass surveillance.
- The Realist: Irreverence Was Their Only Sacred Cow
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Realist was a magazine both representative and counter to the times it existed in. Viciously satirical and usually aimed at power (like all good satire should be), it was neither liberal nor conservative, Democrat or Republican, communist, fascist or anything else in between. Its targets were religion, government, corporate America, popular and counter cultures, racism and imperialism. Very little was spared its pointed and often poison pen. The magazine lasted over forty years, from 1958 to 2001 and published a total of 146 issues.
- Rebels Without a Cause: The Assault on Academic Freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examining current academic culture which falsely labels "words as violence" and how it is affecting acedemic freedom, notably by some who think of themselves as being on the left, who are employing totalitarian tactics which ultimately cause professional and economic harm.
- The Reconciliation Manifesto
Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A look at the historical and current relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians, and what needs to be done to accomplish true reconciliation.
- Red cap terror at the moussaka line: West London ready-meal workers' report and leaflet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Workplace report for WorkersWildWest no.5 and leaflet for future distribution. Main challenge will be the migrant status of workers - there have been various police raids in the plant - and the language and contract division.
- Red Terror: Anti-Corbynism and Double Standards
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A defence oif Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour party.
- A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 As the Anthropocene advances, people across the red-green political spectrum seek to understand and halt our deepening ecological crisis. Environmentalists, scientists, and ecosocialists share concerns about the misuse and overuse of natural resources, but often differ on explanations and solutions.
- Re-examine revolution, but don't abandon it
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Re-examine revolution, but surely now is not the time to abandon it. Chris Nineham reviews Socialist Register 2017: Rethinking Revolution
- Reflections on DC: Promises and Pitfalls in the Anti-Trump Uprising
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The first mass protests of President Donald Trump represent a historic moment – one worth reflecting on so we can understand where we are and where we're going as a nation.
- Reflections on the way to the gallows
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A record from a short prison diary kept by Japanese anarchist and feminist Kanno Sugako prior to her execution in 1911 for her part in a plot to assassinate the Emperor.
- Reflections on Tom Hayden
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Reflections on Tom Hayden and the 1962 Port Huron Statement.
- Regulation -- Who Needs It?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In Trump's vocabulary, regulations are ALL bad. (Of course Trump sees regulations around reproductive rights as good, but consistency isn't one of his characteristics.)
- Remembering Peekskill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Peekskill Riots in 1949 remind us of a period of postwar rebellion and reaction that set the stage for the rest of the century.
- Reporters face 70 years in prison over anti-Trump march
Two journalists are among more than 200 people facing felony charges after mass arrests at Inauguration Day rally. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The actions of police during the inauguration of Donald Trump and arrest of over 230 people with threat of harsh penalties, including 70 years in prison for two journalists, is tantamount to criminalizing dissent.
- Republican Data-Mining Firm Exposed Personal Information for Virtually Every American Voter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Evidence suggests that Republican-linked election databases were inadvertently exposed to the internet, without password protection, potentially violating the privacy of almost every registered voter in the United States.
- Resist This: the United States is at War With Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The United States is engaged in military actions within a sovereign country that poses no actual or imminent threat, effectively an act of war against Syria.
- Resistance and Resolve in Russia: Memorial HRC
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An account of the current climate for political dissent in Russia, describing the activities of and challenges faced by the Memorial Human Rights Centre, a Russian NGO.
- Resistance to Antibiotics: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The growing resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobials due to their overuse and misuse both in humans and animals has become an alarming global threat to public health, food safety and security, causing the deaths of 700,000 people each year.
- Resisting Capital's Disasters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Trump represents the twisted and half-deranged face of a systemic assault on virtually every facet of the social safety net, workers' rights, and the entire public sector -- apart from the bloated permanent war economy.
- Resolutions Advocating a Boycott of Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Modern Language Association (MLA) Delegate Assembly voted in Philadelphia on two resolutions, for and against, of an academic boycott of Israel.
- Responding to Antifa and Riseup
On Revolutionary Politics and Non-Violence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 "The left" of contemporary 2017 America is deeply divided and fractured, and it is a shadow of its former self, considering the decline of organized labor, and the disappearance of left-public intellectuals in higher education. In this environment, what remains of "the left" desperately needs to reach out to the masses of Americans, including liberals, moderates, and political independents, and to pull them further to the left, if there is to be any chance of meaningful change. And berating anyone who is not perceived to be on the far left, rather than patiently working to bring these individuals into a broader left movement, is a recipe for irrelevance.
- A Response To George Monbiot's 'Disavowal'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is a pattern of 'mainstream' media insisting on the need for war in response to unproven claims that are often later debunked.
- A Response to the Anti-Defamation League
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Anti-Defamation League's statement published in Detroit Jewish News (July 24, 2017, "Jewish Voice for Peace Increases Anti-Israel Radicalism") contains numerous distortions, which can't all be addressed in detail in the limited space available to us here.
- Restoring the Heartland and Rustbelt through Clean Energy Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Al paper discussing ways to simultaneously fight climate change and create jobs.
- Restoring the Heartland and Rustbelt through Clean Energy Democracy: an Organizing Proposal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A proposal to end capitalism and fight climate change at the same time.
- Restricting People’s Use of Their Courts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In not so merry old medieval England, wrongful injuries between people either were suffered in silence or provoked revenge. Cooler heads began to prevail and courts of law were opened so such disputes over compensation and other remedies could be adjudicated under trial by jury.
- Rethinking the challenge of anti-Muslim bigotry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In 1997 the British anti-racist organisation the Runnymede Trust published its highly influential report Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. Twenty years on, the Runnymede Trust has brought out a follow-up report Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All, which is a stock-take on current views, and facts, about the issue.
- Retired GM worker speaks on three years of the Flint water crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The poisoning of the city of Flint continues three long years after the decision was made by politicians and financial speculators to switch city residents to Flint River water. As the world now knows, the corrosive Flint River water leached lead from the antiquated piping system into the homes of residents. Lead is a deadly neurotoxin. Because next to nothing has yet been done to fix the city’s infrastructure, even after the switch back to Detroit water, there is no safe water supply for thousands of residents.
- The Return of Commercial Prison Labour
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Prisons are seldom mentioned under the rubric of labour market institutions such as temporary work contracts or collective bargaining agreements. Yet, prisons not only employ labour but also cast a shadow on the labour force in or out of work. The early labour movement considered the then prevalent use of prison labour for commercial purposes as unfair competition. By the 1930s, the U.S. labour movement was strong enough to have work for commercial purposes prohibited in prisons.
- The Return of Engels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 After Marx's death in 1883, Engels prepared volumes two and three of Capital for publication from the drafts his friend had left behind. If Engels, as he was the first to admit, stood in Marx’s shadow, he was nevertheless an intellectual and political giant in his own right.
- Review: The Politics of Some Bodies - On "Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 At a time when Marxist politics is struggling more than ever against the current, queer Marxist scholarship is enjoying a slight, startling, heartening resurgence. Holly Lewis' The Politics of Everybody is a major contribution to the trend.
- Revolution and the Color Line
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of the biography 'W.E.B. DuBois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line', by Bill Mullen, detailing the life of the influential author and organizer.
- The Revolution Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The accumulating failures of both Communist and Social Democratic parties over the past 50 years was accompanied by a marked shift on the radical left toward a broad-ranging ‘movementism’ – whether in its pressure-group or protest-oriented dimensions. As Jodi Dean has recently argued, those trying thereby to escape 'the constraints of party’ often reduced it to 'the actuality of its mistakes’ while ‘its role as concentrator of collective aspirations and affects [was] diminished if not forgotten.'
- Richest 1% have more money than poorest half of world's population
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The bottom half of adults in the world collectively own less than the richest one percent, according to a Credit Suisse report. The gap between the super-rich and the poor has significantly grown since the global crisis.
- Rigged. Forced into Debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt, which is then used as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that leave them destitute.
- Right But Wrong: Trump's Defense of Confederate Symbols and Its Threat to Color-Blind Liberalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The ugly scenes of neo-nazis, neo-Confederates, and self-proclaimed white supremacists marching in large numbers and brawling on the streets of Charlottesville shocked American culture. President Trump spoke three times commenting on those troubling events.
- The Right-Wing Assault on the Truth in India Claims the Life of Another Journalist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Journalist, activist and writer Gauri Lankesh, was gunned down on the night of Sept. 5, 2017, by a suspected right-wing extremist for her published views in a tabloid paper.
- The rising repression of social protest in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On 17 October, 2017, the corpse of Santiago Maldonado appeared in the Chubut River. The young activist had been missing for 80 days. The suspense surrounding Maldonado’s whereabouts aroused a great sense of unease in a country where the word “disappeared” brings to mind the 30,000 victims of the civic-military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.
- Rohingya and the Myth of Buddhist Tolerance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Since their citizenship rights have been progressively revoked between the 1940s and '80s, thousands of Rohingya men, women and children have been subjected to murder and rape, their villages have been raised to the ground and more than a million have fled to neighboring countries without much protest from the world beyond.
- The Role of Science in Capitalist Society and Social Change
Part 1 of 2 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With its Republican allies in Congress, the Trump administration plans to cut scientific programs while feeding more fuel into the ravenous, murderous, and imperialistic war machine of the United States. Trump's hate of scientists is clearly universal as demonstrated by the sanctioning of 271 Syrian scientists by the Treasury Department despite the fact these scientists have not engaged in any hostile acts aimed at the United States.
- Roots of the Rebellion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Kim D. Hunter interviews Melba Joyce Boyd about the 1967 rebellion.
- The Rule of Law Won't Save Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Donald Trump won't be stopped by the law -- in fact, his worse abuses are enabled by it.
- Running Government Like a Business is Bad for Citizens
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Donald Trump and Jared Kushner say that the government should be run like a business, but that would mean eliminating regulations and expenses that benefit the people.
- Rural Americans and the Language Too Many People Use to Talk About Them
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With the rural-urban divide more pronounced now than it has been in generations, the author takes a closer look at the derogatory language too many people use, as well their meaning and contradictions.
- Russiagate and the Democratic Party are for Chumps
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Now Trump and the nation's 34 Republican governors get to wield the ever-expanding powers of the police state in a nation whose populace has lost faith in nearly every major U.S. institution but two: the military and the police. It's a militarized police-state the Democrats helped create.
- The Russian Dossier Reminds Me of the Row Over Saddam's WMDs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The conclusions reached in the Trump dossier claim to be based on multiple sources of information where, in the nature of things, they are unlikely to exist.
- The Russian Hack That Wasn't
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept exposes the fake news put out by the US Department of Homeland Security (an euphemistic name for a Big Brother operation that spies on US citizens) that Russia hacked 21 US state elections, news that was instantly spread around the world by the presstitute media.
- The Russian Hacking Story Continues to Unravel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An examination of the text from a recent report by an IBM executive, which disproves the claim that Russia interfered in the US elections or hacked the servers at the DNC.
- The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women
Part Two Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women
Part Three Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- The Russian Revolution and Workers Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Russian Revolution of February and October 1917 opened up a new historical epoch, and was greeted with enthusiasm by workers around the world.
- The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women
Part One Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was the greatest victory for the world's working people and for all of the oppressed. The spark for the revolutionary upsurge was a mass outpouring of women in Petrograd on International Women’s Day (IWD), March 8 (February 23 by the old Julian calendar). While in recent years bourgeois feminists have usurped IWD, in fact it is a workers' celebration that originated in 1908 among female needle trades workers in Manhattan.
- The Russian Revolution: Workers in Power
October 1917: Workers in Power Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Fred Leplat's and Alex de Jong's October 1917: Workers in Power.
- Ryerson Made a Mistake in Cancelling Panel Discussion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Not only are censorship and suppression fatal to the purpose of the university, they undermine the foundation of democratic society. When individual rights to freedom of expression are diminished or taken away for an allegedly good cause, they are necessarily invested in some higher authority that is given the right to determine what is acceptable. The result is censorship from above – ultimately the state – with the likelihood that the champions of that censorship today are its vulnerable targets tomorrow.
- Sacred Cod
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 Sacred Cod is a feature-length documentary that captures the collapse of the historic cod population in New England, delving into the role of overfishing, the impact of climate change, the effect of government policies on fishermen and the fish, and the prospect of a region built on cod having no cod left to fish.
- Sanders' Campaign & the Democratic Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite his many flaws, the Sanders campaign had a working-class, implicitly anti-capitalist flavor that garnered considerable support among those who might otherwise have voted for Trump, as many perhaps did.
- Scapegoating Russia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia" authored by labour and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik.
- Science and its enemies - Vietnamese text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- Science for the People with the EZLN
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Zapatistas have been extremely clever in responding to the continual challenges (not without serious setbacks), both militarily and politically. They have not only survived over the past 23 years but prospered, in their own terms, and gained considerable popular appeal.
- Scientists: protect vast Amazon peatland to avoid palm oil 'environmental disaster'
A recently discovered peatland in northeast Peru contains two years worth of US carbon emissions, writes Joe Sandler Clarke, but it's under Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The peatland in Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin in northeast Peru - discovered in 2009 by Finnish scientist Outi Lähteenoja - is said to contain 3.14 gigatons of carbon, roughly equivalent to two years of CO2 emissions from the United States. Scientists have said that economic development in the region, like road-building and the arrival of commercial agriculture threatens the important ecosystem.
- Security Is Ruining the Internet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How the need for cybersecurity has made the internet less convenient for users.
- The Seeds of Agroecology and Common Ownership
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With platitudes about 'feeding the world', the corporate agribusiness/agritech industry is destroying the commons and democracy and displacing existing localised systems of food production. In fact the increasingly globalised industrial food system is responsible for some of the most pressing political, social and environmental crises we are facing.
- The Seeds of Agroecology and Common Ownership
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A political-economical critique of modern agriculture and the urgent need to establish societies run for the benefit of the mass of the population, as well as a system of food and agriculture that is more democratically owned and controlled.
- Seeing red: the wisdom of John Berger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A reflection on the life and work of critic John Berger.
- Self-Censored Questions by Career Questioners
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 I've always been intrigued by the major questions not asked by reporters at press conferences, not asked by legislators at public hearings or even the questions citizens at town meetings don't ask public officials. It's not that they do not know about or could not easily become informed enough about a given issue and ask substantive questions. It's just that so many taboos are packed into these questioners' ideological mindset, career goals or concern with what other people over them might think. Maybe it is a culturally-rooted fear of challenging entrenched power brokers.
- Senators 'Stunned' to Learn US Has 1,000 Troops in Niger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee members recently confirmed they were "stunned" by the revelation that the US had upwards of 1,000 ground troops operating inside the country of Niger, sparking new questions about war authorization.
- The Sense of Art: In memoriam John Berger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In memoriam of the British writer and lecturer John Berger.
- The Serious Price of the Hyperconvenient Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The rapid "progress" towards greater convenience will induce dependency, ignorance of the product and service and more loss of voice, self-determination and self-reliance.
- Seth Rich, Craig Murray and the Sinister Stewards of the National Security State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Security leaks and the murder of a Democratic National Committee staff member.
- 7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A list of signs that social justice language is being used abusively in a relationship
- The Sex Offender: the 21st Century Witch
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Looks at the status of a "sexual offender" in America, including sexual offender registries, as well as groups working against false accusations.
- SexSources.ca
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 A web portal featuring sexuality resources: articles, websites, books. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Promoting Russian Hacking Story
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts.
- A Shameful Silence: Where is the Outrage Over the Slaughter of Civilians in Mosul?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The catastrophic number of civilian casualties in Mosul is receiving little attention internationally from politicians and journalists. This is in sharp contrast to the outrage expressed worldwide over the bombardment of east Aleppo by Syrian government and Russian forces at the end of 2016.
- Shocked by Donald Trump's 'travel ban'? Israel has had a similar policy for decades
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Describing how President Trump's stances and policies on immigration, borders and torture draws heavily from existing policies and tactics of the Israeli state.
- A Short History of Liberal Myths and Anti-Labor Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A history of how labour and working-class groups have been alienated or disserviced by the major US political parties, particularly by liberal policies which are primarily aligned with business interests.
- Should You March Against Trump?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Yasmin Nair addresses the issue of whether or not to march against Donald Trump this week, or in the months and years following.
- Silence in NGO Discourse
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) maintain a ubiquitous presence in most peoples lives (whether they realize it or not). It therefore should be a commonsense act that we scrutinize NGO activities to ascertain their exact political function within the "our" neoliberal world order.
- The Single Party French State ... as the Majority of Voters Abstain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The victory of Macron's personal party, la République En Marche (REM), with an absolute majority of 350 out of 577 seats in the National Assembly, has bled the two traditional governing parties, the Republicans and the Socialists.
- 6 underrated Marxists who don't get enough love
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at six less celebrated Marxists: Gavril Miasnikov, Ngo Van Xuyet, Clara Zetkin, Martin Glaberman, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Ambalavaner Sivanandan; who participated in working class movements such as the 1918 German revolution, the 1945 Saigon Commune and the strikes in the car factories of Detroit.
- 6 underrated Marxists who don't get enough love
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It's a sad fact that many of the most radical Marxists, whose participation in working class struggle and ideas challenged not only capitalist society but also the social democratic and Leninist tendencies in the workers' movement tend to get ignored by anarchists and Marxists alike.
- "The Slave-Holding Republic"
Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Gerald Horne's Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic.
- Slavery Now: Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Slavery still exists today. And it exists in the Gulf states and in Saudi Arabia.
- SNCC's Think Tank
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How SNCC's research department helped civil rights organizers fight Jim Crow.
- Socialist Register 2018
Volume 54: Rethinking Democracy Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2017 We have conceived this 54th volume of the Socialist Register on Rethinking Democracy as a companion volume to the 2017 volume on Rethinking Revolution. As we put it in the preface to that volume: ‘The "political event" of gaining state power, whether by taking parliament or in a collapse of the existing political regime, has proven time and again to be less crucial than the social revolution of building capacities for self-government and the democratization and socialization of institutional resources … The "event", in itself, … will never be a sufficient condition for the exploited and oppressed to build their own capacities for establishing collective, rather than competitive, ways of living through developing socialist democracy.'
- Somebody's Going to Suffer: Greece's New Austerity Measures
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The European Commission announced on May 2, 2017, that an agreement on Greek pension and income tax reforms would pave the way for further discussions on debt release for Greece. The European Commission described this as good news for Greece. The Greek government described the situation in similar terms. It isn't.
- South Asia: Murderous majorities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Drawing from essays and recent literature the author discusses the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma/Myanmar, and the broader historical context of majoritarian nationalism in South Asia where majoritarian violence has been a shortcut to power.
- South Korea: How candlelight protests impeached a president and created spaces for direct democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 At 9 am on March 10, 2017, people gathered in front of the Constitutional Court to await the court's ruling on whether to impeach South Korean president Park Geun-hye. Two hours before the verdict was read, those gathered chanted: "The Constitutional Court should uphold Park’s impeachment!"
- South Sudan: Volunteers Gather Names of South Sudan's Uncounted War Dead
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The names of 5,000 victims of violence appear in the "Remembering the Ones We Lost" project, a memorial to people who have died in seven decades of conflict.The project invites witnesses to submit details of killings or disappearances through an online form or by text message, the information is then collated by volunteers.
- Spain Through Orwell's Eyes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Eighty years ago, Barcelona's calamitous May Days sealed the fate of a worker-led social revolution. George Orwell was there to bear witness.
- A Special Obscenity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Picasso painted Guernica eighty years ago this spring. It still stands as a searing protest against the brutality of war and fascism.
- The Spirit of Late Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at Pentecostalism, one of the world's fastest growing religious movements, which preaches a seductive message to the marginalized: that religious prayer, not political action, is a solution to their earthly woes.
- Squatters' 60-Year War Against Private Property
How propertied classes team up with the state to forcibly evict urban squatters. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Over the past 60 years, whenever squatters claimed homes in Western European and U.S. cities, even buildings long abandoned, the state used force to protect private property.
- Stalin and Trotsky (World Revolution for Beginners Part II)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Last week, we were talking about Lenin and Luxemburg, and I was trying to work up some notes for today; I just realize that the topic of Stalin and Trotsky is far more complicated. Why? First of all, because it was in this period that Bolshevism became an international phenomenon.
- State Department Condemns Attacks on Russian Peaceful Protests, Ignores Those in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On March 26, the State Department tweeted, "U.S. condemns detention of 100s of peaceful protesters in Russia today. Detaining peaceful protesters is an affront to democratic values."
- Sticks and Stones: Free Speech and Punching Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author explains why he does not agree with those who believe that right wing 'facist' groups should be denied the right to express their views, either by physical means or force of law.
- The Stomach-churning Violence of Monsanto, Bayer and the Argrochemical Oligopoly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Companies like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta, which make up the oligopoly that controls an increasingly globalised system of modern food and agriculture, have successfully instituted the notion that the mass application of biocides, monocropping and industrial agriculture are necessary and desirable.
- The Strange (and Tortured) Legacy of 'Free Speech'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite a well-cultivated radical image, Antifa rarely focuses on the growing ultra-nationalism, militarism, and imperialism that lies at the very core of American politics – tendencies in fact more dangerous than the rhetoric of Yiannopoulos, Coulter, and Shapiro. Beneath its ultra-leftism is a modus operandi riddled with the worst of identity politics. And since its violent tactics are not aligned with any popular movement, its opposition to fascism (such as it is) turns hollow, empty. The irony is that while the FSM and its heirs did everything possible to expand the realm of free speech, new social forces – extreme identity groups, Antifa – want to restrict or deny freedoms.
- Strategic Thinking and Organizing Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Argues the need for strategy and vision, and effective organizing, in forming a resistance movement to the Trump presidency, and provides several suggestions for organizers.
- Strike Friday at Amazon.it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Amazon workers at the Castel San Giovanni hub launched their first strike on Black Friday 2017. The facility is Amazon's largest in Italy, where the retail giant employs up to four thousand workers, less than half of whom have a permanent contract.
- Striking back in the "world's factory"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Hao Ren, Eli Friedman and Zhongjin Li (editors), China on Strike: Narratives of Workers' Resistance, which gives a history of labour struggles of Chinese migrant workers.
- A successful rent strike in 1930s Peckham
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Historical account of a successful rent strike in Peckham, London, where tenants lived in appalling conditions.
- The 'Superficial, Arrogant Smugness' of BBC News - Peter Oborne Delivers Some Home Truths On BBC Radio 4 Today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In a recent media alert, we noted the occasional tell-tale signs of uncomfortable truths that slip through cracks in the propaganda façade of BBC News. Very occasionally, the propaganda nature is clearly highlighted and can be enjoyed for its directness and the flustered BBC response it provokes.
- "Superman Is Not Coming": Erin Brockovich on the Future of Water
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Come take a ride on America's toxic water slide: First stop: Flint, Michigan, where two years later, people are still contending with lead-laced water, which was finally detected by the EPA in February 2015 with the help of resident Lee Anne Walters. Next stop: California, where hundreds of wells have been contaminated with 1,2,3-TCP, a Big Oil-manufactured chemical present in pesticides.
- Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 According to Renate Klein, "pared down to cold hard facts, surrogacy is the commissioning/buying/ renting of a woman into whose womb an embryo is inserted and who thus becomes a 'breeder' for a third party."
- Survival is the Question
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Ian Angus' Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System.
- Survival? Symptoms of Breakdown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Government policies are driven primarily by short-term political gain and corporate power, so there needs to be a massive public demand for control of the economy towards sustainability. The alternative is no human future.
- Sustainable Agriculture Versus Corporate Greed
Small Farmers, Food Security & Big business Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Examines the downfalls of profit-centred agriculture, and the struggle for a people-and-environment centred alternative in Australia.
- Sweden's Potato Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Together with the other Nordic countries Sweden was spared from the First World War but suffered food shortages and other hardships due to the surrounding conflicts.
- Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolution
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Against the vividly evoked chaos and conflicts of the Vietnam Era, Jonathan Lerner probes the impulses that led a small group of educated, privileged young Americans to turn to violence as a means of political change.
- Symbols of Resistance
A Tribute to the Martyrs of the Chican@ Movement Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 The documentary looks at the history of the Chicano and Chicana Movement in the 1970's; with a focus on Colorado and Northern New Mexico it explores the struggle for land, the student movement and community struggles against police repression. Runtime: 75 min.
- Syria, 'Experts' and George Monbiot
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has published two exclusives whose import is far greater than may be immediately apparent. They concern Israel’s bombing in 2007 of a supposed nuclear plant secretly built, according to a self-serving US and Israeli narrative, by Syrian leader Bashar Assad.
- The Syriza Wave: The Discussion Continues via Irish Marxist Review
The Discussion Continues via Irish Marxist Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The article is review of Helena Sheehan's book "The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left". Her book is an account of her polital activity and personal reflections during the surge of Syrzia from 2012 through 2015.
- The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left - Book review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A book review of The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left by author Helena Sheehan.
- System of a Down
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Michael Roberts 'The Long Depression'.
- Tabloids do not represent the working class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 It should come as little surprise that media owned and run by unscrupulous billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Desmond should be more concerned with protecting the party of big business than it is with the wellbeing or interests of working class people. We need to call out the tabloid media for what it is – run by and for the elites.
- A Tale of Two Islands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look at the two island nations of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the aftermath of devastating hurricanes; one is a poor socialist state and the other a territory of one of the richest countries in the world.
- Tasmania's Black War: a tragic case of lest we remember
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Tasmania’s Black War (1824-31) was the most intense frontier conflict in Australia's history. It was a clash between the most culturally and technologically dissimilar humans to have ever come into contact. At stake was nothing less than control of the country, and the survival of a people.
- Teachers as Change Agents
Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing against the Corporate Juggernaut Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Howard Ryan's Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing against the Corporate Juggernaut.
- Tears of Solidarity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The story of Ann Atwater and Claiborne Paul (C. P.) Ellis is beautifully told in Osha Gray Davidson's book The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South. Atwater, a domestic worker whose parents were sharecroppers, was a civil rights activist in Durham, North Carolina. Ellis, the son of a millhand, was a janitor at Duke University and a local Klan leader. In 1971, after battling each other for years, Atwater and Ellis ended up co-chairing a ten-day public forum -- a "charrette," as it was called -- that brought together black and white community members to address problems in Durham's public schools. It was a fraught process.
- Ten Examples of Direct Resistance to Stop Government Raids
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Resistance to unjust government action is the duty of all people who care about human rights. As Dr. King reminded us in his letter from a Birmingham jail, "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
- Ten Myths about Israel
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 In this book published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Occupation, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel.
- 10 Questions for William Blum
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 "God forbid we should not have a Revolution every 20 years," Jefferson wrote. "The world belongs to the living," he believed, and each generation holds the world in "usufruct." In the United States in 2017, in this whirling age of instantaneous communication, gratification and frustration, TJ would probably Twitter something like: "Make that every 10 years!"
- Ten Theses on Farming and Disease
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There’s a growing understanding of the functional relationships health, food justice, and the environment share. They’re not just ticks on a checklist of good things capitalism shits on.
- Terror in Britain: What Did the Prime Minister Know?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Why did the Manchester bombing occur? How does it relate to British relations with Middle Eastern countries?
- Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Transcript of a speech by the author on December 14, 2016 at the House of Lords, giving a history of the conflicts and terrorist tactics of Zionists in the formation of the state of Israel.
- Texas Couple Exonerated 25 Years After Being Convicted of Lurid Crimes That Never Happened
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Fran and Dan Keller's prosecution in 1992 was part of a wave of cases across the country amid an episode of mass hysteria known as the Satanic Panic.
- Thank You, Ed Herman
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2017 Obituary of Edward S. Herman, condsiderd "the godfather of antiwar media critique."
- That Precious Strand of Jewishness that Challenges Authority
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Like so many of those others in Britain of Jewish lineage, songwriter and award-winning folk singer Leon Rosselson is descended from antecedents who fled pogroms in eastern Europe. Pertinently, he questions what being a Jew means -- is it adherence to Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a citizen of Israel, or someone who eats "chicken soup with knedlach"? He describes clearly and with historical insight how any concept of "Jewishness" can involve all of those things and more. In his own life, he has decided to pick and choose from this tradition and history and build on what he deems to be the progressive, humane, and universalist values of that Jewish background.
- The Venezuelan Opposition does not want Democracy or Elections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Interview with Jorge Martin, secretary of the "Hands Off Venezuela" solidarity campaign. The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is facing its most challenging times. The right-wing opposition, backed by the United States, is engaged in a full-blown regime change campaign, with violent protests occurring daily and resulting in over 50 casualties. The chavista supporters of the government have also taken to the streets in defence of the Bolivarian Revolution, and President Maduro surprised everyone by calling for a Constituent Assembly. Jorge Martín, the secretary of the "Hands Off Venezuela" solidarity campaign, give his understanding of the sitution and where it might lead. He discusses how western media are distorting the reality and presenting a one-sided picture, the role of international solidarity, the lack of progress made by the opposition and where things might go from here.
- Theodore W. Allen's Legacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Theodore W. "Ted" Allen (1919-2005) was an anti-white supremacist, working-class intellectual and activist, whose work on the centrality of struggle against white supremacy is growing in importance and influene 98 years after his birth.
- Theodore W. Allen: Working-Class Scholar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Theodore W. Allen was an independent, anti-white supremacist, working-class scholar when he pioneered his "white skin privilege" analysis in the mid-1960s and when he wrote The Invention of the White Race in the 1990s.
- There's Nothing Parochial About the Issue of GMO Food Labeling
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A criticism of the notion that the issue of labelling GMO foods is too narrow in focus, detailing the complexities of the issue and arguing for the broader importance of labelling.
- There's No Good Reason for Your Boss to Make 347 Times What You Do
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 CEO pay at America's 500 largest companies averaged $13.1 million in 2016. That's 347 times what the average employee makes.
- Theresa May's Katrina
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The unlikely reality of a bearded, unashamedly socialist (of sorts) MP winning the affection of working class voters countrywide calls out for further investigation.
- These are the Israeli leaders who want to destroy al-Aqsa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The recent violence at the al-Aqsa temple and subsequent response by Israeli leadership underscores the belief that the intent is to replace the Muslim holy site as part of the broader agenda of Israeli sovereignty.
- 33rd Anniversary Of The Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The escape of about 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) – a highly toxic chemical – from a storage tank on the premises of the pesticide plant of Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) in Bhopal – the capital of the State of Madhya Pradesh – on the night of 02/03 December 1984 resulted in a horrendous disaster in the city, which was inhabited by about 900,000 persons then.
- This Group Has Successfully Converted White Supremacists Using Compassion. Trump Defunded It.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Life After Hate is a Chicago-based nonprofit that does path-breaking work. Founded by former white supremacist leaders in 2011, it studies the forces that draw people to hate and helps those who are willing to disengage from radical extremist movements. In June, the Department of Homeland Security revoked a grant to the nonprofit, telling The Huffington Post that it wants to focus on funding groups that work with law enforcement.
- This is What Plutocracy Looks Like
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Mr. Trump is the quintessential plutocrat-- a self-interested man of inherited means and limited life experience who stumbled upward through political economy engineered to benefit his class. It is this very public nature of his 'success' that attaches class culpability to his actions.
- This Israeli Presentation on How to Make Drone Strikes More "Efficient" Disturbed Its Audience
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Research backed by the U.S. and Israeli military scandalized a conference near Tel Aviv earlier this year after a presentation showed how the findings would help drone operators more easily locate people -- including targets -- fleeing their strikes and better navigate areas rendered unrecognizable by prior destruction.
- Thoreau at 200
Don't Let Bill Gates Ban the Hoe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In support of the so-called 'Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa,' Bill Gates is telling African women in remote villages to put down their hand-held hoes.
- Three Years Since the Kitty Litter Disaster at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is a place in the United States, almost half-a-mile underground, in a salt mine, where radioactive waste leftover from the production of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs was to be held separate from all contact with humanity for 10,000 years, equivalent to the entire history of civilization. This separation of civilization from the byproduct of its folly had lasted one-tenth of one percent of that immense time when on Valentine's Day, three years ago, an explosion sent the deadly contamination back to the world of humans.
- Throw Sand in the Gears of Everything
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A call for strategic and effective organizing against the Trump presidency, drawing on historical precedent of antiwar and other movements in the US.
- Time to Confront the Media's Anti-Corbyn Bias
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Jeremy Corbyn has been subjected to unprecedented vilification by the British media. No one is surprised that the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Times have been relentless in their hatchet jobs on Corbyn. But it has been disconcerting for the left that the Guardian and BBC never gave him a chance either. He was in their gun-sights from day one.
- Title IX Witchhunts, Anti-Sex Frenzy and Bourgeois Feminism
Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus - A Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Is the specter of sex haunting the campus? Under the pretense of targeting sexual harassment and assault, university administrations have been whipping up a climate of fear and imposing neo-Victorian values. As the recent book Unwanted Advances - Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (HarperCollins Publishers, April 2017) argues, "The new campus codes aren't preventing nonconsensual sex; they're producing it.” Written by Northwestern University professor and self-described left-wing feminist Laura Kipnis, the book exposes the vastly expanded definitions of sexual assault, which criminalize anything from drunken hook-ups to student-professor romance and even allow for consent to be withdrawn retroactively.
- To conserve tropical forests and wildlife, protect the rights of people who rely on them
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Who are the best guardians of forests and other wild places? Governments? Conservation NGOs? Corporations? No, writes Prakash Kashwan, it's the indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with their environment for millennia. But to be able do so, they must first be accorded rights to their historic lands and resources, both in law and in practice.
- To discover the 'rights of a river', first think like a river
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is a growing global movement to recognise the rights of rivers. But rights alone are not enough. We must love and respect rivers, and even think like rivers to understand the vital functions they perform within landscapes and ecosystems, and so discover where their 'best interests' truly lie. And then we must be willing to act: protecting rivers and restoring them to health and wholeness.
- Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Virtually every major organ of the Western media apparatus (the most powerful propaganda machine in the annals of powerful propaganda machines) has been relentlessly churning out variations on a new official ideological narrative designed to generate and enforce conformity.
- Tomorrow's power
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 An award-winning documentary that follows stories of communities in Germany, Gaza and Colombia that are challenging current power structures, leading to possibilities of a future with both social and climate justice. Runtime: 76 min.
- Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the US Constitution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 According to Bertell Ollman, what is in danger of being lost among all the patriotic non-sequiturs is the underside of criticism and protest that had accompanied the Constitution from its very inception.
- Towards a Transformative Electoral Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An essay on Electoral Strategy for the left in the United States.
- Toxicity and Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In a political moment that tends to inspire overwhelming anger, apprehension and fear rather than hope or energy, I suggest that we look towards those who have made resistance a daily part of their lives out of necessity and determination.
- The tragedy of liberal environmentalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The tragedy of liberal environmentalism is that it occupies the political discourse as the most pragmatic, the most possible way to a better future, but implementing this watered down, technical environmental politics is not at all smooth, or easy. It is rather Sisyphean. This is the tragic political circumstance of our times: What is framed as easy, as the most compatible with the status quo, is actually so very, very hard.
- Treating Mental Health Patients as Criminals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The criminalisation of the mentally ill is one of the cruellest and most easily avoidable tragedies of our era.
- The Trial of Sacco and Venzetti
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On May 5 both men were arrested for the Braintree murders. They were armed, Vanzetti with a .38 revolver, Sacco with a .32 Colt pistol.
- Trials of the Russian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book reviews of The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution by Tariq Ali; The Russian Revolution: When Workers Took Power by Paul Vernadsky; The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin; and Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 by S. A. Smith.
- Tribal Justice
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 Documents an effective criminal justice reform movement in America: the efforts of tribal courts to return to traditional, community-healing concepts of justice.
- Trump appeals to the military against the press and the courts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Examining recent remarks by Donald Trump suggesting a presidential and military alliance in opposition to the press and the court system, and the broader impacts of this position.
- Trump Attorney Sues Greenpeace Over Dakota Access in $300 Million Racketeering Case
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Lawyers for Energy Transfer Partners, which include Donald Trump's go-to attorneys, have filed a $300 million lawsuit against Greenpeace and other environmental groups for their activism against the long-contested North Dakota-to-Illinois project.
- Trump and Duterte
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Philippines President Duterte presents himself as a nationalist who is especially opposed to the continuing strong influence of the former colonial power, the United States.
- Trump, fake news and the war on dissidents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A rebuke to a recent Guardian article titled "If mainstream news wants to win back trust, it cannot silence dissident voices", where journalist Nick Robinson claims that the left and right are the peddlers of the same "fakery" in attacking the media.
- Trump Insults the Media, but Bush Bullied and Defanged It to Sell the Iraq War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Bush was anything but a friend of the press during his presidency. Maybe he didn’t demonize it as much as Trump does -- but he actively manipulated it and bullied it far worse and far more effectively than Trump has, much of it in the service of selling his marquee policy: the war in Iraq.
- Trump Is the Only One Losing Out by Refusing to Certify the Iran Deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While commentators across the world struggle to adequately convey their outrage over Trump's withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear agreement, Iran is calculating that nothing they do will be quite so damaging to US interests as Trump himself.
- Trump Is the Only One Losing Out by Refusing to Certify the Iran Deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As President Trump withdraws certification of the nuclear agreement with Iran, commentators across the world struggled for words to adequately convey their outrage and contempt. A favourite term to describe Trump is as "a wrecking ball", but the phrase suggests a sense of direction and capacity to strike a target which Trump does not possess.
- Trump v. the Media: a Fight to the Death
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 At present, this is a golden era in American journalism, because established media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post find themselves under unprecedented and open attacks from the powers that be. Richard Nixon may have felt persecuted by press and television, but he never counter-attacked with the same vigour and venom as Trump.
- Trump and the Middle East
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Trump tweets about keeping refugees out of the United States, and zeroes out the grossly inadequate U.S. humanitarian aid budget. It all poses the question: Which is the real "failed state"?
- The Trump-Netanyahu Circus: Now, No One Can Save Israel from Itself
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The President of the United States can hardly be taken seriously, saying much but doing little. His words, often offensive, carry no substance, and it is impossible to summarize his complex political outlook about important issues. This is precisely the type of American presidency that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, prefers.
- Trump not "Exceptional"
Trump: A Graphic Biography Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Ted Rall's Trump: A Graphic Biography.
- Trump the Gardener
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In an interview defending his Presidential candidate, Silicon Valley billionaire and undisguised self-interested Randian fanboy Peter Thiel assured the public that when Donald Trump asserted that he would build a mighty wall along the US Mexican border, what he really meant was that he would impose a 'saner, more sensible immigration policy'.
- The Trump Way
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Arun Gupta spoke to Leo Panitch about Trump's economic agenda, his relationship to transnational elites, and how neoliberalism's crisis could mean revitalization for the Left.
- Trump's Muslim Ban Will Only Spark More Terrorist Attacks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Donald Trump's travel ban on refugees and visitors from seven Muslim countries entering the US makes a terrorist attack on Americans at home or abroad more rather than less likely. It does so because one of the main purposes of al-Qaeda and Isis in carrying out atrocities is to provoke an over-reaction directed against Muslim communities and states.
- Trump's 'No Fly Zone' Escalates U.S. War Against Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The June 18th destruction of a Syrian government aircraft by a U.S. fighter jet underscores the fact that U.S. and its imperial allies in Syria will attack any and all forces that seek to interfere with U.S. imperialist objectives.
- Trump's Reviled Hotline for "Criminal Aliens" Flooded with Reports of UFOs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has unveiled its controversial immigrant crime office, complete with a hotline for U.S. citizens to report alleged crimes committed by undocumented aliens. The hotline was promptly overwhelmed with calls about extraterrestrials and UFOs.
- Trump's Road to Ruin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The editors address Trump's early assaults on democratic principles and institutions, from the snarling menace of his "America First" inaugural address, to his cabinet of multi-millionaire and billionaire reactionaries, to the pending removal of millions of people from health insurance, to assaulting women's reproductive rights and attempting to bar Muslim travelers, to attacking Black youth and every vulnerable population.
- Trump's Transition Team Colluded With Israel. Why Isn't That News?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Hasan asks the question: why aren't more members of Congress or the media discussing the Trump transition team's pretty brazen collusion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undermine both U.S. government policy and international law?
- Trump's War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Although precise numbers are difficult to obtain, there seems little question that the number of civilians being killed by the U.S. in Iraq and Syria -- already quite high under Obama -- has increased precipitously during the first two months of the Trump administration.
- Trump's Worst Collusion Isn't With Russia -- It's With Corporations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Many leading liberals suspect that Trump worked with Russia to win his election, but we've long known that huge corporations and wealthy individuals threw their weight behind the billionaire.
- Trustworthy, loyal, obedient, clean and reverent...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of 'The Hotel Tacloban' by Douglas Valentine.
- A Turkey Divided by Erdogan Will Become Prey to Its Enemies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What critics claim is the openly fraudulent Turkish referendum ends parliamentary democracy in the country and gives President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dictatorial powers. The most unexpected aspect of the poll on Sunday was not the declared outcome, but that the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) allegedly found it necessary to fix the vote quite so blatantly.
- Turning Perpetrators into Healers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Innocent people -- or "innocently guilty" people, like the junior senator from Minnesota -- often get unfairly hung out to dry. Should he have to resign? Who among us (Roy? Donald?) hasn't committed worse transgressions? And shouldn't a person's positive achievements be factored into the severity of his punishment, at least when no permanent damage has occurred?
- Twelve Reasons to Oppose Rules on Digital Commerce in the WTO
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 US-based transnational companies in the fields of information, technology and media are working to create international rules that limit the ability of governments to put restrictions on how they make profits.
- The 24 hour day: women, work and class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Movements of women, as well as those involving large numbers of women, will increasingly be features of resistance to neoliberalism. The extent to which they succeed will be the extent to which they are able to challenge the class basis of neoliberalism, and its consequences.
- Two Decades of Monsanto's Illegal Actions, Frauds and Crimes in India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Over the two decades since Monsanto entered India, it has violated laws, deceived Indian farmers by making unscientific and fraudulent claims, extracted super profits through illegal royalty collection by violating India’s Patent and Intellectual Property laws, pushed farmers into debt, and, as a consequence of the debt trap, to suicide.
- Two Soviet Spies Who Deserve a Posthumous Nobel Peace Prize
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, both scientists working on the Manhattan Project, should receive posthumous Nobel Peace Prizes for actions that almost certainly saved millions of innocent lives.
- The U.S. Will Invade West Africa in 2023 After an Attack in New York - According to Pentagon War Game
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 By 2021, according to the war game's scenario, AQIM boasts an estimated 38,000 members spread throughout Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, and a network of training camps in Mauritania, as well as outright bases in Western Sahara.
- The Ugly Side of Antifa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 When you criticize Antifa members or their defenders for the tactic of mob violence, the reflexive response is usually something like, "There are literal Nazis marching in the streets, and you're attacking us over your precious little non-violence principles?" But Antifa doesn't have a monopoly over concern for what's happening in this country.
- UK exporting 67% of plastic waste amid 'illegal practices' warnings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Britain's trade in waste plastic to the Far East is booming. The exported plastic is meant to be recycled under UK conditions and standards, but often is not, undermining bona fide UK recycling firms who face falling prices, reduced turnover, collapsing profits, and all too often, closure.
- The UK Is Among the World's Largest Suppliers of Weapons -- and Is Making Arms Boycotts Illegal
Despite human rights abuses, the UK continues to sell arms to Israel and crack down on dissent. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Through 'open' trade conventions such as the Security & Policing (S&P) exhibition and closed events such as the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) fair, the UK allows local and international companies to showcase some of the world's most lethal weapons.
- Uncertainty shapes immigrant life in the United States
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Immigrants in the United States without legal residency or who were admitted on a temporary basis feel that their lives have become much more complicated in 2017 because of the current Republican administration's intention to expel thousands of Latin Americans even though they are successfully integrated into the local economy and have no criminal record.
- The Unclaimed Dead
In Texas, the Bodies of Migrants Who Perished in the Desert Provide Clues to the Living Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Operation Identification, a program began in 2013 amid a swirl of grassroots organizing, lead the exhumation of more than 50 unidentified human remains from a rural graveyard named Sacred Heart.
- Uncovering the history of the English Revolution
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of John Rees, The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640-1650, Verso (2016).
- Under Attack at San Francisco State University
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Students, staff and faculty at San Francisco State University are under investigation by the university on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism brought forth by San Francisco Hillel. This is the latest in a long history of accusations made against Palestinians and Palestinian advocates at SFSU by the pro-Israel organization.
- Undermining Democracy - Corporate Media Bias on Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Are we able to prove the existence of a corporate media campaign to undermine British democracy? Media analysis is not hard science, but in this alert we provide compelling evidence that such a campaign does indeed exist. Compare coverage of comments made on Syria by a spokesman for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in October 2016 and by UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson in January 2017.
- Undermining the Democratic Process: The Canadian Government Suppression of Palestinian Development Aid Projects
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This paper examines the government suppression of Canadian development sector organisations running Palestinian aid projects from 2001 to 2012; based on document analysis, policy analysis and original interviews with coordinators running aid projects, it describes how their work was almost universally undermined by the Canadian government.
- Understanding the counter-revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (Saqi, 2016).
- Understanding the counter-revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A review of Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (Saqi, 2016).
- Unfinished Business
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The failure of Nicolás Maduro's government to maintain popular living standards has allowed the right-wing opposition to take control of Venezuela's National Assembly, resulting in a bitter standoff between executive and legislature that has yet to be resolved one way or another.
- An Unholy Alliance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Fleischmann looks at the reasons behind the unlikely alliance that has formed between Trump, the alt-right, and Israel, who have based their support for each other around shared enemies.
- U.S. Coast Guard operating secret floating prisons in Pacific Ocean
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the war on drugs, the U.S. Coast Guard is reportedly turning its cutter ships into floating prisons.
- U.S. Has Only Acknowledged A Fifth of Its Lethal Strikes, New Study Finds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 While Obama took steps to improve transparency about drone strikes, reports show that the U.S. has only acknowledged approximately 20 percent of its reported drone strikes, and failed to claim responsibility or provide details in the vast majority of cases.
- The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is no contradiction or supposed loss of democracy because the United States simply never was one. This is a difficult reality for many people to confront, and they are likely more inclined to immediately dismiss such a claim as preposterous rather than take the time to scrutinize the material historical record in order to see for themselves
- The U.S. Pushed North Korea to Build Nukes: Yes or No?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Washington's policy toward North Korea for the last 64 years entirely based on the assumption that you can persuade people to do what you want them to do through humiliation, intimidation and brute force.
- U.S., UK and France Denounce Nuclear Ban Treaty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The U.S., UK and France did not participate in the United Nations negotiations leading to the recent adoption of the nuclear ban treaty, and joined together in expressing their outright defiance of the newly-adopted treaty.
- The Universal Lesson of East Timor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Filming undercover in East Timor in 1993 I followed a landscape of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses marching down the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the eye.
- The Unraveling Middle East
Shifting Sands: The Unraveling of the Old Order in the Middle East Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Raja Shehadeh's and Penny Johnson's Shifting Sands: The Unraveling of the Old Order in the Middle East.
- UN's 1947 Partition Plan made Palestine a deal it had to refuse
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Weinroth analyzes the reasons behind Palestinians' refusal of the Partition Plan, reasons that have been largely dismissed in favour of casting their actions in an unfavourable light and thereby justifying Israeli colonization.
- Unspeakable: the Black Book of Imperial Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 American "mainstream" journalists who want to keep their paychecks flowing and their status afloat know they must report current events in a way that respects the taboo status of the nation's underlying inequality and oppression structures and its savage and relentless imperial criminality.
- Untouchable - The Uses And Misuses Of 'Genocide Denial'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 One of the wonders of contemporary propaganda is the extent to which corporate commentators are in denial about their use of the term 'genocide denial'. Clearly, they believe they are using a neutral, objective term to describe indisputable facts of genocidal killing and ugly refusals to recognise those facts. The delusion is quickly exposed when we ask a few simple questions. For example: how often do we see 'mainstream' commentators describing US-UK sanctions on Iraq from 1990-2003 as 'genocidal', as affirmed by senior UN diplomats? How often do journalists describe supporters of the devastating Bush-Blair war on Iraq, the Obama-Cameron war on Libya, or May's war on Yemen as 'genocide deniers'? Can we imagine someone who supported the war on Libya being called an 'Obama apologist'? Like 'terror' and 'terrorism', 'genocide' and 'genocide denial' are simply not terms that are applied to Western actions. This really awesome level of bias points to the reality that 'genocide denial' is a propaganda term overwhelmingly used to portray Official Enemies as morally and intellectually despicable, in fact untouchable. As used in the 'mainstream', the term is antirational, an attack on honest debate.
- Unwanted Advances
Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Feminism is broken, argues Laura Kipnis. Anyone who thinks the sexual hysteria overtaking American campuses is a sign of gender progress is deranged.
- US-China Relations in the Age of Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On the current relationship between the United States and China.
- The U.S. Forcibly Detained Native Alaskans During World War II
In the name of safety, Aleuts were held against their will under intolerable conditions in internment camps Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A brief history of the internment of the Aleut people of Alaska during WWII.
- The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May Be Reading My Blog. They Aren't.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 After the U.S. government published a report on Russia's cyber attacks against the U.S. election system, and included a list of computers that were allegedly used by Russian hackers, I became curious if any of these hackers had visited my personal blog.
- US Spy Chief Presents Third-Party Debates as Proof RT Is Anti-US
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s latest report on the alleged "election hacking" by Russia includes a substantial section focused around the idea that Russian government-funded channel RT is overtly anti-American.
- Using Children for Israeli Propaganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Engler brings to light Canadian schools' practices that indoctrinate students with problematic colonial, Zionist views.
- The Value of Capital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Roberts responds to David Harvey's review of his publication "Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital" by defending and opening up a discussion regarding the theories presented in Marx's "Capital," and how they connect with the rest of his oeuvre.
- Venezuela: the capitalist offensive - has socialism failed?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The current economic, social, and political crisis taking place in Venezuala has not been caused by a failure of socialism, but rather is the result of the country's inability to distance itself from capitalism, and introduce a democratic, socialist, and planned economy.
- Venezuela declares Craib Kowalik, Canada's Chargé d'Affaires in Caracas, persona non gratas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Last week Venezuela declared Canada's chargé d'affaires in Caracas persona non grata. In making the announcement the president of the National Constituent Assembly Delcy Rodriguez denounced Craib Kowalik's "permanent and insistent, rude and vulgar interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela."
- Venezuela Elections: Resurgent Chavismo and 'Unrecognised' Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 After weeks of imperialist threats and opposition violence, the elections for the Constituent Assembly (ANC) in Venezuela took place on July 30th. The result was a massive turnout of over 8 million voters, around 41% of the electorate, which gave chavismo a much-needed shot in the arm. The western media reacted by trying to dispute the number and sticking even closer to the narrative being pushed by the opposition and the US State Department.
- Venezuela in the Media: Double Standards and First Impressions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This article looks into the inconsistent ways that Venzuala has been portrayed in the media, and the effect of sensationalizing the recent crisis. It concludes that those who support the Venezuelan poor, workings classes must seek and spread honest information outside of the mainstream narrative.
- Venezuela on the Edge of Civil War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Venezuela is a step closer to civil war after the July 20, 2017 "fake referendum" held by the government opposition, which resulted in a vote of "no confidence" for President Nicolas Maduro.
- Venezuela: Target of Economic Warfare
What the heck is really going on in Venezuela? A complex story lies behind the offical narrative. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The article examines elements of Venezuala's economic warfare, role as global provider of oil, and the country's relationship with the Trump administration, to provide a multi-faceted picture of the country's recent violent events.
- Venezuelan Opposition "Consultation"
Playing Alone and Losing Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Venezuelan opposition "referendum", which in reality was nothing more than a non-binding 'consultation' without any legal status, was predicted as a major political earthquake that would instantly change the country's landscape.
- Via Campesina Declaration of the Forum on Food Sovereignty, Territories of Peace for a Dignified Life 2017
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The participants of the Forum on Food Sovereignty held in the city of Buenos Aires on December 12th and 13th [2017] want to express our agreements regarding the construction of territories of peace for the people: the peasants of the world and every community struggling to remain in our ancestral territories and to continue feeding humanity, as we have done for the last ten thousand years, while at the same time fighting for a worthy life in the cities with healthy, locally produced food.
- Victory in Stagnation?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An analysis of the direction of the German left party, Die Linke, in the wake of the 2017 national elections.
- Victory Over the Sun
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Postwar America's greatest environmentalist Tony Mazzocchi (who passed away in 2002) was a labour leader.
- Vietnam Revisited During Trump's Bonkers Brinkmanship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 I returned to Vietnam in April, having not been there since the war, nearly 50 years ago. I'd sailed there as a seaman in the National Maritime Union (NMU) on a cargo ship carrying war materiel from the naval ammo base in Port Chicago, California.
- The Vietnam War is Not History for Victims of Agent Orange
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Nearly 58,000 Americans and 2 to 3 million Vietnamese, many of them civilians, were killed in the war. Untold numbers were wounded. Many US veterans of the war suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. More US Vietnam War vets have committed suicide than died in the war. However, those numbers do not begin to tell the complete story of the war.
- The view from different planets
Connecting wildfires and climate change proscribed only on Planet Alberta Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The political discourse surrounding climate change and wildfires is almost nonexistent in Alberta.
- Village demolition based on Israel's 'racist' plan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, residents say the closing of an investigation into the killing of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan is evidence of a wider strategy to drive residents out of the rural community.
- Violence Against Women: Why The UN Secretary-General Got It Wrong
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Burrowes argues that efforts to resolve violence aganist women are futile unless the focus shifts to preventing emotional and physical violence against children, with particular emphasis on boys.
- Wag The Dog -- How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media
Responsibility for the chemical event in Khan Sheikhoun is still very much in question. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Once upon a time, Donald J. Trump, the New York City businessman-turned-president, berated then-President Barack Obama, back in September 2013, about the fallacy of an American military strike against Syria. At that time, the United States was considering the use of force against Syria in response to allegations (since largely disproven) that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Trump, via tweet, declared "to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria - if you do many very bad things will happen & from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!"
- Want to Stop Trump? Take a Page From These Dockworkers, and Stop Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, many Americans wrung their hands. Some took to social media to express their discontent while others protested. But, perhaps, the most dramatic and important action was taken by dockworkers in Oakland, California: They stopped working. Their strike demonstrated the potential power ordinary people have on the job, when organized.
- The War at Home
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A question often arises whether Trump is a genuine representative of the aims of the capitalist ruling class in general and the Republican right wing in particular, or a self-centered rogue with serious and potentially dangerous personality disorders. The answer is that he's actually both.
- The War Over Mangoes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Growing mangoes in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca has racked up an enormous socio-political expense for the region far greater than the price tag on the fruit in the supermarket. For a Mexican drug cartel desperate to move product, hiding illicit drugs in mango shipments is a risky but viable cover for getting them to the U.S. market. For the people of Oaxaca, however, the infiltration of one of the region’s most important industries indicates the threat of a life controlled by drug violence and its wide-ranging effects on society.
- Warning to Spanish (and Other) Whistleblowers: Anonymous Boxes which ARE NOT ANONYMOUS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Citizens' victories in the struggle against corruption, sometimes requiring information to be provided through safe anonymous channels like Xnet's Mailbox for reporting corruption, have catalysed a proliferation of similar initiatives within governments and institutions.
- Warnings from First Americans: Insidious Changes Are Underway that Will Affect Us All
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Rural America In These Times spoke to Native Americans--people whose survival requires being extremely well informed about what all branches of the federal government are up to. From their vantage point as sovereign entities with direct government-to-government relationships with the United States, the tribes have a unique perspective on issues including voting rights, the economy, the extractive industries' hold over this administration and more.
- Wartime
The First World War in a Canadian Town Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 What World War I meant to daily life in a Canadian community becomes clear in this book about the war years in Guelph, Ontario.
- Was the "Russian Hack" an Inside Job?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Forensic studies of "Russian hacking" into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2017, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers, and then doctored to incriminate Russia.
- Washington and Berlin on a Collision Course
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The Russia sanctions bill that passed the US Senate on June 15, 2017 directly demonizes the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, under the Baltic Sea, which is bound to double Gazprom's energy capacity to supply gas to Europe.
- WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of "fake news," the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false.
- Watch How Casually False Claims Are Published: New York Times and Nicholas Lemann Edition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 We have a perfect example of how this happens from the New York Times today, in a book review by Nicholas Lemann, the Pulitzer-Moore professor of journalism at Columbia University as well as a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker. Lemann is reviewing a new book by Edward J. Epstein -- the longtime neocon, right-wing Cold Warrior, WSJ op-ed page writer, and Breitbart contributor -- which basically claims Snowden is a Russian spy.
- Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors: Stories from the Jim Crow Museum
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors uses images from the Jim Crow Museum, the nation's largest publicly accessible collection of racist objects. These images are evidence of the social injustice that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as "a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." Each chapter concludes with a story from the author's journey, challenging the integrity of racial narratives.
- Waving From the Rooftops
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The drug Narcan (Naxalone) has skyrocketed in price due to the heroine and opioide crisis. Political response shows disregard for not only drug addicts, but the welfare and lives of all people under capitalism.
- We Can't Let Britain Become a Vast ISIS Recruiting Station
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The massacre in Manchester is a horrific event born out of the violence raging in a vast area stretching from Pakistan to Nigeria and Syria to South Sudan.
- We Didn't Start the Fire
Class conflict isn't something we choose to engage in. It's just how capitalism works. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Day urges the historically Liberal US Democratic party to turn to the left, embracing class conflict as an integral component of left-wing politics.
- We Know What Inspired the Manchester Attack, We Just Won't Admit It
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Not blaming Muslims in general but targeting "radicalisation" or simply "evil" may appear sensible and moderate, but in practice it makes the motivation of the killers in Manchester or the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015 appear vaguer and less identifiable than it really is.
- We Must Be Brave Enough to Admit the War on Terror Simply Not Working
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Amid sorrow of Manchester bombing, UK Labour Party leader explains why actively building peace is requisite for ending such horrific and inexcusable carnage in the future.
- We Need a Much Bigger Leap! John Bellamy Foster on Naomi Klein's 'No Is Not Enough'
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is much to admire in Naomi Klein's new book, but she underestimates the danger posed by Trumpism, and doesn't pose a real alternative. She calls for a Leap, but it isn't high enough or far enough.
- We need popular participation, not populism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Wainright dissects the problems with liberal democracy and argues for real democratic self-government.
- We Need to Talk about Women: The Problem with Western Liberal 'Feminists'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Western women have fought hard and bravely for rights and privileges that were denied to generations of women before them and have made vast strides towards greater equality and representation in society. For this, western women and traditional feminism should be applauded. At the same time, the version of feminism that presently functions in the west -- liberal, consumer, mainstream feminism -- has become problematic.
- We shouldn't weep for broke but lying mainstream media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A report from the Public Policy Forum of Montreal released on January 26 says the Canadian news industry "is reaching a crisis point as the decline of traditional media, fragmentation of audiences and the rise of fake news pose a growing threat to the health of our democracy." Whereas the 1970 report was entitled "The Uncertain Mirror", the new appeal for support is called "The Shattered Mirror."
- Welcome to the Witchhunt
or Would the Labour Party Expel Einstein for Antisemitism? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- West Papua: the sago and the palm oil - The Yerisiam people fight
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 How Papua's Yerisiam people are fighting against palm oil expansion and protecting their last sacred sago forest.
- What can the Corbynistas learn from Syriza?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As a Corbyn government seems more and more likely, there are clear lessons to be drawn from the Greek experience.
- What Corporate Media Never Tells You about North Korea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 There is a great deal of propaganda and deliberate misinformation about North Korea, which the public should know. While neocons, a cheering corporate media, and Deep State, rush to war with North Korea, information is the ultimate weapon. For example, did you know that North Korea, China, and India, are the only three nations who have committed to a "no nuclear first" policy.
- What is Happening in Catalonia and Spain?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Vincente Navarro explains the historcal background to the Catalonian independence referendum results in 2017, and notes the political challenges this movement will face.
- What is Objective Journalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite objectivity being widely accepted as a norm in journalism, Edwards discusses how opinion and bias are still an inherent part of 'reporting the facts.'
- What Is Reproductive Justice?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Reproductive justice means having full control over all aspects of our sexual and reproductive lives, which means an end to all sexual violence.
- What Kind of Opposition?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 To address the millions of Trump supporters whose lives are devastated by his government... requires building an independent - and yes, socialist - left with uncompromising loyalty to the working class and oppressed people of the United States and the world, not to the liberal wing of capital or the Democratic Party.
- What Makes Americans Proud
The Anti-Empire Report #152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Donald Trump thinks that everyone will be impressed that the American military has never been stronger. Lucky for the man … his seeming incapacity for moral or intellectual embarrassment.He’s twice blessed. His fans like the idea that their president is no smarter than they are. This may well serve to get the man re-elected, as it did with George W. Bush.
- What Obsessing About Trump Causes Us To Miss
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Since the late eighteenth century, the United States has been involved in an almost ceaseless string of wars, interventions, punitive expeditions, and other types of military ventures abroad – from fighting the British and Mexicans to the Filipinos and Koreans to the Vietnamese and Laotians to the Afghans and Iraqis. The country has formally declared war 11 times and has often engaged in undeclared conflicts with some form of congressional authorization, as with the post-9/11 "wars" that rage on today.
- What the Media isn't Telling You About North Korea's Missile Tests
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Here's what the media isn't telling you about North Korea's recent missile tests.
Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan's Hokkaido Island. The missile landed in the waters beyond the island harming neither people nor property.The media immediately condemned the test as a "bold and provocative act"
- What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Rural Poverty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Gurly analyzes the institutional reasons behind widespread poverty, depopulation, and unemployment in Jefferson County, Mississippi.
- What's left of Pakistan's left?
For those in Pakistan who want to explore a non neo-liberal, non-right wing option, the Left is there in some form. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Menon recounts her discovery of the emerging political Left in Pakistan and reflects on its future. Awami Workers Party featured.
- The Wheel Has Come Full Circle
What Went Wrong: The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Dan La Botz's What Went Wrong: The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis.
- When a Radio Host Interviews a War Criminal, Is It Churlish to Ask About His War Crimes?
A letter to New York's popular WNYC-NPR radio host Brian Lehrer Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An open letter to NPR radio host Brian Leher, critizing the host for not providing greater context and background for his guest Elliott Abrams, who was a go to-guy for U.S.-funded terrorism, and helped arrange the overthrow of democratically elected governments throughout Latin America and the Middle East.
- When Canada Invaded Russia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The corporate media presents Russia as militaristic but ignores Canada’s invasion of that country.
- When Israel's friends in Labour advocated genocide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Every so often Labour Friends of Israel pays tribute to Richard Crossman, an early activist with the British pressure group and one of the best known British politicians of the mid-20th century. The tributes to the late cabinet minister are not entirely informative.One detail that tends to be omitted is that, when it came to Palestine, Crossman advocated genocide.
- When Progressives Start Abandoning Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the wake of attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia there were a number of rallies in Canadian cities. The anti-racist counter-demonstrators hugely outnumbered their rally opponents, constituting phenomenal public solidarity against racism. There was much to be cheered in these events. One thing dampened this amazing response. It was how, for some, denouncing hate slid into denouncing speech rights and into dangerous calls for governments to prevent rallies.
- When the Alt-Right Hits Campus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Under the auspices of the "Alt Right" and its wannabe hipster version of white nationalism, the University of Michigan community was subjected to a bombardment of racist hate that many of us thought relegated to the pre-Obama past.
- When White Supremacists March
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The rally, featuring white nationalist groups such as the Nationalist Front and the League of the South as well as white supremacist "superstars" like Richard Spencer and David Duke projected violence from its first moments.
- When Will Co-opted Figures and Board Members Be Hauled into Court?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 They promote the message that their products are essential to our survival. They promote a fundamentally ecologically, socially and economically damaging model of agriculture facilitated by Washington, the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
- Where Did Britain's Racists Go?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A year ago Britain voted to exit the European Union. Anyone who wanted to leave the EU was deemed to be a racist, a caveman, an irrational nationalist and even a drunk fool. However today – exactly one year later, some are talking about a "soft" Brexit or even no Brexit. Has Britain changed so much in a year?
- Where the Anti-Russian Moral Panic is Leading Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This is how the smear campaign scores points: you don't have to be on the Russian payroll -- you can be a "useful idiot" just because of your political views, which condemn you as an "unwitting" agent, as former CIA director Mike Morell described Trump. This is how the parameters of "respectable" opinion are policed: this is how the War Party criminalizes those who think that the cold war is over and shouldn't be revived.
- Where the world's appetite for fish matters most
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Illegal over-fishing by Chinese and other foreign vessels is severely affecting the economy and food securty of West African nations.
- Where's the Evidence?
The CIA-FBI-NSA report on the hacking of the 2016 election is pure baloney Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 We are told from the outset that the actual evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta's emails as part of a wide-ranging campaign to put Donald Trump in the White House cannot be revealed: "source and methods" must be kept secret. This in spite of DNI director James Clapper's pledge that he would declassify as much of the evidence as possible in the interests of transparency: but then again, Clapper is an admitted liar.
- Which Way to the Barricades?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 What was the mass strike and what would a successful one look like today?
- While US, North Korea Both Make Threats, Only One Has Killed Millions of the Other's People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite bombastic threats from both the Unites States and North Korea, the mainstream media plays down the simple fact that it is North Korea that is isolated and facing overwhelming military superiority.
- White Nights: Before Charlottesville Was in the Spotlight, Police Arrested Their Most Prominent Critic in the Middle of the Night
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Within two weeks of voters in Charlottesville going to the polls to decide on the city's next district attorney, the candidate vowing to rein in police abuse and roll back mass incarceration was arrested in the middle of the night and bound for a police station.
- White Supremacy/ Identity Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Can cop violence and anti-Black racism be permanently defeated so long as white supremacist ideology permeates the ruling class and society?
- Whiteness Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Whiteness is a protection racket that used to provide material bonuses. It is a minimally advantageous deal that the ruling class continuously renegotiates with a part of the working class, and the first such deal happened before the founding of the United States.
- Who Are the "Alt-Right"? On the Rise of Reactionary Hatred and How to Fight it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With much of the public discussing strategies for how best to fight right-wing extremism, the need for constructive solutions is greater than ever. First and foremost, it’s important to point out that public support for far-right extremists is miniscule. The vast majority of Americans reject this movement's violence and hatred. According to a Marist survey from the summer of 2017, just 4 percent of Americans said they support "white supremacy movement" or "white nationalism." Similarly, just 6 percent embraced the term "alt-right" Still, there is a legitimate concern that support for right-wing bigotry may grow in the future if left unchecked.
- Who Built the Panama Canal?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Donald Trump might not know it, but the United States didn't build the Panama Canal. Workers did.
- Who Could Ever Feel Pride in the Balfour Declaration?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Although the Balfour Declaration itself has been parsed, de-semanticised, romanticised, decrypted, decried, cursed and adored for 100 years, its fraud is easy to detect: it made two promises which were fundamentally opposed to each other -- and thus one of them, to the Arabs (aka "the existing non-Jewish communities"), would be broken.
- Who is the biggest climate change villain?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Here is an exclusive the Guardian has held back from its readers for 26 years. It is finally published on its pages today.
- Who Put Trump in the White House?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The media story in the days following the 2016 election was that a huge defection of angry, white, blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt from their traditional Democratic voting patterns put Donald J. Trump in the White House in a grand slap at the nation's "liberal" elite. But is that the real story?
- Who to Believe: The CIA and Corporate Media or WikiLeaks?
Without Substantiation, Media Integrity Suffers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Imagine if justice were administered mainly on hearsay (ignoring the fact that justice is too often lacking in society). It is a cardinal rule of justice that rendering a decision of guilty must only be done when such guilt is beyond a reasonable doubt. Medical schools state they follow evidence-based practices. Nursing schools do the same. Science progresses through the scientific method which demands evidence. When observations and experimental results contravene theory, the theory is tossed. There is academia, and then there is politics and the corporate media. Politics and its corporate media has long since become risible within the sphere of serious contemplation.
- Who Voted for Germany's New Nazis?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Klikauer examines the rise of the far-Right in Germany, with reference to unresolved inequalities post re-uinification, changing demographics and media interests.
- Who’s Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On November 30, 2016, presumably right at the stroke of midnight, Google Inc. unpersoned CounterPunch. They didn't send out a press release or anything. They just quietly removed it from the Google News aggregator. Not very many people noticed.
- Who's Afraid of the White Working Class?: On Joan C. Williams's 'White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America'
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A book review on White Working Class Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Written By Joan C. Williams).
- Whose seeds are they anyway?
Real Farming Report Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The new People Need Nature report - published to coincide with this week's annual Oxford Real Farming Conference - warns that modern farming practices are not good for wildlife. But they're not good for humans either. And with predictions that we will need to produce 70 per cent more food to feed a third more mouths by 2050 the question of seed ownership and diversity cannot be ignored.
- Whose Streets? Their Streets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 If people don’t believe that the police in America are the greatest threat to civil society then they've been asleep for years, and comatose just this week. Or they're white, privileged and/or accepting of brutality against their own fellow citizens.
- Why the Anti-Trump Resistance Movement Should Not Initiate Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 One hazard we must avoid in our struggle is to allow violence to be used in the movement. We can't afford to give our approval to this by green lighting the burning of limousines and the breaking of store windows, as happened in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2017, or by punching the Nazi Richard Spencer in the face, which is satisfying but unproductive.
- Why Are All Those Racists So Terrified?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Past efforts, whatever personnel, resources and strategies have been devoted to them, have done nothing to address the underlying cause of racism and so their impact must be superficial and temporary. As the record demonstrates.
- Why Are Police In The USA So Terrified?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The routine killing of innocent civilians by the police has become a national crisis despite concerted attempts by political and legal authorities and the corporate media to obscure what is happening.
- Why Are Progressives Stupid? It's Not Too Late to Get Smart
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Many progressives are stupid. Unless they get smart soon, "The Resistance" to Donald Trump will fail, just like everything else the Left has tried to do for the last 40 years.
- Why Banning Laura Kipnis Would Betray Wellesley's Academic Mission
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Six professors at an elite American college insist that students will suffer "damage" or "injury" if speakers they may disagree with are allowed to speak on campus.
- Why Can't the U.S. Left Get Venezuela Right?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 As Venezuela's fascist-minded oligarchy conspires with U.S. imperialism to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicolas Maduro, few in the U.S. seem to care.
- Why Culture Matters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In order to engage in a meaningful dialogue about 'cultural appropriation' we have to reject the framing that critics like Bari Weiss give it -- where culture becomes just another market.
- Why Did the US Use Depleted Uranium Weapons in Syria?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The recent confirmation by the US that DU ammunition was used in two attacks in Syria in late 2015 raises a number of troubling questions. Firstly, why was DU used? Has it been used again? Will it be used again?
- Why I Support the Palestinian Right of Return
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The repatriation of Palestinian refugees is is a very real and practical concept for which there is ample historical precedent as well as practical means of implementation.
- Why ICE Raids Imperil Us All
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Millions of people who have been living and working in the U.S., contributing to their communities and to the economy, are now at risk simply for who they are: people "without papers."
- Why Imperial Washington Should Cool It On North Korea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author argues that an enhanced package of sanctions, UN resolutions, diplomatic pressures and miltary threats against North Korea is futile; indeed Washington has been doing this for years and it hasn't worked yet, and a more robust version directed at North Korea won't work now.
- Why is the New York Times promoting the "black bloc"?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A New York Times article, which ran across four columns of the newspaper's front page under a huge photo of a black-masked individual preparing to break an office building window with an iron bar during Wednesday night's protests at the University of California, Berkeley, amounted to free publicity and promotion of the violent protests organized by elements identifying themselves as the "black bloc," anti-fascists and anarchists.
- Why is the media promoting Antifa?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The promotion of Antifa serves several interrelated functions. First, the physical violence of a handful of protesters in any large demonstration is regularly used as a pretext for police provocation. This is true not only in the US, but in Europe and around the world. Police give the "anti-fascist" and anarchist groups a free hand to carry out provocations, which are then exploited to carry out a violent crackdown. The groups themselves are easily infiltrated by police provocateurs, who encourage violent acts for the desired end.
- Why is the West praising Malala, but ignoring Ahed?
Is an empowered Palestinian girl not worthy of Western feminist admiration? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Khoja-Moolji examines the lack of media response to the plight of 16 year-old Ahed Tamimi, detained for allegedly assaulting an Israeli soldier during a confrontation at her home during which Israeli soldiers shot a fourteen-year-old child.
- Why Is There No 'Saudi-Gate'?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 For decades, the DC establishment has been on the payroll of a foreign terror state. But because it's Saudi Arabia, you won't hear a peep.
- Why ISIS Fighters are Being Thrown Off Buildings in Mosul
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The suspicion by Iraqi soldiers and militiamen that their own government is too corrupt to keep captured Isis fighters in detention is one reason why prisoners are being killed.
- Why Israelis must disrupt the occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Even dedicated dedicated well-meaning Israelis do far too little and use far too little of their privilege to challenge and combat the injustice meted out against Palestinians.
- Why Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 No country in the world recognises Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with the exception of Russia.
- Why Palestine is Still the Issue
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The longest occupation and resistance in modern times is a crime that has been suppressed in the intellectual and political culture of the West.
- Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Chief among the common misconceptions about the way official propaganda works is the notion that its goal is to deceive the public into believing things that are not "the truth" (that Trump is a Russian agent, for example, or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, et cetera). However, while official propagandists are definitely pleased if anyone actually believes whatever lies they are selling, deception is not their primary aim.
- Why the CIA Cares About Marxism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Abundant evidence of course exists of the CIA's complex cultural interventions into French intellectual affairs -- but it is critical to recognise that it was the political shortcomings of communist organizations themselves (i.e., Stalinists) that had the determinant impact on the obscurantist trajectory of left-wing academic ideas.
- Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump
The Russia-connected allegations have created an atmosphere of hysteria amounting to McCarthyism. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The bipartisan, nearly full-political-spectrum tsunami of factually unverified allegations that President Trump has been seditiously "compromised" by the Kremlin, with scarcely any nonpartisan pushback from influential political or media sources, is deeply alarming. Begun by the Clinton campaign in mid-2016, and exemplified now by New York Times columnists (who write of a “Trump-Putin regime” in Washington), strident MSNBC hosts, and unbalanced CNN commentators, the practice is growing into a latter-day McCarthyite hysteria. Such politically malignant practices should be deplored wherever they appear, whether on the part of conservatives, liberals, or progressives.
- Why White Working Class Americans Are Dying "Deaths of Despair"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Franklin examines the reasons behind the steadily growing mortality rates for working-class white Americans, which he attributes to both workplace hazards and mental illness resulting from joblessness, poverty, and despair.
- Why Won't American Media Tell the Truth About What's Happening in Venezuela?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Unlike Brazil and Argentina, Venezuela has been victimized by a number of factors outside of its control, but especially a precipitous drop in the price of oil, the country's main source of revenue.
- WikiLeaks Vault 7 Reveals CIA Cyberwar and the Battleground of Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7”, the whistleblowing site began releasing the largest publication of confidential documents that have come from the top secret security network at the Cyber Intelligence Center.
- Winner of the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize for Asia: Prafulla Samantara
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Prafulla Samantara, winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for his relentless efforts, has made it his life's work to fight injustice by lending a voice to Indigenous communities and small scale farmers.
- Wisconsin Dairy Farmers Have Been Duped into Producing Too Much Milk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Wisconsin farmers have been duped into producing too much milk, resulting in reduced profitability and at the expense of the environment.
- With Ash on Their Faces
Yezidi Women and the Islamic State Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 A chronicle of ISIS' genocide of the Yezidis population in northern Iraq in 2014, including the enslavement and abuse of women and children, a persecution and tragedy that continues to this day.
- The Women of 1917
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Women weren't just the Russian Revolution’s spark, but the motor that drove it forward.
- Women Rise Up Against Gender Violence in the Caribbean
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Podur interviews Joan Joy Grant Cummings, a women's right activist, regarding the severity of sexual violence towards women and girls in Jamaica.
- The Women's March Was a Dismal Failure and a Hopeful Sign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Despite what pundits said, the Women’s March was not a movement. Nor was it the beginning of a movement. It was a moment: a show of hands: "I'm against Trump," these women (and men) told the world. Question was, who/what do they want to replace him?
- Wonder Woman is a hero only the military-industrial complex could create
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author peels back the layer of blockbuster comic book fun to reveal the film's disturbing and not-so-covert political and militaristic messages.
- The wonderful world of bossnapping
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A short introduction to and history of 'bossnapping', where workers detain their bosses in order to win demands.
- Workers Hold the Keys
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In a discussion of the history and practice of socialist ideas, Chibber and Farbman discuss precarity and the changing composition of the working class, how socialists should think about unions, and how the Left can get off the college campuses and into the workplaces and streets.
- Workers Hold the Keys
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An interview with Vivek Chibber.
- The World and Its Particulars
The Ways of the World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of David Harvey's The Ways of the World.
- World Bank claims 'sovereign immunity' to escape liability for its crimes against humanity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In arguing against the World Bank's attempt to declare itself a sovereign state that is above the law, Dolack brings attention to the large-scale crimes the World Bank has committed or been involved in over many decades.
- The World Center of Hacking is in Washington, Not Moscow or Beijing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Documents from the U.S. NSA (National Security Agency) unveiled by Edward Snowden show that whole countries, not just a number of sensitive computers, have been hacked by the NSA.
- The World Must Learn From Cuba
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 On the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, why has the small Caribbean nation outperformed many capitalist democracies in key ways despite fifty years of attack?
- The World Through African Eyes
Securing the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Book review of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Securing the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe.
- World War I and Afterward: Upheaval, Repression and Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Following the April 1917 U.S. entry into World War I, a massive months-long strike wave occurred as workers in those industries, booming with wartime orders demanded improved conditions and better wages that were rapidly being outstripped by war-bred price increases.
- World's Best Economist Tells All!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 If you want to learn real economics instead of neoliberal junk economics, read Michael Hudson’s books. What you will learn is that neoliberal economics is an apology for the rentier class and the large banks that have succeeded in financializing the economy, shifting consumer spending power from the purchase of goods and services that drive the real economy to the payment of interest and fees to banks.
- Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Sociologist Wess Harris further examines the coal industry in Appalachia, and brings attention to how state government and the coal industry have strived to keep its troubling history buried from the public.
- Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2017 Written in Blood features the work of Appalachia’s leading scholars and activists making available an accurate, ungilded, and uncensored understanding of our history. Combining new revelations from the past with sketches of a sane path forward, this is a deliberate collection looking at our past, present, and future.
- W.W.E. the People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 An excerpt from Naomi Klein's book "No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need", published by Haymarket Books.
- Xulhaz Mannan: Murder of LGBTQ+ editor highlights danger facing all rational voices in Bangladesh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Published: 17 The murder of Xulhaz Mannan, the founder and editor of Bangladesh's first and only LGBTQ+ magazine, Roopban, has drawn the world's attention to the violence directed against the country's outspoken supporters of equal rights. His death at the hands of six assailants sent a wave of fear through the community, and has prompted others to go into hiding.
- Yanis Varoufakis's Self-Incriminating Account of the Greek Crisis - Parts 1 and 2
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Part One: Proposals Doomed to Fail
In his latest book, Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis gives us his version of the events that led to the Tsipras government's shameful capitulation in July 2015. It essentially analyses the period 2009-2015, though it makes incursions into earlier periods.
With this voluminous work (550 pages), Yanis Varoufakis shows that he is a gifted narrator. At times he succeeds in moving the reader. His direct and vivid style makes it easy to follow events.
This initial article will cover the first four chapters of a book that comprises 17 in all. It deals with the proposals Varoufakis made before he became a member of the government in January 2015.
- Years Before Charlottesville, Tribes Urged Yellowstone National Park to Change the Names of a War Criminal and a White Supremacist That Defile Sacred Land
We're Still Waiting Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Chief Stan Grier explains why historical figures who advocated genocide and white supremacy must be not continue to be commemorated at Yellowstone National Park, a sacred land to Indigenous communities for at least 10,000 years.
- Yemen Doctors: Hundreds Will Die Within a Week to Saudi Blockade
Key Medicines Have Run Out in Yemeni Capital Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 In the past month, Saudi Arabia's naval blockade of Yemen, has tightened dramatically, and even vital medications and food are virtually impossible to import.
- You Are Not An Experience
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A growing number of intellectuals are arguing that free speech needs to be subordinated to the goal of protecting the feelings of people who don't want to hear views that they find threatening. They are wrong.
- You Want a Picture of the Future? Imagine a Boot Stamping on Your Face
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author explains why the dystopian future dreamed up by such authors as George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and Margaret Atwood has already arrived.
- The Young Karl Marx
Der Junge Karl Marx Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2017 A 2017 film about Karl Marx directed by Haitian Raoul Peck, co-written by Peck and Pascal Bonitzer, and starring August Diehl.
- The Young Patriots, The Original Rainbow Coalition and Rising Up Angry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 A look back at the social movements The Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry in the 1960's and 70's; the seventh article in the series 'Organize the White Working Class!'.
- Your Personal Consumption Choices Can't Save the Planet: We Have to Confront Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 Failing to do our part for climate change is a convenient narrative to the small minority of people who are actually responsible for fueling the crisis, and the answer to tackling the crisis is actually changing the economic system driving climate change.
- Zapatistas urge scientists to join in building a better world
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 With all the damage that the capitalists have done to the people through their misuse of science, can we create a science that is truly human? Can we work collectively to defend life and humanity?
- Zionism in the Light of Jerusalem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017
- Zionist Colonization is Not 'Exceptional': A Marxist Viewpoint
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 This article aims to challenge the rather widely accepted claim that the nature of Zionist settler colonization is exceptional and even "defies appeal to any precedent that can usefully be invoked as to its evolution and eventual revolution."
- Zionist Colonization is Not 'Exceptional': A Marxist Viewpoint
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author offers a contrasting position to Moshé Machover's 2016 article, "The decolonization of Palestine"- namely, that Zionist colonization is not unique and that features of Zionism are similar to those of other colonial projects, including apartheid South Africa.
- Zombies R Us: the Walking Dead of the American Police State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2017 The author examines zombies in American popular culture, and notably how zombies also embody the government's paranoia about citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored and controlled.
2016
- The ABCs of Socialism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 A slim, accessible, inexpensive, irreverent introduction to socialism by the writers of Jacobin magazine.
- Abortion Victory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On June 27, 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Whole Women's Health vs. Hellerstedt, not only struck down key provisions of a 2013 Texas law restricting abortion, but also set a standard by which similar legislation can be measured.
- Abundance for everybody
'Conscious food' supports a thriving urban activist community in Bolivia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A group of Bolivian activists engage in 'conscious eating' while resisting capitalism and climate change and valuing everyone's work.
- Academics can change the world -- if they stop talking only to their peers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Public outreach or engagement is not valued enough in universities where the emphasis is on research journal articles with tiny readerships for communication. The "publish or perish" culture is a reality at universities all over the world.
- Acceptable Losses
Aiding and abetting the Saudi slaughter in Yemen Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A close look at the crisis in Yemen, a country rife with povery and water shortages and further devastated by a prolonged campaign of bombing and military action.The military campaign, supported by the United States, is an effort by the Saudi governemnt to oust a tribal group in north Yemen who follow Zaidism, an off-shoot of Shia Islam.
- ACLU Wants 23 Secret Surveillance Laws Made Public
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The ACLU has identified 23 legal opinions that contain new or significant interpretations of surveillance law -- affecting the government's use of malware, its attempts to compel technology companies to circumvent encryption, and the CIA's bulk collection of financial records under the Patriot Act -- all of which remain secret to this day, despite an ostensible push for greater transparency following Edward Snowden’s disclosures.
- After Malheur, the end of the beginning: war for America's public lands rages on
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Those who value public lands - for economic, environmental, recreational and aesthetic values - owe a debt of gratitude to Harney County, Oregon, writes Peter Walker. A violent branch of the Sagebrush Rebellion came to town, and the community told it to go away: the decisive factor in the occupiers' defeat. But the greater war for America's public lands has only just begun.
- After Nice, Don't Give ISIS What It's Asking For
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Not much is yet known about Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the 31-year-old man French police say is responsible for a horrific act of mass murder last night in the southern city of Nice. In the wake of the killings, French President Francois Hollande has denounced the attack as "Islamist terrorism" linked to the militant group the Islamic State. Supporters of ISIS online have echoed these statements, claiming responsibility for the attack as another blow against its enemies in Western Europe. While the motive for the attack is still under investigation, it is worth examining why the Islamic State is so eager to claim such incidents as its own.
- After Trotskyism, what? Some personal thoughts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Arash Azizi had been a member the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) for more than seven years. Recently Azizi left the organization. He outlines his decision to leave in this esssay at the request of many friends and comrades.
- Against Activism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "Activism" stands in contrast to organizing. Organizing aims to bring people together to build and exercise power, informed by a strategic vision for acquiring power and changing society. To be an "activist" now merely means to advocate for change, and the hows and whys of that advocacy are unclear. Activist is a generic category associated with oddly specific stereotypes: today, the term signals not so much a certain set of political opinions or behaviours as a certain temperament. Worse, many activists seem to relish their marginalization, interpreting their small numbers as evidence of their specialness, their membership in an exclusive and righteous clique, effectiveness be damned.
- Against the Cultural Turn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The starting point of this debate is the failure of multiculturalism. It has become fashionable today to criticise multiculturalism. The trouble is, many of the criticisms are as problematic as multiculturalism itself. And I say that as someone who's been a critic of multiculturalism for more than 20 years, from well before it was fashionable to be so.
- Age of Austerity
Capital, the Financial Crisis and the State in Canada Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The financial and economic crisis of 2008 has left a continuing legacy on social welfare, showing up in slow economic growth, unemployment and underemployment, and increasing social conflict. In the debate over the future of the world economy, many foresee a long depression, and the intensification of neoliberal austerity. Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman's new book is concerned with Canada's unique economic and social history over the period of neoliberalism, including the financial and economic crisis of 2008.
- Agencies of Fear
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The article details an example of how little control the US administration can have over one of its agencies and the dangers and consequences of the situation.
- Agroecology Case Studies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The thirty-three case studies shed light on the tremendous success of agroecological agriculture across the African continent. They demonstrate with facts and figures how an agricultural transformation respectful of farmers and their environment can yield immense economic, social, and food security benefits while also fighting climate change and restoring soils and the environment.
- "All changed, changed utterly": The historical significance of the Irish Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The problem with political anniversaries is that they often focus on specific dates in the past without any recognition that they are part of a longer process. Easter Monday 1916 is an iconic date in Irish history that all and sundry seek to appropriate, but it can only be understood by what preceded and followed it.
- Henri Alleg
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Henri Alleg (20 July 1921 – 17 July 2013), born Henri Salem, was a French-Algerian journalist, director of the "Alger républicain" newspaper, and a member of the French Communist Party. After Editions de Minuit, a French publishing house, released his memoir La Question in 1958, Alleg gained international recognition for his stance against torture, specifically within the context of the Algerian War (1954–1962).
- Allen Ginsberg and the '60s Movement
The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Eliot Katz' The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg.
- Alternatives to Neoliberal Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Neoliberal capitalism today has become unpopular, but imagining alternatives is difficult nonetheless.
- Amazing Brexit: Identity and Class Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This shell of a once fighting left embraces the culture of identity but excludes the entity of class. As a result poverty has become the P-word, and the poor the pariahs of neoliberal dystopic utopia. When we talk about class in a Marxist, materialist, scientific sense, we are talking about a relation of power, specifically about who does and who doesn’t have power to shape society. Identity politics makes this conflict of interests in society invisible. Neoliberal economics, however, is class war. It has advanced in part because identity politics depoliticized the public.
- Americal Liberals Unleashed the Trump Monster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Cook argues that Trump's victory was due to liberals losing rather than Trump winning.
- The American Imperium
Untangling truth and fiction in an age of perpetual war Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With the present-day US military overextended throughout the globe, this essay takes a look at past American military policy and actions in overseas conflicts, and how these events of the past century affect public perceptions and ultimately how the military continues to be used.
- The American Jewish scholar behind Labour's 'antisemitism' scandal breaks his silence
Norman G. Finkelstein talks Naz Shah MP, Ken Livingstone, and the Labour 'antisemitism' controversy. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An interview with author Norman Fikelstein on the Labour 'antisemitism' scandal.
- American Literature and the First World War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Given that the United States entered the First World War much later than any other major belligerent, declaring war on Germany in April, 1917 - over two and a half years after the war began - one might expect that the war had less impact here than on other countries. American literature, however, argues otherwise.
- American Nuremberg: Putting Washington's War Criminals on Trial - Book Review
Book Review of "American Nuremberg: Putting Washington’s War Criminals on Trial" by Gar Smith. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Any honest review of the aggregating crimes of America’s political leaders gives rise to a nagging question: Isn’t it time someone threw the book at them? Well, the wait is over. We now have the book.
- American Wasteland
The Most Urgent Challenge for America is Its Poorly Hidden Mental Health Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Hearing the phrase "mental health crisis," one may think of the epidemic of mass shootings plaguing the country since the Reagan era. Or, images may erupt of home grown terrorist attacks or the plunge toward right-wing extremism in contemporary politics. Yet, suicide outranks both homicides and car accidents as the number one killer of our fellow citizens.
- America's Deceptive Model for Aggression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Since NATO's 1999 war on Serbia, U.S. officials have followed a script demonizing targeted foreign leaders, calling ultimatums "diplomacy," lying about "war as a last resort" and selling aggression as humanitarianism.
- America's hidden homeless: Life in the Starlight Motel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A motel in Massachusetts reveals the extent of the US' hidden homelessness problem. Residents share their stories.
- America's Social Arsonist
Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Gabriel Thompson provides a full picture of Fred Ross,this complicated and driven man, recovering a forgotten chapter of American history and providing vital lessons for organizers today.
- Amid corruption, poverty and violence, Paraguay's rural poor fight for land and freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The closing down of a community radio station in eastern Paraguay is the latest example of political repression in the country with the most unequal land distribution in Latin America, and in which the media are dominated by a tiny elite of the super-rich. As small farmers begin to reclaim the land that is rightfully theirs, landowners and the state they control are striking back.
- Among the Pipeline Fighters in Central Iowa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Iowans protest the Bakken pipeline, fighting against Big Carbon and 21st century petro-capitalism.
- Anarchism's Mid-Century Turn
A Review & Response: Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century, Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 No matter how one feels about it, the current state of anarchism has represented something of a mystery: What was once a mass movement based mainly in working class immigrant communities is now an archipelago of subcultural scenes inhabited largely by disaffected young people from the white middle class.
- Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz - Part 1
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We live in a time when state-corporate interests are cooperating to produce propaganda blitzes intended to raise public support for the demonisation and destruction of establishment enemies. Here we will examine five key components of an effective propaganda campaign of this kind.
- Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz - Part 2: 'Hitlergate'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As with so many propaganda blitzes, intense media coverage was triggered by 'dramatic new evidence'; namely, the discovery of a graphic posted by Naz Shah two years ago, before she became a Labour MP. The graphic shows a map of the United States with Israel superimposed in the middle, suggesting that a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict would be to relocate Israel to the US.
- Ancillary Lessons from Brexit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Apart from the substantive issues for the European elites of the Brexit referendum victory, two ancillary lessons have been thrust upon us, if we were not already wise to them. One, the contemptible character of the mainstream media. Two, the crucial importance of historical understanding.
- Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA's Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There are some basic facts about what is known and, more importantly, what is not known about the anonymous CIA leaks concerning the 2016 US Presidency Election.
- Another Response to May '68 Revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The significance of the May Events is not to be found in the question of state power. Like other recent movements such as Occupy, it changed the discourse in the public sphere. May 68 changed people's expectations in their social life and their utopian hopes.
- Anti-Intellectualism, Terrorism, and Elections in Contemporary Education: a Discussion with Noam Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Washington DC based History Teacher Dan Falcone and New York City English Teacher Saul Isaacson sat down with Professor Noam Chomsky to discuss current issues in education and American domestic and foreign policy issues. They also discussed the place of the humanities in education and how it relates to activism, definitions of terrorism, and how education impacts the perceptions of the political process in the US.
- Anti-Palestine Media Bias Remains Untouchable Even to Canada’s Media Critics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A recent Canadaland podcast simultaneously highlighted anti-Palestinian media bias and the fear liberal journalists’ face in discussing one of the foremost social justice issues of our time.
- Apartheid in the fields: From occupied Palestine to UK Supermarkets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Articles and interviews with Palestinian agricultural workers and farmers in the West Bank and Gaza, together with information on many of the Israeli exporters and UK supermarkets, as a resource for campaigners seeking to follow the call to boycott Israeli goods, companies and state institutions.
- Arctic Death Rattle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The warming of the Arctic negatively affects the entire Northern Hemisphere by altering jet streams at 30,000-40,000 feet altitude, which turns normal weather patterns upside down, wreaking havoc throughout the hemisphere. Even more significantly, loss of Arctic ice exposes the planet to risks of a crushing blow to the planetary ecosystem, without warning.
- The Arctic Turns Ugly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Runaway global warming is far and away humankind's biggest nightmare, and the Arctic is the likely perpetrator. If it happens, it'll blister agricultural foodstuff before it can reach the outstretched arms of the multitudes.
- Are There Lessons for Canada's Elites in the US Election?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the aftermath of the results of the US election the mix of emotions and analysis spans the spectrum from feeling sorry for the irrational and politically illiterate American voter to fear about the consequences of the election of a thuggish buffoon as president. But common to all reactions is a smugness rooted in our sense of superiority -- as if our elites are somehow more attentive to the public interest and the lives of ordinary Canadians.
- Are These the Keystone Cops?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The CIA owes its vaunted reputation to one source: Hollywood’s movie studios. The way the movies portray America's clandestine services goes so far beyond mere "exaggeration" or embellishment, it verges on outright hero worship, stubbornly confusing James Woolsey with James Bond. Alas, if our intel-gathering networks were a fraction as accomplished as Hollywood portrays them to be, we wouldn’t have been mired in Vietnam or Iraq.
- Arms, agribusiness, finance and fossil fuels: the four horsemen of the neoliberal Apocalypse
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The world is in the grip of a structural war against people, land, economies and ecosystems, writes Colin Todhunter. It is being waged by a quartet of organised criminal interests bent on monopolizing energy, money, food and violence across the globe. But a deep-rooted resistance against their 'neoliberal' doctrine of death and destruction is fighting back.
- The Art of Spin
How Hillary Clinton backers deployed faux feminism and privilege politics to divert attention from her destructive policies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Propaganda and misdirection have been deployed to great effect in the 2016 American election.
- As Corruption Engulfs Brazil's "Interim" President, Mask Has Fallen Off Protest Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Momentum for the impeachment of Brazil's democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was initially driven by large, flamboyant street protests of citizens demanding her removal. Although Brazil's dominant media endlessly glorified (and incited) these green-and-yellow-clad protests as an organic citizen movement, evidence recently emerged that protests groups were covertly funded by opposition parties. Still, there is no doubt that millions of Brazilians participated in marches demanding Rousseff's ouster, claiming they were motivated by anger over her and her party’s corruption. But from the start, there were all sorts of reasons to doubt this storyline and to see that these protesters were (for the most part) not opposed to corruption, but simply devoted to removing from power the center-left party that won four straight national elections.
- As Pipeline Construction and Repression Grows, DAPL Protest is Looking More Like a Mass Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A look at the escalating conflict between the DAPL, Dakota Access Pipeline, and the native tribes and activists who are resisting it. The issue is centered around the construction of a pipeline which risks the destruction of a river that serves as a main water source to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the more than 17 million people downriver.
- As Police Killings of Minorities Mount, Attacks on Police Like the One in Dallas, While Awful, Are Also Sadly Predictable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The tragedy that is America has deepened with the news of a sniper attack targeting police in Dallas during a protest march and rally against police brutality and killings of black people in that city. The murder of anybody, whether it's a police officer or someone who is simply stopped by a cop for a minor traffic violation and is then shot because a jumpy officer mistakes reaching for a wallet to be reaching for a gun, as happened just two days ago in Minnesota, is a dreadful thing.
- As Temperatures Climb Across the Country, Workers Will Suffer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The summer of 2016 is barely two weeks old, but this year is already on track to break high temperature records in the United States. On June 20, cities across the Southwest and into Nevada reached all-time triple-digit highs. Meanwhile, every single state experienced spring temperatures above average, with some in the Northwest reaching record highs. These temperatures have already proved deadly, killing five hikers in Arizona earlier this month. Triple-digit heat earlier that same week is also being blamed for the deaths of two construction workers, 49-year old Dale Heitman in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 15 and 55-year old Thomas F. “Tommy” Barnes on June 14 at the Monsanto campus in nearby Chesterfield, Missouri.
- Assad's Death Warrant
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on the uprisings in the spring of 2011, but rather the war began in 2009, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria.
- The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and the Politics of Silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In 1976, agents working for the Chilean secret service attached plastic explosives to the bottom of Orlando Letelier's Chevrolet as it sat in the driveway of his family's home in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. There are still many unanswered questions about this time. Exactly how complicit was the U.S. in the overthrow of the Chilean government? Why did the CIA ignore a cable telling it that Chile's agents were heading to the U.S.? Why did Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, cancel a warning to Chile not to kill its overseas opponents just five days before Letelier was murdered?
- At the forefront of revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The gains won by the women's liberation movement during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the right to divorce and increased reproductive rights, are real material gains. Women are told that in Britain we have never had it so good. And on the surface that can appear to be true. But, as Judith Orr points out in Marxism and Women's Liberation, "much has changed for women, but too much has not".
- The Attempts to disappear Garifuna people
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Development projects pushed by the government in the Atlantic coast threaten the survival of afro-descendant communities.
- Austerity vs. the Planet:The Future of Labour Environmentalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last December members of the International Trade Union Confederation joined other civil society activists in a mass sit-in at the COP21 talks in Paris. Unionists and their allies, some 400 strong, filled the social space adjacent to the negotiating rooms for several hours, in defiance of a French ban on protests that remained in effect in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks. The ITUC delegation demanded the negotiators go back to the table and make a serious effort to incorporate labour's demands for a just transition – which, at its heart, is concerned with making sure workers in environmentally unsustainable industries are retrained and put to work building a new, sustainable economy.
- Australia: 1966 Aboriginal Stockmen's Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the courageous Aboriginal stockmen's strike at the Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory (NT). On 23 August 1966, head stockman Vincent Lingiari led 200 workers out on strike against the appalling conditions under which they were forced to live and work. They walked off with their families to a nearby welfare settlement and later set up camp at Daguragu (also known as Wattie Creek). This strike by Aboriginal workers for equal pay and conditions, and protesting the abusive treatment of Aboriginal women, provided an opportunity for class-struggle unity between Indigenous and white workers.
- Australia's Day for Secrets, Flags and Cowards
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call "New Australians" often choose 26 January, "Australia Day", to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.
- Australia's rebel heritage of poetry and song
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ballads like the one published in Borough, London, by the famous printer HP Such, had been sold on the streets of the towns and cities from which convicts were transported to Australia from the First Fleet onwards. This street literature was hawked for less than a penny and was sung, or "chaunted" by the seller to a large audience, many of them poor. HP Such's ballad provides us with a sample of the early industrial working class' emotional and political understanding of the rising empire.
- Authoritarianism Means Never Having to Apologize Over Spilled Milk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In Virginia a middle school student named Ryan Turk was arrested and then suspended from school for allegedly stealing a $0.65 carton of milk. Officials claim that the student tried to conceal the carton of milk and are also charging him with larceny. But there’s a problem: Ryan Turk is on the free lunches program.
- Autonomist Marxism and Workplace Organizing in Canada in the 1970s
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Accordin to John Huot, Autonomist Marxism, from its headwaters in the early 1960s workers’ struggles and Marxist circles in Italy to multiple, diverse social movement/Marxist/feminist spaces in many countries, has developed into a significant current in the global anti-capitalist, anti-oppression project for social transformation. Huot examines this current in the context of the 1970s "New Tendency" in Canada.
- Auto's Permanent Temporaries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the auto industry, temporaries were once students who covered auto jobs over a clearly defined summer vacation period. Today temps can work a full week year after year, never becoming permanent workers.
- Away with the gatekeepers!
The bane of cultural appropriation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On the the controversies over 'cultural appropriation' and what they reveal about the degradation of contemporary campaigns for social justice.
- The Bad Losers (And What They Fear Losing)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If the 2016 presidential campaign was a national disgrace, the reaction of the losers is an even more disgraceful spectacle. And why is that?
- Bahrain's Government Continues to Strangle Dissent Five Years After Uprising Began
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Five years after the eruption of what came to be known as the "Arab Spring" protests that spilled over from Tunisia, Bahrain's regime continues to lock up opposition leaders, sending a message of its refusal to reform or change.
- Baiting the Bear
Russia and NATO Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "Aggressive," "revanchist," "swaggering": These are just some of the adjectives the mainstream press and leading U.S. and European political figures are routinely inserting before the words "Russia," or "Vladimir Putin." It is a vocabulary most Americans have not seen or heard since the height of the Cold War. The question is, why?
- Ban of Russian Olympic Team: Cold War at its "Best"!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The West is using both old and new tactics to demonize and discredit all of its opponents, in what is becoming a new Cold War.
- Bank of Canada Lawsuit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the most important legal cases in Canadian history is slowly inching its way towards trial. Launched in 2011 by the Toronto-based Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), the lawsuit would require the publicly-owned Bank of Canada to return to its pre-1974 mandate and practice of lending interest-free money to federal, provincial, and municipal governments for infrastructure and healthcare spending.
- Barriers to love in Israel and Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Love Under Apartheid and IMEU released a new video "Palestinians Daring to Love" highlighting four married couples struggling to maintain love and family relationships despite the restrictions imposed by Israel's policies that systematically discriminate and segregate Palestinians.
- Bata’s footprint in Africa: The dark story of Canadian shoe giant
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Toronto-based shoemaker took advantage of European colonialism to rapidly set up across the continent, squeezing out local footwear producers, working with apartheid South Africa and even reaching out to Uganda’s Idi Amin.
- The Battle of Cable Street
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Eighty years ago this week, anti-fascists in East London confronted Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts as they tried to march though what was then a largely Jewish area. Mosley's British Union of Fascists was notorious for using marches and rallies as cover for vicious attacks on Jews. The confrontation has gone down in folklore as 'The Battle of Cable Street'.
- The Battle of Oaxaca
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This is not just another of the many Oaxacan wars. It is part of a much more profound and extensive war that is by no means contained within the national territory itself. But the battle being waged in Oaxaca has a special meaning in that war, in the larger war.
It is a battle long overdue. In Oaxaca people knew that many aspects of the ongoing confrontation were being postponed due to the elections. It was evident that after the elections, the attacks, provocations, and the final assault would intensify. Everywhere, preparations began.
- The Battle to Unionize Starbucks in Chile: an Interview with Andrés Giordano Salazar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 After six years of intense battles, two strikes, a hunger strike, and four legal sentences for anti-union activities, Starbucks reluctantly agreed to sign a collective agreement with unionized workers in Chile in May 2015. This was a huge concession for the world’s largest coffee shop chain that has long aggressively fought off unionization efforts among its 150,000 workers in 64 countries.
- BDS in the Crosshairs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 That project in dispute is BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, promoted by civil society throughout the Western world. BDS is directed at Israel due to its illegal colonization of the Occupied Territories and its general apartheid-style discrimination against non-Jews in general and Palestinians in particular.
- Beating the fascists? The German Communists and political violence 1929-1933
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Eve Rosenhaft examines the involvement of Communist Party militants in political violence against Nazis during the years of Hitler's rise to power in Germany (1929-33). Specifically, she aims to account for their participation in 'street-fighting' or 'gang-fighting' with National Socialist storm-troopers.
- Before Facebook Was The Coffee House
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Kenan Malik writes about the issue of fake news.
- Before the parade
A History of Halifax's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Communities, 1972-1984 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Halifax's first generation of gay and lesbian elders forged a rainbow path that LGBTQIA and Two-Spirited activists continue to march down today.
- Behind Israel's campaign to vilify peace groups
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Far-right activists spying on Israeli human rights community received hidden funds from Netanyahu government.
- Beinart's Jewish double-bind: Support oppression or you're out of the family
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Even when he's serving up a soul-crushing ultimatum, you have to give Peter Beinart some credit. By comparing Israel to "your violent, drug-addicted brother," but saying that if you call the cops -- i.e., support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) -- to "make them change their destructive and self-destructive behavior” you are putting your “personal morality" ahead of family loyalty, he's enraged Israel defenders and anti-Zionists alike. In this way, he becomes the personification of the untenable situation he writes about.
- Being African in India: 'We are seen as demons'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 After a year in India, Zaharaddeen Muhammed, 27, knows enough Hindi to understand what bander means. Monkey. But it isn't even the daily derogatory comments that make him doubt his decision to swap his university in Nigeria for a two-year master's degree programme in chemistry at Noida International University. Nor is it the questions about personal hygiene, the unsolicited touching of his hair or the endless staring. It is his failure to interact with Indian people on a deeper level.
- The "Bernie Bros" Narrative: a Cheap Campaign Tactic Masquerading as Journalism and Social Activism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The concoction of the "Bernie Bro" narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic -- and a journalistic disgrace. It's intended to imply two equally false claims: (1) a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are "bros"); and (2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior. Needless to say, a crucial tactical prong of this innuendo is that any attempt to refute it is itself proof of insensitivity to sexism if not sexism itself (as the accusatory reactions to this article will instantly illustrate).
- Bernie and His Critics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Bernie Sanders has provided an opening that we can't squander.
- Bernie Sanders and the New Class Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An interview with Adolph Reed, a political scientist and Bernie Sanders supporter, who dicsusses assumptions about black voters, the legacy of the Sanders campaign, and the tasks ahead.
- Berta Cáceres: her fight for human rights in Honduras continues
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last week the environmental and human rights activist Berta Cáceres was murdered by gunmen in an early morning attack on her home which may have been carried out by or in collusion with state agents. Now her friend and colleague Gustavo Castro, himself wounded in the attack and the only witness to Berta's murder, has been detained for questioning.
- Berta Cáceres, Honduran eco-defender, murdered
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Berta Cáceres, Honduran indigenous and environmental rights campaigner, has been murdered, days after she was threatened for opposing a hydroelectric project. Her death has prompted international outrage, and a flood of tributes to a courageous defender of the natural world.
- Beth Macy, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local -- and Helped Save an American Town (2014) (Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Between Marx and Freud: Erich Fromm revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 More than three decades after his death, the ideas of Erich Fromm are enjoying something of an intellectual renaissance.
- Between Rage and Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On the nature of comteporary terror.
- Beware Liberals: Ridicule Will Backfire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What a year for political satire. It's nourishing; it lowers our stress level; it breaks taboos. Every democracy needs satire but one wonders how much it will count when it comes to votes on November 8th.
- Beware of Basic Income
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Wouldn't it be great to get a cheque every month just for being you? This is the sweet, fuzzy vision the Ontario and federal Liberals are counting on to sell their latest idea, a basic income. Just this year, the Ontario government laid the groundwork for a pilot project to test the idea. Any actual large-scale program is far off into the future, however, and that's a good thing. We need to take a hard look at the idea, especially in Liberal clothing.
- Beware the GMO Trojan horse! Indian food and farming are under attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Global oilseed, agribusiness and biotech corporations are engaged in a long term attack on India's local cooking oil producers. In just 20 years they have reduced India from self-sufficiency in cooking oil to importing half its needs. Now the government's unlawful attempts to impose GM mustard seed threaten to wipe out a crop at the root of Indian food and farming traditions.
- Beyond Banksters
Resisting the New Feudalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Beyond Banksters explores how the powers of the Bank of Canada were appropriated in the 1970s, resulting in billions of dollars in public debt. From Milton Friedman to Justin Trudeau's Canada Infrastructure Bank, from BlackRock to crappy trade deals to Bilderberg, Nelson exposes the major players privatizing the world and creating a new state of feudalism. Icelanders resisted. Nelson says Canada must too.
- Beyond Bernie: The Hidden Potential of Progressive Third Parties
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What Bernie no longer articulates, and what relatively few of his new fans may realize, is that left third parties can be effective. Resisting the two-party system, even against the so-called odds, is not futile or irrational. Contrary to popular myth, it is a proven and still relevant method for advancing progressive change in the United States.
- Beyond Panama: Unlocking the world's secrecy jurisdictions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 21 jurisdictions covered by the Panama Papers data vary from the rolling hills of Wyoming to tropical getaways like the British Virgin Islands. But all have at least one thing in common - secrecy is the rule.
- Beyond the brexit debate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Whatever the result of the Brexit referendum, of one thing we can be sure: Britain will neither be invaded by marauding Turks, as anti-EU campaigners suggest might happen if the country votes 'Yes', nor will Western civilization collapse, as EU president Donald Tusk fears after a 'No' vote. There will undoubtedly be economic and political turbulence, but Britain will not be staring into the abyss, however it votes.
- Bias in the Media: the Result of Corporate Ownership
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There may still be, perhaps in the quiet countryside somewhere, people who believe that news programs present news. It is unlikely that this is true; rather, those who rely on the corporate-owned press for information probably enjoy finding sources that support what they want to hear. And, if they are unsure of just what it is that they want to hear, their 'trusted' source will tell them.
- The Biased Report that led to Banning Russians at the Olympics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Canadian lawyer Richard Mclaren's report infuenced the World Anti-Doping Agency to call for the banning of all Russian athletes from the Rio Games.
- Big Crony CEO Pay Grab: Effects Beyond Greed!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Over the past fifty years, the pay gap between many highly-paid CEOs and their employees has increased dramatically. In 1965, when they also liked to be rich, CEOs made approximately twenty times as much as their average employee, meaning they would earn their workers' average pay by the third week of January, and since the 1980s, the average difference and greed have increased. Highly-paid CEOs now make 303 times as much as their employees in a year, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
- Big Farms Make Big Flu
Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 An examination of the relationships between infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science.
- Big Papers Want Foreign Companies, Not War Crime Victims, to Sue US
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The editorial boards of the US’s four most influential newspapers joined President Barack Obama in opposition to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, a bill that makes suing Saudi Arabia for the 9/11 attacks markedly easier.
- The Big Split
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The article depicts how despite Trump being likened to the perfect wrong play, wrong director and wrong cast as in Mel Brooks' The Producers, he has managed to claim victory. The author argues that this was more due to the Democratic party's failure than it was Trump's success.
- Big Three Contracts: Who Won?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 2015 UAW/Big Three contracts took 67 days and multiple attempts to ratify, resulting in what most autoworkers see as a partial victory.
- The Biggest Heist in Human History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The only way stimulus can work is if its put where it’s needed. And we can now say with 100 percent certainty, that the Fed’s stimulus wasn’t put where it was needed which is why it hasn’t worked.
- Bigotry vs. Black Lives, Muslims, Immigrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates use hate and fear of these "others." Could this strategy win the 2016 presidency?
- Bil'in and the Nonviolent Resistance
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Tells how the farming village in Bil'in, located in Palestine's West Bank, has been facing its occupier, Israel, head-on. Side by side with Israeli and civil rights activists the world over, the people of Bil'in and their protests have been standing against the injustices imposed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) since 2004. That was when the IOF's raids began to uproot the village's ancient olive trees and confiscate its farmlands, the main sources of its livelihood. All of it to build their separation wall and illegal settlements.
- Billionaires in Brazil: Understanding How Extreme Wealth and Political Power Overlap Everywhere
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Alex Cuadros spent years covering the billionaire class of Latin America for Bloomberg. A Portuguese-speaking American journalist who spent years based in Brazil, he has now written a highly entertaining and deeply insightful book about the particularly powerful, flamboyant, assertive, and often-crazed class of Brazilian billionaires. Titled Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, his new book was released yesterday. Brazillionaires contains important lessons far beyond Brazil.
- Biofuel or Biofraud? The Vast Taxpayer Cost of Failed Cellulosic and Algal Biofuels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In November 2014, cellulosic biofuel company KiOR filed for bankruptcy, having shut down their refinery in Columbus, Mississippi earlier that year. There have been many unsuccessful biofuel ventures of this type, but KiOR's stands out for several reasons.
- The Birth of Agro-Resistance in Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Canaan Fiar Trade, a co-operative farming project with a model of self-sufficiency and dignity, has grown rapidly, and now assists some 2000 small-hold farmers in the West Bank, but it still receives little more than ambivalent support from the compromised Palestinian national leadership.
- Birth-Control Wars: Two Centuries of Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The birth-control wars have reached a new level of contestation. On June 27th 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law -- Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt -- that sought to restrict a woman’s right to an abortion and other birth-control medical services.
- "Black Americans for a Better Future" Super PAC 100% Funded by Rich White Guys
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 New FEC filings show that all of the $417,250 in monetary donations to a Super PAC called "Black Americans for a Better Future" comes from conservative white businessmen-- including $400,000, or 96 percent of the total, from white billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.
- Black History and the Class Struggle
#25 Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2016
- Black Ops Advertising
Native Ads, Content Marketing, and the Covert World of the Digital Sell Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Black Ops Advertising dissects this rapid rise of "sponsored content," a strategy whereby advertisers have become publishers and publishers create advertising -- all under the guise of unbiased information. Covert selling, mostly in the form of native advertising and content marketing, has so blurred the lines between editorial content and marketing message that it is next to impossible to tell real news from paid endorsements. In the 21st century, instead of telling us to buy, buy, BUY, marketers "engage" with us so that we share, share, SHARE -- the ultimate subtle sell.
- The Black Student Rebellion of 1976
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A defining feature of the 1976 uprising was the decisive entry of black students onto the stage of history. Until the 1960s, the number of Africans in schools remained relatively low. But the urban African population was growing, especially the number of young people. And industry required a larger pool of industrial labour. So there was a rapid expansion of schooling for Africans. In 1976 there were 3.8 million Africans in schools. Nearly 10% percent of those were in secondary schools. In Soweto alone the number of secondary school students increased from approximately 12,500 to more than 34,000.
- Black Women's Writing Recovered
An Interview with Mary Helen Washington Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Interview with Mary Helen Washington.
- Blame the Neoliberals: Democrats' Toxic Ideology Paved the Way for Trump
How corporate centrism has failed to defeat even the most incompetent figurehead of the nativist right Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Democratic Party is ideologically bankrupt. Neoliberalism, the party's driving force, is toxic, and it has failed not only much of the United States, but also much of the world, driving wealth into the hands of the few. Without a populist left offering an ambitious alternative to the status quo, the nativist right has thrived.
- Blaming Everbody
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Democratic Party brought the 2016 election disaster on themselves.
- Blatant Hypocrisy: the Latest Late-Night Bailout of Greece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The new late night deal in the Eurogroup on the new bailout for Greece is another blatant hypocrisy by the dominant European Union powers, their partner-cum-competitor IMF (aka the US) and the Greek establishment (now represented by the SYRIZA government). The new deal is an uneasy compromise subject to a continuing tug-of-war between the US (through its proxy, the IMF) and the EU.
- BLM Movement Grows Stronger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The vanguard leadership of the young women who started the Black Lives Movement with the #Blacklivesmatter on Twitter, after the killings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Missouri, continues to advance and has led to similar formations in other countries.
- Bloggers Under Fire: The Fatal Consequences of Free Thinking in Bangladesh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Six secular Bangladeshi writers have been killed since November of 2014: Rajshahi University professor AKM Shafiul Islam, literary publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan, and bloggers Avijit Roy, Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, Ananta Bijoy Das and Niloy Neel. At least a dozen more bloggers and progressive activists have been killed and scores of others attacked or threatened with death for their progressive and secular views since 2005.
- Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz's firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua.
- Blood on the Marias
The Baker Massacre Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 An in-depth depiction of the 1870 Baker Massacre in a small Piegan town by the Euro-American Major Eugene Baker who attacked the wrong town killing 173 innocent citizens.
- A Blow for Peace and Democracy
Why the British Said No to Europe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.
- A Blueprint for a New Party
With the rise of Donald Trump, we need to think seriously about what it would take to form a democratic organization rooted in working class Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A proposal for a national political organization that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nominated at all levels throughout the country.
- The Body Cam Trade-Off
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ever since the Snowden revelations, both liberals and conservatives have become increasingly convinced that government surveillance and encroachment into Americans lives has spiraled out of control. That the government should play some role in providing safety and security for its citizens is accepted, but how the government achieves these goals is not as clear. We want security, but not at undue cost to our privacy.
- The Boy Who Could Change the World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Remembering the brief life of Aaron Swartz: programmer, activist, entrepreneur, community builder.
- The Boy Who Could Change the World
The Writings of Aaron Schwartz Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 In his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet, questioned our assumptions about intellectual property, and touched all of us in ways that we may not even realize. His tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of twenty-six after being aggressively prosecuted for copyright infringement shocked the nation and the world.
- Branding Tradition: a Bittersweet Tale of Capitalism at Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It's almost sugaring time here in Vermont. On our homestead we tap about 25 trees, boil down the sap on the kitchen cookstove, and - in a good year - end up with 4 or 5 gallons of maple syrup. That may sound like a lot, but since it represents our family's main source of sweetener it's rarely enough to get us through the year. By mid-winter we're usually buying syrup from a neighbor -- someone who makes his living from his sugar bush.
- Brazil, like Russia, Under Attack by Hybrid War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Colour revolutions would never be enough; Exceptionalistan is always on the lookout for major strategic upgrades capable of ensuring perpetual Empire of Chaos hegemony. The ideological matrix and the modus operandi of color revolutions by now are a matter of public domain. Not so much the concept of Unconventional War (UW).
- Brazil: Social movements reject coup, take to streets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In response to a recent vote in the lower house of Brazil's parliament in favour of impeaching Workers' Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's two main coalitions of social movements issued the statement below on April 17, 2016.
- Brazil's Crisis and the New Right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The impeachment process against President Dilma Rousseff resulted from the conjunction of three factors: the rupture of the alliance with business owners, the rise of a new militant right, and the PT's serious mistakes after abandoning the streets. What remains is a wounded society and an extractive model that went unquestioned by the left and undermined the hegemony of the Lula current.
- Breaking Yugoslavia: How the US Used NATO as Its Battering Ram
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The United States used NATO to break up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
- Breedlove Network Sought Weapons Deliveries for Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Working with dubious sourcing, a group close to NATO's chief military commander Philip Breedlove sought to secure weapons deliveries for Ukraine, a trove of newly released emails revealed. The efforts served to intensify the conflict between the West and Russia.
- Brexit and the Diseased Liberal Mind
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The enraged liberal reaction to the Brexit vote is in full flood. The anger is pathological -- and helps to shed light on why a majority of Britons voted for leaving the European Union, just as earlier a majority of Labour party members voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
- Brexit: the English and Welsh Enlightenment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 By voting for Brexit the English and Welsh have switched on the light. And, as usual, when the light suddenly conquers the dark the cracks become obvious and the cockroaches scatter. It’s a beautiful sight. The speculators and the hoarders are running for cover. And their liberal apologists are blinded.
- Brexit: Establishment Freak Out
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The "masters of the universe" are shocked and displeased. Increasing numbers of voters are registering their anger, most recently by voting for Brexit in Great Britain. But many who voted for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the recent US primary season were motivated by similar frustrations. And before that, there was Occupy Wall Street, los Indignados in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and other massive protests elsewhere in Europe as well. The reason is simple.
- Brexit and the EU implosion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The article looks into the construction of the European Union, Britaint's Brexit choice and Germany's hegemony, particularly in the euro zone.The author talks about a range of ways that financialised monopolies of the imperalist triad (Inited States, Europe, Japan) implement to dominate over the nations of the peripheries and force developing counties into the plunder of their national resources.
- Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The decision by U.K. voters to leave the EU is such a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions that -- for once- their failures have become a prominent part of the storyline.
- Brexit: It's Not About the EU, It's About the EZ
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "Politics is the concentrated essence of economic forces in motion."
Forget the politics of the June 23 Brexit referendum for a minute. Let's take a look at the money.
- Brexit and the new hostility to participatory democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The reaction to Brexit illustrates the desperate need for the Left to return to first principles. For, as the result broke on social media, a remarkable number of progressives directed their anger not at anti-immigrant demagogues and opportunist politicians but against the voters themselves and the very idea of a referendum in which they might express their will. It's merely the most recent illustration of a growing estrangement from democracy, not only on the mainstream Right but also on the Left.
- Brexit: the British Working Class has Just Yawned Awake
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The referendum has engaged all kinds of people who were politically indifferent 6 months ago.
- The brief summer of anarchy: the life and death of Durruti
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s non-fiction "adventure novel" about Buenaventura Durruti and the Spanish anarchist movement (ca. 1917-1937), first published in Germany in 1972, consisting of a more or less chronological “collage” of "translated, abridged and rearranged" excerpts from "reports and speeches, interviews and proclamations … letters, travel narratives, anecdotes, pamphlets, polemics, newspaper articles, autobiographical texts, flyers and propaganda leaflets" (including extensive selections from the eyewitness accounts of Simone Weil, Ilya Ehrenburg, H. E. Kaminski, Mikhail Koltsov, Ricardo Sanz and Jesús Arnal Pena), punctuated by the author's "Commentaries".
- Bring on the Crackup: Hoping for a Trump - Sanders Election
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There is every reason to think that electoral "politics" in the United States (and most places) is bullshit. For people who yearn for a very different world to get involved in this "process" -- which is almost entirely scripted by people who absolutely do not yearn for a very different world -- is a big waste of energy and commitment. The arguments here are addressed to the yearners, who I will call "radicals" -- people who recognize that the only real solution to the many problems facing humanity today is a qualitative, even epoch-making, change. When I say "we," I mean those of us who yearn for and work for such a change.
- Britain, Europe and the Real Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The decision by British voters last week to leave the European Union has brutally exposed two features of contemporary British politics. The first is the depth of popular disaffection with mainstream political institutions. The second is the paralysis of the political class in the face of this disaffection.
The Brexit victory was buttressed by a coalition of disparate social groups. Traditional Conservative supporters in the shires and the suburbs have long been suspicious of the European project. Few were surprised that they voted in large numbers against EU membership. What shocked many politicians and pundits about the referendum result was the extent of hostility in traditional Labour Party heartlands, in the North of England, in the Midlands and in the Welsh valleys.
- British Government-Funded Outlet Offered Journalist $17,000 a Month to Produce Propaganda for Syrian Rebels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Revolutionary Forces of Syria media office, a major Syrian opposition media outfit and frequent source of information for Western media, is funded by the British government as a propaganda outlet.
- Brutal, opaque, illegal: the dark side of the Tres Santos 'mindfulness' eco-tourism resort
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A small fishing community in Mexico's Baja California is playing involuntary host to a gigantic tourism and real estate development. And while the branding of the Tres Santos resort is all about mindfulness, ecology and sustainability, the reality is one of big money, high level politics, and the unaccountable deployment of state violence against those who dare oppose it.
- Bucharest's housing crisis: post-Communist restitution victimises Roma
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Twenty-five Roma families were evicted from an apartment block in Vulturilor Street, Bucharest, in 2014, turned out of homes they had rented from the state for nearly 20 years. The entrance to their alleyway was sealed off with a metal sheet.
- Building a progressive majority
Left strategy after the Brexit vote Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 After the EU referendum we are seeing both horror at anti-migrant sentiment and pandering to it -- but only a radical economic offer can carve a way through.
- Burying the White Working Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Liberal condescension towards white workers is code for a broader anti-working class agenda. The white working class is a zombie that doesn't know it's dead. Or if it's not fully zombified yet, its members are all too busy cleaning their AR-15s and posting racist comments on YouTube to vote for a progressive. That is, if they're not already on the Trump bandwagon, which they probably are. At least that's what the Democratic Party wants you to believe.
- C.L.R. James's "Critical Support" of Fidel Castro's Cuba
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 C.L.R. James's "critical support" of Fidel Castro’s Cuba is little understood among scholars of his life and work. This essay explores James’s 1967–1968 visit to Cuba and reconstructs private debates and discussion on Cuba within his revolutionary organizations, based in Detroit, in the 1950s and 1960s, and among anti-imperialist movements. Many of James's commentaries and disputes were consistent with his attempts to reconcile anti-colonialism with direct democracy and workers self-management.
- California Drought and Global Warming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Global warming is not only exacerbating the drought, it has likely transformed the ecology of the state well into the future.
- Can we combine intersectionality with Marxism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Neoliberal austerity is impacting particularly hard on women. Capitalism relies on women not just directly as workers who generate surplus value but also to provide the primary carers for the next generation of workers and increasingly for the sick and elderly as social service cuts bite. Reproductive rights face serial attacks and domestic violence and other forms of endemic sexism in capitalist society mean that the fight for women's liberation and, in the shorter term, the fight to defend those rights women have won so far from being rolled back remain key issues for socialists.
- Can we shop our way to a better world?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In this article Umair Mohammad summarizes arguments from the introduction and first chapter of his book Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism. Mohammad argues that lifestyle change and 'ethical consumerism' are not bridges to effective social change, but barriers to it. To build effective social movements, he says, we must begin by rejecting individualist approaches.
- Can You Figure Out What This Chart Means?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The U.S. economy is in the throes of the lousiest recovery since World War 2. The so called monetary stimulus has failed to lift the economy out of the doldrums or produce the robust recovery that they promised. Instead, US gross domestic product, (GDP) has been plodding-along at an abysmal 2.2% since 2009, which is far below the 3.6% average of the prior 60 years.
- Canada Since 1960: A People's History
A Left Perspective on 50 Years of Politics, Economics and Culture Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 An account of the most important developments in Canadian history from the 1960s to today, seen through the eyes of Canadian Dimension magazine.
- Canada's Liberal Government Joins NATO's War Escalation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Canadians who hoped the October 2015 federal election would usher in changes to the aggressive, foreign policy of the defeated Conservative government are wondering what happened to their wishes. The transition in imperialist foreign policy from the Harper Conservatives to the Justin Trudeau-led Liberals has been utterly seamless, if not predictable.
- Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold fired whistleblower. Then it spilled cyanide into five rivers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Toronto-based mining giant, Barrick Gold, spilled cyanide solution into five Argentina rivers shortly after firing an engineer who raised serious safety concerns about the mining operation responsible for the contamination.
- The Candidate
Jeremy Corbyn's Improbable Path to Power Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Chronicling Jeremy Corbyn's rise to the position of leader of Britian's Labour Party. An insider's look at the events that led to his appointment.
- Cap and Clear-Cut
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Jerry Brown basked in adulation during his whirlwind trip to Paris, and the evening of December 8 figured to offer more of the same. Standing alongside governors of states and provinces from Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, California's governor planned to tout his state's leadership role on global climate policy. The event was one of 21 presentations that Brown delivered during a five-day swing through France during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 21). His busy schedule included a stately private meeting with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and presentations at events organized by the French, German, Chinese, and US governments.
- Capital in context
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Deciphering Capital by Alex Callinicos is the impressive balance sheet of some 30 years of research. Its starting point is a thesis completed at Oxford in 1978 entitled "The Logic of Capital", which distanced him at one and the same time from both the surrounding Hegelian Marxism and the empiricism of Ernest Mandel.
- Capitalism and Freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the United States, many take for granted that freedom and democracy are inextricably connected with capitalism. Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, went so far as to argue that capitalism was a necessary condition for both.
- 'Captain Elder Brother' and the Whirlwind Army
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 At 94, a forgotten hero of India’s struggle for freedom returns to the scene of his most daring exploit in the anti-British Raj uprising that saw a parallel government established in Satara, Maharashtra, in 1943.
- The Case Against Bombing ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The military campaign against ISIS is just the latest phase of US imperialism in the Middle East.
- The Case Against Glyphosate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On 13 April, 2016, the EU Parliament called on the European Commission to restrict certain permitted uses of the toxic herbicide glyphosate, best known in Monsanto's Roundup formulation.
- The Case Against Ratifying the TPP
The Case Against Ratifying the Trans Pacific Partnership Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- The Cashless Economy of Chikalthana
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An article about the cash crisis in the Indian village Chikalthana.
- Cataclysm 1914
The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 This collection argues that the First World War -- and its consequences -- was perhaps the defining moment of 20th century world-politics.
- Celebrating Mother Jones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This week commemorates the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair, International Workers' Day, and the claimed birthday of Mother Mary Harris Jones. While the United States' official Labour Day falls in September, the international community celebrates workers and workers rights on May 1st, in recognition of actions taken by Americans in 1886, and the events that led up to the Haymarket Massacre.
- Celebration and Fresh Inquiry
Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Howard Brick's, Robbie Lieberman's, and Paula Rabinowitz's Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald.
- The Centrality of Seed: Building Agricultural Resilience Through Plant Breeding
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Five of the global issues most frequently debated today are the decline of biodiversity in general and of agrobiodiversity in particular, climate change, hunger and malnutrition, poverty and water. Seed is central to all five issues. The way in which seed is produced has been arguably their major cause. But it can also be the solution to all these issues.
- A Century of Theft From Indians by the National Park Service
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Mojave National Preserve is run by the National Park Service, which, in contrast to previous times, has been including more Indian history in its displays and programs.
- Chain of Title
How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 The account of how a car dealership worker, a nurse, and a forensic expert discovered the foreclosure fraud perpetrated by America's biggest banks.
- Charged with murder, but they didn’t kill anyone -- police did
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A Reader investigation found ten cases since 2011 where police killed a civilian in Chicago and charged an accomplice with the murder.
- Charter Schools Increase Fraud, Corruption, Chaos, and Anarchy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Charter schools, which barely make up seven percent of U.S. schools, are often accused of taking all the antisocial, antipublic, and antipeople practices of medieval autocrats and opportunuties to new extremes. Shawgi Tell looks into the issue of privatization of education that will intensify in the months ahead.
- Charting Environmental Conflict - The Atlas of Environmental Justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Another tool supporting the growing movement and better global awareness is the Atlas of Environmental Justice. The EJAtlas is packed with qualitative information about almost 1800 environmental conflicts.
- Chávismo and Its Discontents
International Left Intellectuals Respond to Venezuelan Government's Legislative Election Setback Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Five hours after the polls had closed, the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced a landslide victory for the opposition in Venezuela's the National Assembly elections. The response of international left intellectuals has ranged from critical support to outright rejection of the socialist project in Venezuela. We argue for the importance of recognizing the overarching influence of US imperialism and for the acceptance of using the state as an instrument of popular power by the international solidarity movement.
- Checking Out
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In mid-June of 2016, tension between workers and their boss in a small New York City retail shop reached the boiling point. The result was chaos for a hated overseer, and the sweet aftertaste of an assertion of people power all too rare in their line of work.
- Cheshire, Ohio
An American coal story in 3 acts Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 Published: 2017 Follows a community devastated by coal, starting with American Electric Power's buyout and bulldozing of this Ohio River town, after exposing them to years of harmful emissions.
- A Children's Book Introduces German Kids to the True Story of Syrian Refugees
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Germany has received more than 1 million refugees, mostly from Syria and Iraq. Despite supporters initially celebrating Chancellor Angela Merkel's actions, many Germans have begun voicing concerns about when this acceptance of migrants will come to an end. But while the adults in Germany have expressed mixed reactions to the refugees, German author Kirsten Boie wants children at least to realize that a refugee child is just like any other kid in the world.
- China on Strike
Narratives of Workers' Resistance Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Through first person accounts, the book details the growing unrest, destabilization and strikes in factories that are gripping China.
- China's Climate of Repression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With secret trials and lengthy prison sentences imposed on human rights lawyers after forced and humiliating "confessions," the abduction of Hong Kong booksellers under circumstances that remain obscure, and new legislation that sharply restricts the work of independent organizations, the climate of repression in China is clearly sharpening.
- Chomsky on Trump's Climate Denialism
He wants us to march toward the destruction of the species Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Transcript of an interview with Noam Chomsky discussing Donald Trump's denial of climate change and the dangers it poses.
- CIA photographed detainees naked before sending them to be tortured
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The CIA took naked photographs of people it sent to its foreign partners for torture, the Guardian can reveal. A former US official who had seen some of the photographs described them as “very gruesome”.
- CIA planned rendition operation to kidnap Edward Snowden
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prepared to kidnap Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal and unconstitutional mass spying by the National Security Agency (NSA), documents obtained by the Danish media outlet Denfri show.
- The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last week, the Washington Post published a scurrilous piece by a heretofore obscure technology reporter named Craig Timberg, alleging without the faintest evidence that Russian intelligence was using more than 200 independent news sites to pump out pro-Putin and anti-Clinton propaganda during the election campaign.
- Ciência e seus inimigos
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Cities Need More Public Transit, Not More Uber and Self-Driving Cars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the near future, it is likely that cities will come under intense pressure to sacrifice public transportation in favor of new, private, car-dependent alternatives, even at a time when city planners are suggesting reducing or even eliminating car use in cities.The article looks into the benefits of the new technologies, as well as benefits of public transit.
- A Citizen's Guide to Combating Election Propaganda: Debunking Anti-Welfare Myths
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The goal moving forward must be to create a critical citizen consciousness, so the masses don't simply "accept what they're told" once every four years by the pretty faces running for office. What follows is a primer for readers to help in their conversations with friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and family, to fight back against the racist, classist propaganda so often employed against disadvantaged groups in the U.S.
- The City That Bleeds
Freddie Gray and the makings of an American uprising Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The killing of black teenager Freddie Gray by six police officers resulted in a civic uprising, and spotlights a history of brutality and bloodshed by police in the city of Baltimore.
- Class Is in Session
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Millennials are better educated than ever. They also overwhelmingly identify as working class.
- Class is More Intersectional than Intersectionality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Left as it exists currently is often ashamed of and apologetic for its class struggle orientation, chasing after demographic-specific oppression issues. An approach that leans toward greater emphasis on a class struggle focus is actually more intersectional than a focus which gives more attention to demographic-specific issues than to class.
- Class War in the British Labour Party
Tories, Blairites Turn the Screws on Jeremy Corbyn Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party last September, the party has been in a state of internal class warfare. Corbyn is a decades-long member of old Labour’s left wing and is hugely popular among working people. Pitted against Corbyn and his followers are the vast majority of Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) who uphold the legacy of Tony Blair and are unashamedly committed to "free-market" capitalist exploitation and imperialist military slaughter in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
...
James Bronterre O’Brien, an Irish-born leader of the Chartists, gave voice to the need for the working class to fight in its own interests instead of begging its oppressors:
"My motto is... 'What you take you may have.' I will not attempt to deal with the abstract question of right, but will proceed to show that it is POWER, solid, substantial POWER, that the millions must obtain and retain, if they would enjoy the produce of their own labour and the privileges of freemen."
- Class War in the Confederacy
Why Free State of Jones Matters Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Free State of Jones may well be the most politically important film about the civil war and its aftermath to appear in a quarter century. Free State of Jones is a proper antidote to identitarian thinking, which has mystified popular understandings of the past, and how we approach political action in the present. In contrast to the prevailing view among so many nowadays that racism has always been and continues to be the main barrier to any progressive left politics, this film reminds us of a more complex history, where anti-slavery politics, Radical Republicanism and mass action created the short-lived progress of Reconstruction.
- Clickbait v Political Impact: Alternative Journalism as Social Media Becomes the New News Source
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In first world countries, Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming the main places where people come across their news -- ahead of television and news sites. "Success" is becoming about the number of reads, shares, likes, upvotes, and re-tweets -- making it easy to lose sight of what really defines the usefulness of an article: political impact.
- Climate Change: A Radical Primer
Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of David Klein's Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming.
- Climate Justice and Palestine: the New Intersectionality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The repeated failures of international and governmental agencies to effectively deal with the disastrous changes that threaten the entire planet have sparked local indigenous and small farmer activism from Bolivia to Palestine.
- Climate justice and the prospect of power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A balance sheet of the movement to block the cross-Toronto 'Line 9' pipeline project. With notes on the meaning of "climate justice" and the relationship of socialism to social movements.
- Climate justice movement shakes Canada's New Democratic Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The impact of the Leap Manifesto at the party convention, argues Richard Fidler, opens major opportunities to deepen the debate on climate justice and to build an ecosocialist left in and around the NDP.
- Climate Justice Transitions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The devastating fires in Fort McMurray show the urgent need to transition to an economy that supports people and the planet, and this is part of a transition in climate justice politics.
- Climate Migrants Lead Mass Migration to India's Cities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 South Asia will be severely impacted by climate change and cause challenges that the government must resolve.
- Clinton Manipulates Language of Intersectionality to Preserve Support from Minority Voters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton has been a master class in how to divorce economic issues from issues of race and gender by pushing the language of "intersectionality," which enables the political class to head off threats to their power and protect the status quo.
- Clinton's Defeat and the Fake News Conspiracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Debunking the scapegoating of 'fake news' by the corporate media following the 2016 US elections as a tactic by the media and Democratic party establishment to avoid blame for Hillary Clinton's election loss.
- Close Calls: We Were Much Closer to Nuclear Annihilation Than We Ever Knew
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used -- accidentally or by decision -- defies credibility. This unanimous statement was published by the Canberra Commission in 1996. Among the commission members were internationally known former ministers of defense and of foreign affairs and generals.
- Coal companies trying to revive 'zombie' open cast mines in Wales
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A tangle of undercapitalised companies are coming forward to cash in on old deep coal mines in Wales - by digging them all out from above from huge open cast pits. But local communities, alarmed at the noise, pollution and destruction of landscape, increasingly see coal as an industry that's best consigned to the scrapheap.
- The Coding Of 'White Trash' In Academia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As an academic from the U.S. Deep South, Holly Genovese has found herself between two worlds, not accepted in academia because of her background, and yet unable to 'go home again.'
- Colonialism and Nationalism in the Building of Liberation Movements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This is an excerpt from It's Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment.
- Coming Cutthroats and Parting Pirates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "Shoot them down!" That’s one answer to the problem of refugees and immigrants flooding into Germany, clearer even than any Trump-wall. It was offered by Frauke Petry, head of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the fast-growing party which, now at 12 percent nationally, has moved up into third place, outstripping the Greens and the Left party (LINKE).
- The Coming War On China
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 The Coming War on China, is a warning that nuclear war is not only imaginable, but a ‘contingency’, says the Pentagon. The greatest build-up of Nato military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia. On the other side of the world, the rise of China as the world’s second economic power is viewed in Washington as another ‘threat’ to American dominance.
- Comintern Congress Revisited
To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Review of John Riddell's To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921.
- Commercial Ships Could Be Quieter, but They Aren't
Shipbuilding economics and lack of regulations are getting in the way of a quieter ocean Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As the ocean drowns in sound, the number of studies showing the harmful effects of noise on marine life has surged. And so, too, have the projections for how loud things might soon become.
- The Commons and the Centennial of the Easter Rising
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A hundred years ago today in Dublin the Easter Rebellion commenced. This was an urban insurrection, in the revolutionary tradition. Not more than a thousand participated. It lasted five days, before the British military killed hundreds, and executed sixteen including those who had signed the Proclamation of the Republic.
- The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet that refuses to die. As incendiary as the day it was published, Paul Vernell unpacks this founding document
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The striking thing about re-reading Marx's Communist Manifesto is how each time you return to it, it seems more not less relevant than the last time. Chillingly, it seems to be describing the globalised, war-torn, crisis-ridden world of the 21st century. In many ways this is because it is a document ahead of its time, whist being firmly rooted in it. Its predictive power and vision are central to its resonance.
- Communities at Risk
Hazards of LNG Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 The proposed LNG Terminals and Tanker Routes for BC put coastal communities at risk. Know the Hazards of LNG Transportation and advocate for the adoption of the SIGTTO safety standards.
- The Compelling Memoirs of Ali Abumghasib
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ali Abumghasib knows little about the current intrigues of the Fatah Movement, or, perhaps, he is just not interested. Now living in an old, rusty and tiny caravan somewhere in Gaza, Ali has no money, no family, but also no regrets. We spoke at length about his life. He wanted to share his story, and I wanted to understand what went wrong in what was once Palestine's leading movement.
- Confessions of an Alleged Russian Propagandist: A Pentagon Hit?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While our corporate media don't talk about it, the US does run a vast propaganda operation, which includes the spawning and spreading of, guess what?, fake news stories! This kind of thing has gone on for years abroad, but since 2001, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, both the Pentagon and the US Information Agency have done away with an earlier ban on spreading such lies posing as news inside the US. Now we’re all fair game for US propaganda, which by the way the mainstream media routinely parrot.
- Congo's Environmental Paradox
Potential and Predation in a Land of Plenty Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Congo has natural resources the world needs. Its forests count in the fight against global climate change and Congo's farmers could feed all of Africa's population. The Inga hydroelectric site has the potential to light up the entire continent. Congo's incredible natural wealth has the potential to contribute to development in this troubled central African country -- but structural problems, cultural factors, poor governance and predation remain serious challenges.
- Connecting with nature through wildlife, place and memory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Some of us are fortunate enough to have close relationships with the nature around us. But what about everyone else? We must find ways to make people feel like old friends with wildife near and far, and feel that their wild homes and habitats are extensions of our own. And hence, that they are as deserving of our care as human neighbours - if not more so.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2016
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Connexions Calendar RSS Feed
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 RSS feed for the Connexions Calendar, listing events about social justice.
- Connexions RSS Feed
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 RSS feed listing some recent new, updated, and interesting items on the Connexions website.
- The Conquest of Bread
Review article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Kropotkin’s classic, The Conquest of Bread, reveals problems of radical politics and organisation that remain vital today, argues Dominic Alexander.
- Containing the United States
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With Hillary Clinton about to be elected and some advanced cadres of the war party preparing to take charge, who is going to contain the United States? The U.S. political system has failed its populace and the world and has imposed no brakes on the war machine. The UN and EU are still too much under the U.S. thumb. Russia and China are too weak and with too flimsy an alliance system to threaten U.S. hegemony and do more than make direct U.S. aggression against themselves very costly.
- The Contested Haymarket Affair: 130 Years Later
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On May 4th, 1886 someone threw a bomb into a file of Chicago police dispatched to break up a workers' protest rally at the city's Haymarket Square. The blast and ensuing gunfire killed seven cops and at least four civilians, and wounded many more.
- Converging on Philadelphia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 At the "Socialist Convergence" and other spaces in Philly the weekend before and week of the DNC, socialists should argue for an orientation toward movements rather than narrow electoralism.
- Conversations about Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 At first, the scene appears tense. Twenty-one Israeli soldiers in full combat gear are arrayed in a neat line across the main road of the small village of Al Ma’sara, just south of Bethlehem in the West Bank. Several of the soldiers wear partial balaclavas which obscure their features, leaving their faces visible only from the eyes up. They stand expectantly, some with their hands resting casually on the butts of their rifles.
- Convict and Immigrant Detainee Struggles Converge in Strike Wave
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There was a time in the United States when it was not only common knowledge, but commonly reported, legislated, and adjudicated that crime is a function of poverty. This went out sometime during the Carter Administration, its demise heralded by the appearance in 1975 of James Q. Wilson's Thinking About Crime, where he first aired the broken-windows theory,which holds that punishment has to be harsh for minor violations of public order to incentivize criminals against larger violations.
- Convict and Immigrant Detainee Struggles Converge in Strike Wave
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The ongoing struggle of us convicts to preserve and enhance their humanity has been taking on an explicit labor aspect, connected to and conscious of such struggles outside the prison walls, and it appears to be intensifying hand in hand with the convicts' traditional struggles for human dignity.
- Corbyn's Millions - Blair's Millions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While 'social media' like Facebook and Twitter are forms of corporate media, it is unarguable that they and other web-based outlets have helped empower a serious challenge to traditional print and broadcast journalism. For the first time in history, uncompromised non-corporate voices are able to instantly challenge the filtered 'mainstream' version of events. This certainly helps explain the rise of Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos in Spain, and now Bernie Sanders in the US.
- Corporate climate risk is about profit, not fixing the problem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Corporate 'risk management' is concerned with protecting profits, not with protecting the planet or human beings.
- Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive leak of their documents ought to be a wonderful thing.
Unfortunately the leaker has made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results. In consequence the first major story, published today by the Guardian, is all about Vladimir Putin and a cellist on the fiddle. As it happens I believe the story and have no doubt Putin is bent.
But why focus on Russia? Russian wealth is only a tiny minority of the money hidden away with the aid of Mossack Fonseca. In fact, it soon becomes obvious that the selective reporting is going to stink.
- Corporate power and the moulding of truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The corporate dominance of 'free' media in western democracies imposes deep structural constraints on what may be reported, and how. Syria is now the latest example of skewed reportage - and even journalists seeking to analyse the problem must carefully avoid the real reasons for it.
- Corrupted Science: the DEA and Marijuana
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While I was on my book tour for Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto, I was shocked to discover how many Americans didn’t know our Founding Fathers grew cannabis.
- Countering Pro-GMO Deceptions in the British Press
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In his recent piece for The Times newspaper in the UK, Viscount Matt Ridley argues that a new report from the American National Academies of Sciences (NAS) leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.
- The Cowards' Wars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The condemnation of Radovan Karadzic to forty years of imprisonment by the International Crime Tribunal-Yugoslavia occasions these reflections.
- The Cowliphate and Poisoned Kids: Twin Assaults on The Commons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 When I opened up my Facebook feed today, 90 percent on the items on my feed were equally divided between the Bundy Cowliphate here in Oregon and the poisoning of the water supply in Flint, my hometown. Given my decades of Public Lands’ Conservation activism, both topics are dear to me.
- Crime or Punishment Why Wall Street Elites Don't Do Time
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Illicit financial behavior has been decriminalized in the United States -- for all practical purposes. Despite the revelations of massive misconduct by banks and other financial services businesses, criminal investigations are rare, indictments exceptional and guilty judgments extraordinary. Most potentially culpable actions are overlooked by authorities, slighted, reduced from criminal to civil status when pursued, individuals evade penalties much less punishment, and the appeals courts take extreme liberties in exonerating culprits when and if the odd conviction reaches them. The last mentioned are establishing new frontiers in the formulation of ingeniously sophistic arguments to justify letting financial malefactors off the hook.
- Crime & Public Shaming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Shaming is one of the oldest forms of social regulation and, in the U.S., has long been employed to enforce social order -- specifically to fight crime and suppress unacceptable beliefs and practices. Today, there is an apparent rise of public shaming either as an alternative or supplement to incarceration. On February 8th, 2016, Pres. Obama signed the “International Megan’s Law to Prevent Demand for Child Sex Trafficking” (H.R. 515), the first law in U.S. history in which a special symbol will be placed on a citizen's U.S. passport to identify that the individual was convicted of a sex crime.
- Crimea, Georgia and the New Olympic Sport: Russia Bashing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Crises, Craziness, and "Security"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Trump himself is not so important - a vicious demagogue, but not a mass organizer or leader. What matters, following the carnage of the "Islamic State" attack in Paris and the San Bernardino mass shooting, is the climate in which the priority target of opportunity for racist reactionaries has become Muslim refugees, immigrants, communities and mosques.
- Crowds and Party
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Dean argues that class struggle and the party form are not obsolete, and this renewal has caused great enthusiasm in left politics.
- The Crusade in Favor of GMO: Falsehoods and Vilification Will Not Fool the Public
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Pro-GMO campaigners often attack critics of the technology by claiming their negative views of it emanate from well-funded environmentalist groups or commercial interests in the organic food sector. The assertion is that such bodies promote falsehoods and scaremongering about GM to protect their own interests and that the GMO agritech sector has fallen victim to this.
- Cuadrilla versus The Nanas - #IamTinaRothery
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Thanks to fracking company Cuadrilla, grandmother Tina Rothery will be in court tomorrow over a £55,000 'debt' imposed on her for joining a peaceful occupation of a fracking site in Lancashire. But as she explains, she can't pay, she won't pay, and even if she could pay, she wouldn't. Someone has to stand up to corporate vandalism and abuse of justice - and in this case, it's her, no matter what the consequences.
- The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Now that Donald Trump, the candidate, has become both widely popular and deeply loathsome, we're seeing a cataract of editorials and commentary aimed at explaining how it happened and who's to blame. The predictable suspects are trotted out: the Republican Party, which had been too opportunistic and fearful to stand up to its own candidate, Fox News, which inflamed the jingoes, and white working-class voters, unhinged by class envy and racial resentment.
- The cyber arms race
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A look at cyber warfare between nations, a militarisation of cyberspace that is advancing far faster than the creation of positive peace keeping mechanisms.
- Dakota Access Pipeline and the Future of American Labor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As United States Energy Transfers Partners began building the Dakota Access Pipeline through territory sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, the tribe began an escalating campaign against the pipeline.
- The Dangers of Anti-Trumpism
Silvio Berlusconi's tenure as Italian prime minister shows how not to resist an authoritarian demagogue. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Comparisons between Donald Trump and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi abounded throughout the presidential election campaign. We can draw some important lessons if we move our attention away from the apparent similarities between Berlusconi and Trump, and focus instead on the analogies between anti-Berlusconism and the shape anti-Trumpism threatens to take.
- The Dark Side of Clean Energy: Industrial Wind Plantations in Mexico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Days of Rage
America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 An account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary movements in the United States in the 1970s.
- The deadly racism of the 'anti-racist' liberal imperialist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 When it comes to hypocrisy, the pro-war Western ‘liberal’ is in a class of his own. While professing opposition to racism, the pro-war liberal is cheerleader for the most dangerous and deadly form of racism in the world today - contemporary US/Western imperialism.
- Dear Sisters, They Are Killing Our Trees
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 People in the Thrissur district of Kerala, India, are fighting to keep their forests in the face of a threatened dam project which would submerge their ancestral lands.
- Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More
A science journalist takes a skeptical look at capital-S Skepticism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 So I'm a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists. When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.
- Death In Honduras - The Coup, Hillary Clinton And The Killing Of Berta Cáceres
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Debating Syria Productively
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A collection of remarks on how the debate, within the left, over the Syrian conflict has been lacking and could be made more productive.
- Debs for His Time and Ours
Eugene V. Debs Reader: Socialism and the CLass Struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of William A. Pelz's Eugene V. Debs Reader: Socialism and the CLass Struggle.
- Defend Brazil!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Enough weeping! Latin America has wept incessantly, continuously, for years, decades and centuries. Its people robbed of everything since the days of Columbus, since Potosi. Tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions have been slaughtered here, in the last five centuries; first by the conquerors, then by their descendants and serfs, and finally by the Empire of Lies as well as the treasonous local 'elites'.
- Defending Exxon's Denial: It's Their Right to Free Speech!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the world of science denial, Money is Speech, corporations are people, Donald Trump is Galileo, and apparently, lying to your customers and shareholders is exercising your constitutional rights.
- Defending the Faith
The Catholic Church waged a century-long war against the Irish left. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ireland's foremost socialist knew that the British Empire and Irish capitalists weren't the only challenge he and his comrades faced. "In dealing with Ireland," James Connolly wrote in 1910, "no one can afford to ignore the question of the attitude to the clergy." Connolly's subject of discussion was a 1830s Owenite cooperative that enjoyed brief success, in large part because nearby clergymen didn't oppose it.
- Democracy and Popular Sovereignty instead of Neoliberal Integration and a failed Euro-System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This document was commonly developed by people from the Lexit Network. It was written and agreed before the Brexit referendum and was not intended to influence the popular vote one way or another. With the implementation of the European single market and the Maastricht Treaty, European integration was established as a neoliberal project for the long run. The Stability- and Growth Pact, the fundamental freedoms of the single market and the European monetary union, among other elements, constituted a framework that has fueled austerity policies, the dismantling of workers’ rights and the welfare state and imposed privatization throughout the EU member states.
- Democracy was never intended for degenerates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This is not a left vs right debate -- today, as a century ago, the anti-democratic impulse comes from both left and right, from both reactionaries and self-defined progressives.
- Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Detailing how the Democratic party's response to their defeat in the 2016 election reflects a failure to recognize factors leading to the UK Brexit referendum result.
- Demonetisation: Stories Of Flesh And Blood
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An article about the demonetization announced by the Indian government on November 8th, 2016.
- The Department of Defense Is the Third Largest Polluter of US Waterways
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Advocacy group Environment America has "crunched the numbers" in an effort to reveal who the largest polluters of American waterways are. The culprits that crack the top-15 list may very well surprise you.
- Derailing Neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Haines-Doran examines the British transit workers' stike against rail privitization with its lack of concern for safety, unions, and workers' rights.
- The Descent of the Left Press: From IF Stone to The Nation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Just about fifty years ago when I was becoming politicized around the war in Vietnam, I began searching desperately for information and analysis that could explain why this senseless war was taking place. After taking out a subscription to I.F. Stone’s Weekly that an old friend had recommended, the scales began to fall from my eyes.
- Desire to Kill the Streetcar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The author analyzes the conspiracy by large corporations to monopolize the American transit system and its fuel system.
- Destroying Detroit Schools
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Detroit Public School system has been under state control for 15 years, the last decade under the direction of a series of Emergency Managers. The result has been a staggering debt, now more than half a billion dollars, with a 50% decline in the number of students served. More students attend charter schools than the public system, but as there is no oversight over charters, poorly run schools continue year after year.
- Destroying Detroit Schools
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Detroit Public School system (DPS) has been under state control for 15 years, the last decade under the direction of a series of Emergency Managers.
- Destroying Syria: a Joint Criminal Enterprise
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Everyone claims to want to end the war in Syria and restore peace to the Middle East. Well, almost everyone.
- Detroit's Tax Foreclosure Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Given the history of housing discrimination in Metro Detroit over the last 100 years, it is hardly surprising that the illegal over-assessments of property values has a greater impact on African-American homeowners.
- The Devil Capitalism Makes Us Destroy Our Planet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Capitalism is asking us to choose between jobs and the future livability of our planet. Capitalism tells us it makes sense to flood some of the best food growing land in B.C. and build a dam to provide electricity for Alberta's tar sands; capitalism says build more pipelines across B.C. and allow hundreds more oil tankers every year to sail through pristine waters; capitalism doesn’t care that more carbon extraction will guarantee our planet is cooked.
- A Different Kind of Safe Space
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Words are dangerous, but not as dangerous as efforts to suppress them, be it by government or dean -- and certainly not as insidious as self-censorship.
- Digital Disconnect and its adverse impact on how (or whether) we engage with nature
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As the Digital Schoolhouse programme starts a national roll out to schools across the UK, scientists warn that digital disconnect can mean caring less - for each other and the environment.
- Digital Labor and Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This article reviews the role of the international division of labour in classical Marxist concepts of imperialism, and extends these ideas to the international division of labour in the production of information and information technology today. Sigital labour, as the newest frontier of capitalist innovation and exploitation, is central to the structures of contemporary imperialism.
- Digital Labour and Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A century has now passed since Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) and Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy (1915), as well as Rosa Luxemburg's 1913 Accumulation of Capital. All spoke of imperialism as a force and tool of capitalism. It was a time of world war, monopolies, antitrust laws, strikes for pay raises, Ford's development of the assembly line, the October Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the failed German revolution, and much more. It was a time that saw the spread and deepening of global challenges to capitalism.
- Dirty Fossil Fuel 'Business-As-Usual' Tactics Spew Out Of The International Maritime Organization At COP22
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The shipping industry needs to clean up its CO2 emissions now. The IMO's own Third IMO Greenhouse Gas Study 2014 report stated that by 2050, CO2 emissions from international shipping could grow by between 50 percent and 250 percent, depending on future economic growth and energy developments.
- Disability, resistance and revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The number of disabled people has grown from around 10 percent of the world population in the 1970s to 15 percent, 1 billion people, today. The World Health Organisation predicts that this figure will continue to grow as the world's population ages and chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease and stress related illness increase. Severe physical injury in warfare and road traffic accidents as well as industrial injury, malnutrition and insanitary living conditions also remain major causes of serious impairment. Around the world disabled people are among the most marginalised -- suffering poorer health outcomes, lower levels of educational achievement and higher levels of unemployment and poverty than non-disabled people.
- Disasters in Seria and Yemen
An Interview with Gilbert Achcar Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Interview with author Gilbert Achcar.
- The Disneyfied Narrative of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Pinocchio and Little Red Riding Hood still believe in the impartiality of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). I have yet to meet either a partial or an impartial Serb that shares their sentiments. Toward the political bazaar in Hague the Serbs feel what has been hurled at them by the institution’s creators since the early 1990s -- disdain, occasional profanity, and boiling resentment. Those are the only self-defense tools available to the tired citizens of a small, impoverished country.
- Disobedience
The rise of the global fossil fuel resistance Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 Disobedience is a film about a new phase of the climate movement: courageous action that is being taken on the front lines of the climate crisis on every continent, led by regular people fed up with the power and pollution of the fossil fuel industry.
- Divine wilderness: John Muir's spiritual and political journey
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For John Muir, founder of America's national parks, immersion in nature was a blessing providing direct communion with divinity,and the cause of a spiritual awakening that inspired his life's work: to preserve wilderness and communicate the beauty, wonder and fragility of nature, sharing widely the source of his own enlightenment.
- "Do Not Resist": The Police Militarization Documentary Everyone Should See
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On a sunny afternoon last summer, Craig Atkinson, a New York City-based filmmaker, stood in a front yard in South Carolina surrounded by several heavily armed police officers. Inside, they found a terrified family of four, including an infant. As the family members were pulled outside, Atkinson's camera captured a scene that plays out with startling regularity in cities and towns across the country, one of many included in his new documentary, "Do Not Resist," an examination of police militarization in the United States.
- Does the United States Still Exist?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 To answer the question that is the title, we have to know of what the US consists. Is it an ethnic group, a collection of buildings and resources, a land mass with boundaries, or is it the Constitution? Clearly what differentiates the US from other countries is the US Constitution. The Constitution defines us as a people. Without the Constitution we would be a different country. Therefore, to lose the Constitution is to lose the country.
- The Domestic Workers' Movement
Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built A Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Premilla Nadasen's Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built A Movement.
- Don Weitz in conversation with Ulli Diemer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Activist Don Weitz interviewed by Ulli Diemer, December 8, 2016.
- Don't weep for censoring, right-wing Postmedia newspapers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Another 90 dedicated journalists in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa lost their jobs Tuesday as cutthroat Publisher Paul Godfrey slashed away again in an effort to turn Postmedia into a profit-making business. In a bizarre move, two competing papers will continue to be separate entities, but there will be one set of editors and most journalists will be shared.
- Donald Trump and the Vicious Culture of Neoliberal Mass Idiocy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The U.S. media and educational elites share responsibility for creating a world where a despicable idiot like Trump coud be president.
- Don't build Jew-only towns on the rubble of Bedouin villages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Israel's government is now free to expel 1,200 of its Bedouin citizens from their 'unrecognised' villages in the Negev desert, following a Supreme Court decision not to hear their appeal. Now only one thing can save the Bedouin, their communities and their way of life: an international outcry.
- Dorothy Day Refuses To Duck-And-Cover
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On June 15th, 1955, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in the civilian defense drills scheduled on that day. These drills were to prepare the citizenry in the event of a nuclear attack, and involved evacuations of city centers, taking shelter in subway tunnels, and, for schoolchildren, "duck-and-cover" to hide under their school desks. Such actions would be futile if a nuclear attack were underway, but the drills were part of a government propaganda program to convince Americans that nuclear weapons were a necessary part of the US arsenal, and that it would be possible to survive a nuclear war.
- Doubling Down in Atlantic City
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The casino workers' strike at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino is a defining battle for American labor.
- Draw and you'll go to jail': the fight to save comics from the censor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 From worried parents to policemen with built-in 'Satan detectors', underground comics have never lacked enemies. And for 30 years Neil Gaiman and his friends have fought back in the name of free speech.
- The Dreadful Chronology of Gaddafi's Murder
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Since 2003, Gaddafi had worked hard to repair his reputation for financing terrorism; his proposal for a trans-African banking system never reached fruition. Freedom and justice were never part of the West's agenda.
- A Drone Protestor Heads to Jail
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Fifty-nine-year-old Mary Anne Grady Flores will serve six months for photographing a protest of an airfield in upstate New York where drone pilots are trained and from where missions are carried out.
- Dumbass Democrats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Democrats were oblivious to the deep discontent among the American people because that simply does not figure into their clever and cunning calculations. Why should it? Fear, lesser of two evils, scapegoating, palace politics -- all these things worked in the past, didn't they?
- DuPont May Dodge Toxic Lawsuits By Pulling a Disappearing Act
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 First DuPont spun off much of its environmental liability into a new company known as Chemours. Now the company plans to merge with Dow.
- A Dweller in Peace
The Life and Times of Daniel Berrigan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the renowned anti-war activist, award-winning poet, author and Jesuit priest, who inspired religious opposition to the Vietnam war and later the U.S. nuclear weapons industry, died at age 94.
- Early U.S. Communism Revisited
The Communist International and US Communism 1919-1929 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Jacob A. Zumoff's The Communist International and US Communism 1919-1929.
- The Easter Rising, My Grandfather and the Untold Story of Sir Roger Casement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 100th anniversary of the Easter uprising of 1916 saw the beginnings of a deeper appreciation of the achievements of Sir Roger Casement who was hanged as a traitor in Pentonville prison on 3 August 1916. Over the following century he has never lacked for notoriety, famous as an Irish patriotic martyr, but discussion of his life has frequently focused on his sexuality and revolved around the "Black Diaries" that were covertly used by the British government to blacken Casement's name and sabotage the campaign against his execution.
- Echoes From the Past: Creating the Underclass
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Kenan Malik explores the late twentieth century 'underclass' debate, and what it tells us about the changing character of the perceptions of race and class.
- Echoes From the Past: the Racial View of Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 How the Victorian elite saw class in racial terms. Malik challenges conventional ways of thinking about the historical roots of racial ideas, and demonstrates how much of racial thinking originated not in the context of perceptions of non-Europeans but to a large extent at home out of the relationship between the elite and the masses. And that is what makes this material important in thinking about contemporary discussions of the working class. Today, elite views of the working class are rarely racialized, at least in an overt fashion. Yet, many of the themes, especially about the character of the 'unrespectable' working class, remain, though they necessarily have to be expressed in a different language. What is of interest here is to understand what has changed as well as what remains the same in thinking about democracy and the working class.
- Election Meddling
Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About if Done by USA Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Describing the contradictions in media coverage of, and attitudes toward, outside meddling in US elections versus US interference in foreign elections.
- Electoral Politics and the Illusion of Control
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We have all been told a lie. The lie that says democracy can be maintained only through voting, through purely representative, parliamentarian means. When the founding fathers set up the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were wary of any truly popular, working and middle class control of the United States. Our government was to be run as a republic, designed by elites, for the elites. Our three branches of government were not simply invented for checks and balances: another reason was to stymie any massively popular mandates that would go against the interests of the oligarchy.
- Electoral Strategy After Bernie's Campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Supporters of Bernie Sanders wagered that his campaign would be the most important event in the development of socialist politics in decades. There is at least some evidence to suggest that this prediction was correct.
- Eleven years of protesting Israel's occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Al Jazeera spoke with 11 villagers on the anniversary of Bilin's weekly protests against Israel's separation wall.
- Elie Wiesel: Poseur for Peace
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the midst of another Israeli operation in Lebanon, this one in 2006, Wiesel stood in front of a crowd in Manhattan (along with then Senator Hillary Clinton) and declared "Israel defends herself, and we must say to Israel 'Go on defending yourself.'" His final years didn't slow him down. Wiesel took out a full page ad in newspapers across the country during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict fully supporting Israel's effort (Human Rights Watch went on to document several instances of war crimes by the Israeli military) without a syllable about diplomacy except that 'before diplomats can begin in earnest the crucial business of rebuilding dialogue…the Hamas death cult must be confronted for what it is'.
- The elites hate Momentum and the Corbynites - and I'll tell you why
The movement that backed the Labour leader challenges MPs and journalists alike - because it's about grassroots democracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As the rolling catastrophe of what's already being called the "chicken coup" against the Labour leadership winds down, pretty much all the commentary has focused on the personal qualities, real or imagined, of the principal players. Yet such an approach misses out on almost everything that's really at stake here. The real battle is not over the personality of one man, or even a couple of hundred politicians. If the opposition to Jeremy Corbyn for the past nine months has been so fierce, and so bitter, it is because his existence as head of a major political party is an assault on the very notion that politics should be primarily about the personal qualities of politicians.
- Emerging workers' movements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Since the 1980s the institutionalisation of global neoliberalism has been pursued based on a range of ideological claims which have been advanced (or at least accepted) across the political spectrum. These claims include the arguments that the working class is increasingly a thing of the past, both structurally (as industry gives way to services and information) and politically (as traditional left parties embrace varieties of neoliberalism); that globalisation is reducing world poverty and that as a result the global middle class is expanding rapidly; and, seemingly logically, that radical politics are a thing of the past.
- The Empire Strikes Back
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If you argue a case strongly on the internet you must expect to receive robust argument back. Plus the odd insult. There has been plenty of both in reaction to my posts about corporate media control of access to the data in the Panama Papers. But I believe it is fair to say that the overwhelming public feeling I have picked up through monitoring online discussion worldwide, is that the full data should be made available online in searchable form so that the public can look through it and form their own conclusions.
- An enemy within
There are terrible precedents for attacking immigrant culture - like the well organised and sponsored US campaign during the first world war Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A look at the persecution and campaign against Americans of German origin within the United States during WWI.
- Entrenching Capitalist Agriculture in India Under the Guise of Development
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A criticism of the efforts by the IMF and World Bank to change India's agricultural system and its impact on the Indian economy and populace.
- Erdogan is Strengthened by the Failed Coup, But Turkey is the Loser
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Looks into the impact of the recent (2016) coup attempt in Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's counter-coup.
- Eritrea commits crimes against humanity, UN says
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Eritrea's government is guilty of committing crimes against humanity since independence a quarter-century ago with up to 400,000 people "enslaved", the UN has said. The crimes committed since 1991 include imprisonment, enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killings, and rape and murder, said the United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) on human rights.
- Essential reading on the Paris climate agreement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An annotated guide to thirty-four of the best articles on the COP21 Paris Agreement on climate change published in the immediate aftermath of the agreement.
- Ethiopian Protesters Endure Brutality and Censorship Amid Land Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Students in Ethiopia's largest administrative region, Oromia, have been braving state-sponsored violence and censorship since November 2015 to protest a government development plan.
- Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine: Home Demolitions on the Rise
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 According to the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, an Israeli NGO, the Israeli government has demolished 28,000 Palestinian structures since the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967, resulting in the homelessness and suffering of untold numbers of people. There is little ambiguity about the morality of this form of ethnic cleansing, and even most Israeli legal scholars agree that it is in contravention of international law.
- European Unification Divides Europeans: How Forcing People Together Tears Them Apart
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Unification of Europe has brought about radical new divisions within Europe. The most significant split is between the people and their political leaders.
- Every 25 Seconds, Cops Arrest Someone for Drug Possession
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The war on drugs may have failed, but it certainly hasn't ended: Every 25 seconds in the U.S., someone is arrested for drug possession. Arrests for the possession and personal use of drugs are boosting the ranks of the incarcerated at astonishing rates - with 137,000 people behind bars for drugs on any given day, and 1.25 million every year.
- Everyday Exposure
Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada's Chemical Valley Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Surrounded by Canada's densest concentration of chemical manufacturing plants, members of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation have expressed concern about a declining male birth rate and high incidences of miscarriage, asthma, cancer, and cardiovascular illness. Everyday Exposure uncovers the systemic injustices they face as they fight for environmental justice.
- Evicted
Poverty and Profit in the American City Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Matthew Desmond examines the impact on the poor in the United States of rising housing costs and declining/stagnating incomes in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash. Many tenants in the U.S. now pay more than 50 per cent of their incomes in rent -- over 70 per cent with the soaring costs of utilities included -- challenging their ability to survive on a daily basis.
- The Evolution of Union Co-ops and the Historical Development of Workplace Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Excerpts from Endgame: Pacifism
Part 1 of 3 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Derrick Jensen looks at the main arguments normally presented by pacifists and examines them to see if they make any sense.
- Extinction
A Radical History Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Some thousands of years ago, the world was home to an immense variety of large mammals. From wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to giant ground sloths and armadillos the size of automobiles, these spectacular creatures roamed freely. Then human beings arrived. Devouring their way down the food chain as they spread across the planet, they began a process of voracious extinction that has continued to the present. This relentless extinction, Ashley Dawson contends in a primer that combines vast scope with elegant precision, is the product of a global attack on the commons, the great trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as well as collectively created cultural forms such as language, that have been regarded traditionally as the inheritance of humanity as a whole.
- An Extraordinary Moment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the end, the one sure prediction about the 2016 election is that the power of corporate capital will not be touched. That's the nature of what's called "bourgeois democracy." But almost everything else is up for grabs.
- Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution Was A Global Threat By Late 1970s
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Throughout Exxon’s global operations, the company knew that CO2 was a harmful pollutant in the atmosphere years earlier than previously reported. Exxon corporate documents from the late 1970s state unequivocally "there is no doubt" that CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels was a growing "problem" well understood within the company.
- Fake News About 'Fake News' - The Media Performance Pyramid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Following Brexit and Trump, mainstream media have focused on media bias and the implications of so-called fake news. The definition of fake news can be easily generalized to all corporate media, and applied to the recent focus on fake news itself.
- 'Fake News' in America
Homegrown, and Far From New Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Details the hypocrisy of the media and Democratic party's recent outcry over 'fake news', as the loose definition encompasses well-established media practices, and may be used to attack any alternative media source.
- Fascinating Antifascism
Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Enzo Traverso's Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945.
- Fatema Mernissi: A Pioneering Arab Muslim Feminist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Remembering sociologist Fatema Mernissi.
- The FBI Wants Teachers To Go Stasi On American Kids
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While Apple and the federal government duke it out over the encrypted phone of a dead terrorist, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is keeping things old school by advocating that educators start paying close attention to any radical leanings among their students.
- The FBI's secret biometrics database they don't want you to see
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wants to prevent information about its creepy biometric database, which contains fingerprint, face, iris, and voice scans of millions of Americans, from getting out to the public. The Department of Justice has come up with a proposal to exempt the biometric database from public disclosure. It states that the Next Generation Identification System (NGI) should not be subject to the Privacy Act, which requires federal agencies to give people access to records that have been collected concerning them, "allowing them to verify and correct them if needed."
- Fear of the light: why we need darkness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Light pollution conceals true darkness from 80% of Europe and North America. What do we lose when we can no longer see the stars?
- Feeding body and soul - an exploration of Britain's new age landworkers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There is a change being made in food production that have individual reaping healthier and energy preserving benefits.
- Feral 'Roundup Ready' GM alfalfa goes wild in US West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A USDA study shows that a GM alfalfa has gone wild in alfalfa-growing parts of the West. This may explain GMO contamination incidents that have cost US growers and exporters millions of dollars - and it exposes the failure of USDA's 'coexistence' policy for GMOs and traditional crops.
- 50 Years Later, Protesters in Texas Reenact a Farmworker Strike That Is Scarcely Mentioned in History Books
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the summer of 1966, hundreds of farm workers in Texas marched from Rio Grande City to Austin -- almost 500 miles over 90 days -- to demand change. They weren’t asking for anything fancy. They wanted better wages, restrooms and uncontaminated water for the people cultivating and picking melons and other crops. Now 50 years later, more than 100 people -- some who were at the original strike in Starr County -- are are marching again.
- Files linking Britain to Israel's nuclear weapons go missing from National Archives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Official documents on Britain's relationship with Israel, including papers on "military and nuclear collaboration" in the 1970s, have disappeared from the National Archives in the last four years.
- Filtering The Election
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Examining the mainstream media's role in the 2016 US election of suppressing criticisms of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party establishment.
- Finally, a Wall to Unite People, Not Divide Them
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Throughout history, walls have been a symbol of separation, segregation, and division. However, a new phenomenon called "walls of kindness" (Deewar-e-Meherbani) is doing just the opposite. Faced by cold weather, Iranians began outdoor charity drives for the homeless and needy by building "walls of kindness." The walls feature clothing hooks beside the phrase, "Take one if you need it. Give one if you don't." Iran's campaign to clothe the poor has developed into an international onslaught of donations, coats, hats, trousers, and warm apparel.
- The Financial Invasion of Greece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Greece's economic crisis has perhaps been eclipsed by Europe's refugee crisis, terrorist attacks, and by the forthcoming Brexit referendum. But it has not gone away. Greece's Syriza coalition faced violence on the streets and a 3-day general strike last week that brought much of the country to a halt. In spite of the protests the government of Alexis Tsipras pushed through legislation to amend the country's tax and pension system with the backing of 153 MPs, a measure required by the lenders in order to continue the debt negotiations.
- The Financial System is a Larger Threat Than Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Trillions of dollars have been added to the taxpayers' burden and many billions of dollars in profits to the military/security complex in order to combat insignificant foreign "threats," such as the Taliban, that remain undefeated after 15 years. All this time the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.
- Fire and Blood
The European Civil War, 1914-1945 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Europe's second Thirty Years' War -- an epoch of blood and ashes.
- The Fire Each Time
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, and suddenly there was light, and warmth, and the gathering at the hearth. The gods never forgave, and ever since periodically they thrust a torch into villains' hands and watch the hearths burn and bring the roofs down. Civilization weeps, in Troy, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria.
- First Steps of Participatory Research Project: Indigenous Languages and Digital Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The rapid development of digital media, which began during the last decade of the 20th century, has had unanticipated effects at the beginning of the 21st century. Peoples, whose cultures and languages were marginalized and displaced by the Nation-State, have appropriated -- slowly, but surely -- these media to reassert their cultural and linguistic presence in cyberspace.
- Fishers and plunderers: The tragedy of the commodity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Overfishing, pollution and warming water have pushed the world’s oceans into crisis. If nothing is done the results will be catastrophic for marine systems and the billions of humans who rely on them. To stop this destruction our society has to be organized in a completely different way.
- Five reasons why we don't have a free and independent press in the UK and what we can do about it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Exposes the power structures and entities that exert influence over the UK press, and proposes ways that influence might be subverted.
- Five Revealing Facts About Homeless Youth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The federal government has set a goal of ending youth homelessness by 2020 with Opening Doors, a strategic plan released in 2010. But as the plan acknowledges, figuring out how many youth are homeless is no easy task.
- Flint drinks lead-laden water; Republicans attack Clean Water Act
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 To save a small amount of money residents of Flint, Michigan, have been forced to consume hazardous levels of lead in their drinking water. Just the moment for the Republican House Speaker to attack the Clean Water Act.
- The Flint River Lead Poisoning Catastrophe in Historical Perspective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 By now the main facts of the Flint River lead poisoning are pretty well known and essentially undisputed. A spectacular regulatory failure by all levels of government -- enabled by Michigan Governor Snyder's unprecedented "emergency management" policies for African-American majority cities. The big remaining question is why this disaster happened?
- The Flint Water Crisis is Not Without Parallel in Michigan History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the days, weeks, and months following a disaster people feel uncertain about real and perceived risks. The parties directly involved a disaster as well as other organizations such as public agencies, governmental bodies, corporations, the media, and environmental groups release a cacophony of information and disputations that the affected population and the general public see as conflicting and confusing. In the process victims and the general public struggle to gain credible sources of information in an attempt to make sense of an event and unpack the truth in order to assign, meaning, blame, and responsibility as well as develop coping strategies and effective remedies. This informational uncertainty can also result in the lack of an effective response between responding governmental agencies on all levels as witnessed in the ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan.
- Flint's poisoned water and capital's second contradiction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The politicians who poisoned the water supply in Flint are as bad as they come, but it's the system they serve that makes such disasters inevitable.
- Florida Today: "Worse Than Mississippi"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If Emancipation means the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water, then Florida falls short. In the 20th century we were a leader in environmental racism.
- The Flowers of Rojava: A Feminist Revolution in Northern Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Janet Biehl speaks about her recent visit to Rojava, Kurdistan where Kurdish men and women have organized themselves into a democratic autonomous region.
- A Food Renaissance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Colin Tudge reports on The College of Real Farming and Food Culture; a project designed to tackle the current issues in global food production. The current system is not fit for purpose but through a holistic approach and an overhaul of current mainstream agriculture, achieving a balance between feeding the world and conserving the environment is within grasp.
- Food sovereignty and climate change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Climate change has become, in a short time, one of the "global affairs" of critical importance in our times. It has now penetrated every sphere of our social and political life to the point of acquiring a centrality that dangerously makes it seem natural.
- Foreclosure Fraud Is Supposed to Be a Thing of the Past, But It Happens Every Day 1
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Recruiters are hiring for a job that shouldn't exist: finding "missing" documents required to "complete" broken chains of title on mortgages entering foreclosure. Since all assignments of mortgage should have been prepared and recorded within days of the transfer or sale -- and the failure to do so irreparably ruptures chain of title -- the companies would seem to be looking for time travelers or magicians. Or maybe they want to manufacture false evidence to introduce into courts as a means to take away people's homes.
- Foreclosure Fraud Is Supposed to Be a Thing of the Past, But It Happens Every Day 2
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Every day in America, people continue to be kicked out of their homes based on false documents. The settlements over allegations of robosigning, faulty paperwork, and illegal mortgage servicing didn’t end the misconduct. And law enforcement, along with most judges and politicians, have looked away in the mistaken belief that they wrapped up a scandal that just goes on and on.
- Forests and Crops Make Friendly Neighbors in Costa Rica
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The ways to better agricultural development is to promote co-existence of farming and forestry, and encourage farmers to be productive and competitive.
- Former Cleanup Workers Blame Illnesses on Toxic Coal Ash Exposures
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There have been numerous cases of workers getting sick after exposure to ash.
- Forsaken
The Persecution of Christians in Today's Middle East Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Across the Middle East, Christian communities today find themselves the victims of widening repression: massacres, expulsions, and brutally enforced restrictions on the right to worship have all become commonplace. Such persecution has now reached the point where, in the region that was once its birthplace, Christianity's very existence is under threat.
- 45 Days of Solidarity
How Verizon workers outmatched the country's largest telecommunications company. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The strike by 39,000 Verizon workers -- members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) -- ended after forty-five days with a tentative agreement announced late last week.
- 41 Years Since Jumping Bull (But 500 Years of Trauma)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Leonard Peltier writes about his own case and about the 500 years of violence and injustice directed at indigenous peoples.
- Fossil Capital
The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power.
- Fossil Capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We all know that coal and steam vanquished over water power in Britain's - and the world's - industrial revolution, writes Irma Allen. But as Andreas Malm sets out in his fascinating new book, the deciding factors in that victory were the unconstrained mastery over people and nature that coal provided mill owners. And so the model was set for the fossil age that may only now be coming to an end.
- A fossil free world must be founded on a Just Transition for workers and their communities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Climate impacts hit working people first and with extreme weather events, changing seasons and rising sea levels, whole communities stand on the frontlines. The challenge of industrial transformation is both an imperative and an opportunity. We know there are jobs in action on climate, millions of jobs. With infrastructure investment projected to be up to US$90 trillion by 2030. This means jobs.
- Four Harsh Truths for Canada's Lovestruck Pipeline Politicians
A reality check for our bitumen-besotted leaders. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There are four obvious (and very conservative) reasons why more pipelines don’t make any kind of economic, energy or climate sense. These truths also explain the growing opposition to the corrupt National Energy Board that still approves pipelines without due process and ignores their impact on global pricing, let alone the science on climate change.
- France's National Front Draws Strength From Brexit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The party has long shrouded racism in the language of "self-determination" -- now, they feel vindicated.
- Free Speech and Double Standards
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Free State of Jones: Three cheers!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 From 1863 to 1865, Newton Knight (1837-1922), a white, antislavery farmer in Jones County in southern Mississippi, led an insurrection against the Confederacy. Inspired by Knight's life and struggle, Free State of Jones, written and directed by Gary Ross, is a fictional account of an enormously compelling, but little known chapter in American history.
- Freeing Julian Assange: the Final Chapter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the epic miscarriages of justice of our time is unravelling. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention -- the international tribunal that adjudicates and decides whether governments comply with their human rights obligations -- has ruled that Julian Assange has been detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden.
- From Albrecht to Monsanto: A System Not Run for the Public Good Can Never Serve the Public Good
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- From Hillsborough to pesticides
Establishment cover-ups, lies and corruption Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The British establishment does nothing quite so well as lies, cover-ups and high-level corruption - whether it's the Hillsborough disaster or permitting polluters to poison us. Georgina Downs won her own High Court legal victory protecting rural residents from pesticide exposure as long ago as 2008 - only to have it snatched away as Court of Appeal judges closed ranks.
- Front Runner
Marine Le Pen's campaign to make France great again Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A look at Marine Len Pen, leader of the far-right National Front Party (FN), and the events and circumstances that led to her party's rise in popularity from a fringe movement to the forefront of French politics.
- Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been tranported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn't always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.
- FSNL, 1979 and today: Nicaragua's compromised revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Sandinista revolution happened over 30 years ago, but FSLN has completely altered within the past few years to a neoliberal organization.
- Fukushima After Five Years
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the five years since the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, at least 100,000 people remain displaced; 80 people have committed suicide in Fukushima alone over the loss of their families.
- Full Democratic Rights for Transgender People!
"Bathroom Bill" Bigotry Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Transgender and gender non-conforming people -- that is, anyone whose appearance, behavior or dress falls outside of bourgeois gender norms -- face an exceptionally high degree of harassment. Around 75 percent of transgender students report being verbally harassed at school and more than 30 percent physically assaulted. Transgender individuals are vulnerable in public spaces, especially if the difference between their preferred gender identity and their biological sex is apparent. Barring them from bathrooms would turn them into criminals while inviting further harassment and physical violence. Everyone -- regardless whether they match the skirt-clad or pants-clad signage on the door -- should be able to go about their business in peace.
- The "Fundamentalism" in Police Operations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As police murders accumulate, and police chiefs get fired and replaced because they cannot stop it (as in Oakland and San Francisco), the notion that this represents a political crisis becomes a truism. It is not a "crisis of policing," which would suggest a situation beyond the capacities of the police. It is the police who have become the crisis. In Oakland, on July 7, 2016, 5000 people came to demonstrate on one day's notice against the two police killings that had occur the previous two days out of a profound awareness of the malignity afoot – and they shut down the Interstate. The magnitude of this crisis is represented by its insidious repetitiveness.
- The Funny Business of Farm Credit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In May of 1998 we held a conference dedicated to two Government-sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In my statement to that assembly, I noted that both corporations had been enjoying good times, but cautioned that one of the unintended consequences of fat profits over a long period is the tendency of both government and private corporations to start believing in the fantasy of ever-rising profits. GSEs often escape the accountability that Congress or regulatory agencies should impose.
- Fury at Israeli plan to build town on historic Muslim village
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Netanyahu government agrees to first new Palestinian community in 68 years -- exclusively for the Druze -- on refugees' land
- Fury at Israeli plan to build town on historic Muslim village
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Netanyahu government agrees to first new Palestinian community in 68 years -- exclusively for the Druze -- on refugees' land.
- A Future Without Hate or Need
The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Driven from their homes in Russia, Poland, and Romania by pogroms and poverty, many Jews who came to Canada in the wave of immigration after the 1905 Russian revolution were committed radicals. A Future Without Hate or Need brings to life the rich and multi-layered lives of a dissident political community, their shared experiences and community-building cultural projects, as they attempted to weave together their ethnic particularity -- their identity as Jews -- with their internationalist class politics.
- Gatekeeper
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 In 2015, there were 24.025 documented suicides in Japan. A retired police detective dedicates his life to preventing deaths at Japan's suicide cliffs, providing emergency assistance and counseling even as tourists flock to the site, attracted by its notoriety as a popular suicide destination.
- The Gatekeepers Aren't Gone
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Viral content seems democratic. But it's still mostly controlled by big media companies.
- Gay imperialism: Postcolonial particularity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Since her refusal to accept the Berlin Pride Civil Courage Award, Judith Butler has been a leading critic of "homonationalism" and the closely related phenomenon of so-called "pinkwashing." Homonationalism is understood here as an ideology which uses a nation's liberal attitudes toward homosexuality as a means of encouraging racist attitudes toward other nations, on the grounds that they are supposedly less enlightened. Butler stated in a May 2010 address on "Queer Alliance and Antiwar Politics" in Ankara, Turkey that "in some parts of Europe and surely in Israel as well, the rights of homosexuals are defended in the name of nationalism."
- Gender is not an identity, it is a tool of patriarchy
Gender hurts Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Gender is a set of societally-imposed, socially-constructed norms which are the structure through which all males and females are boxed in, but which, in particular, are the building blocks of the hierarchy between males and females. From a very early age, almost birth, these gender expectations are imposed through the clothes we wear, the toys we play with, the colours that are considered appropriate, the behaviour that is expected of us, the attitudes expressed towards us. They may vary from culture to culture and throughout history but their purpose is the same, to mould us into roles in society. Let’s not swallow patriarchy’s lies, let’s keep asserting that the objective definition of us as a female or a male based on biological reality will never define our personality, our attitudes, our abilities, our desires, our behaviour, our place in the world.
- The general strike of 1842
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A detailed history of the UK Chartist general strike of 1842 against pay cuts and for universal male suffrage.
- The Genius of Huey P. Newton
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 To those of us who were alive -- and sentient, the name Huey P. Newton evokes an era of mass resistance, of Black popular protest and of the rise of revolutionary organizations across the land. To those of subsequent eras, youth in their 20s, the name is largely unknown, as is the name of its greatest creation: The Black Panther Party.
- Genocide by Prescription: The "Natural History" of the Declining White Working Class in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The white working class in the US has been decimated through an epidemic of 'premature deaths' -- a bland term to cover-up the drop in life expectancy in this historically important demographic. This is the first time in the country's 'peacetime' history that its traditional core productive sector has experienced such a dramatic demographic decline -- and the epicenter is in the small towns and rural communities of the United States.
- Genocide in Plain Sight: Shooting Bushmen From Helicopters in Botswana
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In a healthy democracy, people are not shot at from helicopters for collecting food. They are not arrested, stripped bare and beaten while in custody without facing trial. Nor are people banned from their legitimate livelihoods, or persecuted on false pretenses. Sadly in Botswana, southern Africa's much-vaunted ‘beacon of democracy', all of this took place late last month in an incident which has been criminally under-reported. Nine Bushmen were later arrested and subsequently stripped naked and beaten while in custody.
- Get out there and organise
The excitement of activism has supplanted slowly organized structures working for social and political change Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While there has been an explosion of activism over the past couple of decades, the left must better cultivate organizing to make activism more sustainable and effective.
- Getting Serious About Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Ground Means Getting Serious About a Just Transition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If the climate movement is going to get serious about keeping fossil fuels in the ground, the movement needs to get serious about cultivating a real vision for a just transition. If we’re going to see coal-fired power plants and oil refineries and chemical plants shut down we need to have a real vision about what the future looks like for those workers, their families and their communities.
- Ghostbusters, GMOs and the Feigned Expertise of Nobel Laureates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last week a controversy erupted just as the Roberts-Stabinow Digital Divide GMO labeling law was being discussed in the Senate. It involves a letter signed by 100+ Nobel laureates attacking Greenpeace for being "anti-scientific" in its stance against the proliferation and continued use of genetically engineered organisms.
- A Giant, Flushing Sound
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The editors discuss the anti-TPP rhetoric of Sanders, Trump, and Clinton, as well as the pro-TPP positions of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
- Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption
Millions of documents show heads of state, criminals and celebrities using secret hideaways in tax havens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A massive leak of documents exposes the offshore holdings of current and former world leaders, politicians , public officials, and wealthy individuals around the world.
- Global Agribusiness, Dependency and the Marginalisation of Self-Sufficiency, Organic Farming and Agroecology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Is organic-based farming merely a niche model of agriculture that is not capable of feeding the global population? Or does it have a major role to play? In addressing these questions, it would be useful to consider a selection of relevant literature to see what it says about the role of organic farming, how this model of agriculture impacts farmers and whether or not it can actually feed the global population.
- Global pitbulls: the US military mission to support corporate colonialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With its 800 bases in 80 countries, the US's global military domination is often seen as an altruistic exercise to ensure world peace and harmony. It is, of course, the opposite: the essential underpinning of the US's predatory economic power, always ready to strike down any challenge to the rights and privileges of its corporate conquerors and financial oligarchy.
- GMOs, Development and the Politics of Unhappiness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Modern state-corporate capitalism is stripping the environment bare through unsustainable levels of consumption. It is legitimised by a deceitful ideology that attempts to justify and sell a system which by its very nature is designed to benefit a minority at the expense of the majority.
- The God that fails: C-51, review committees and the dangers of window dressing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Among the Harper era's most destructive legacies is a toxic stew of repressive "anti-terror" laws that, in building on similarly repressive measures brought in under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, extended major new powers to Canadian state security agencies Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the RCMP, among numerous others.
- God's Red Pencil? CRISPR and The Three Myths of Precise Genome Editing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For the last seventy years all chemical and biological technologies, from genetic engineering to pesticides, have been built on a myth of precision and specificity. They have all been adopted under the pretense that they would function without side effects or unexpected complications. Yet the extraordinary disasters and repercussions of DDT, leaded paint, agent orange, atrazine, C8, asbestos, chlordane, PCBs, and so on, when all is said and done, have been stories of the steady unraveling of a founding myth of precision and specificity. Nevertheless, with the help of industry propagandists, their friends in the media, even the United Nations, we are once again being preached the gospel of precision. But no matter how you look at it, precision is a fable and should be treated as such.
- Good nutrition begins in healthy soils
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There's no such thing as 'healthy food' if it's not produced by sustainable farming systems on living soils, Patrick Holden told the recent 'Food: The Forgotten Medicine' conference. But after 70 years of industrial farming, there's a huge job to be done to restore our depleted soils and the impoverished genetic diversity of our seeds and crops.
- Goodbye to democracy if TTIP is passed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The leaked chapters of the EU-US TTIP 'free trade' deal reveal a shredding of health, environmental and other protections for consumers and citizens. It's a wet dream for corporate monopolists and profiteers, and the elite bureaucrats that serve them. But for civil society it represents an irreversible destruction of democracy itself.
- The government just admitted it will use smart home devices for spying
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Many consumers are wholly unaware that the smart devices making their home more custom and responsive are making data that can be hacked or collected.
- The Great Acceleration
An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism.
- The Great Class War
1914-1918 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 In this critical, revisionist account, historian Jacques Pauwels shows how the First World War was rooted in class strife that begin with the French Revolution in 1789 and continued long past the war itself. As Pauwels sees it, war seemed to offer major benefits to the European upper classes of the early twentieth century, who felt threatened by the seemingly irresistible process of democratization or, as they saw it, the "rise of the masses." War was expected to serve as an antidote to social revolution, causing workers to abandon socialism's focus on overthrowing the established order via international worker solidarity in favour of nationalism and militarism.
- The Great Inequality
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 A growing inequality in income and wealth marks modern capitalism, and it negatively affects nearly every aspect of our lives, especially those of the working class. Michael Yates explains what inequality is, why it matters, how it affects us, what its underlying causes are, and what we might do about it. This book was written to encourage informed radical action by working people, the unemployed, and the poor, uniquely blending the author’s own experiences with his ability to make complex issues comprehensible to a mass audience.
- The Great Libya War Fraud
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Coming so soon after the incomplete but still damning exposure of the Iraq deception - with the bloodbath still warm - the media's deep conformity and wilful gullibility on the 2011 Libyan war left even jaundiced observers aghast. It was clear that we were faced with a pathological system of propaganda on Perpetual War autopilot.
- The Great Ponzi Scheme of the Global Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Chris Hedges has a discussion with the economist Michael Hudson (author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy) on a great Ponzi scheme that not only defines not only the U.S. but the global economy, how we got there and where we’re going.
- The Great Seed Piracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A great seed and biodiversity piracy is underway and it must be stopped. The privateers of today include not just the corporations -- which are becoming fewer and larger through mergers -- but also individuals like Bill Gates, the "richest man in the world". When the Green Revolution was pushed in India and Mexico, farmers' seeds were "rounded-up" and locked in international institutions, which used these seeds to breed green revolution varieties which responded to chemical inputs.
- The great train robbery
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Privatised networks of European railways have neglected safety, community and environmental issues in pursuit of profit.
- Greatest Threat to Free Speech in the West: Criminalizing Activism Against Israeli Occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The U.K. government has announced that it is will be illegal for "local [city] councils, public bodies, and even some university student unions ... to refuse to buy goods and services from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products, or Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank." Thus, any entities that support or participate in the global boycott of Israeli settlements will face "severe penalties."
- Greece is sold off and sold out
Greece's public assets, including ports and airports, went at discount prices to predatory buyers who will deprive the state of much - need Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A recent study has concluded that privatisation in Europe has undermined wage structures, made working conditions worse and increased income inequality; nowhere is this exemplified more than in Greece.
- Greek Debt and the New Financial Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Describes how the Greek goverment is forced to extract income and wealth from its workers and small businesses resulting in a new form of financial imperialism that smaller states and economies, planning to join larger free trade zones and 'currency unions' should avoid at all cost.
- Green by default - how a nudge and wink can save the planet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There's a simple way to induce us to make good environmental choices: make them the default setting. Whether it's selecting double sided photocopies or renewable electricity tariffs, defining easily-overridden 'green defaults' is by far the most efficacious means to influence consumer choices for the environment and the planet.
- Green transformation is a political project, not an economic one
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There is a need for public policy in order for green initiatives to be tangiblem in-depth projects.
- Growing International Movement Seeks to Place Arms Embargo on Saudi Arabia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A lawsuit filed in Canada in March 2016 is seeking to halt a major $15 billion sale of light-armoured vehicles to the government of Saudi Arabia, part of a growing international movement to stop arms sales to the Saudi government over its alleged war crimes in Yemen.
The suit, filed by University of Montreal constitutional law professor Daniel Turp, argues the vehicle sales to Saudi Arabia violate a number of Canadian laws.
- The Guangdong Six and the rule of law (of value): Preliminary theses on the December 3 crackdown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Information about the December 3, 2014 crackdown on Chinese labour activists is now widely available in English and several other languages, but there has been little satisfactory analysis of its significance -- in relation to business as usual in China, to comparable situations in other countries, or to workers' struggles as such.
- Guaranteed income's dangerous outcome
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Ontario Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne is talking about a guaranteed basic income for all residents. It sounds great; in fact it sounds too good to be true. There are a number of very different models of guaranteed annual income (GAI) out there, and there are proponents on both the right and left. In Canada, most GAI proposals have come from the right and, importantly, at times when capitalism is experiencing crises.
- Guardian sinks into gutter on Corbyn - again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Jeremy Corbyn today launched a review into the Labour party's supposed "anti-semitism crisis" -- in fact, a crisis entirely confected by a toxic mix of the right, Israel supporters and the media. I have repeatedly pointed out that misleading claims of anti-semitism (along with much else) are being thrown at Corbyn to discredit him.
- Guide to the UFW Canadian Boycott: Toronto Office Audio-Visual Collection LAV002473
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The UFW Canadian Boycott was part of a series of U.S. nation-wide boycotts that the United Farm Workers spearheaded during the mid 1960s and 1970s. These boycotts alerted the national consumer of the grape and lettuce strikes that had erupted in California, Texas, Arizona and other states. The main duties of the Toronto Boycott office were to enlist support for the striking farm workers by soliciting donations, spreading information and organizing marches and rallies.
- The Habits of Highly Cynical People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A look at the consequences and dangers of 'naive cynicism', where complex issues are oversimplified and the future and past is flattened out, reducing motivations to engage in intelligent dialogue, and to participate and act.
- Halle/Chomsky: An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Among the elements of the weak form of democracy enshrined in the constitution, presidential elections continue to pose a dilemma for the left in that any form of participation or non participation appears to impose a significant cost on our capacity to develop a serious opposition to the corporate agenda served by establishment politicians. The position outlined below is that which many regard as the most effective response to this quadrennial Hobson's choice, namely the so-called "lesser evil" voting strategy or LEV. Simply put, LEV involves, where you can, i.e. in safe states, voting for the losing third party candidate you prefer, or not voting at all. In competitive "swing" states, where you must, one votes for the "lesser evil" Democrat.
- Hanford's Leaky Nuke Tanks and Sick Workers, A Never-Ending Saga
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It's been a toxic few weeks at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington. Not that this is exactly news -- Hanford is the most radioactive site in North America and is thereby always toxic. But what is news is how dangerous and negligent the remediation efforts at Hanford continue to be.
- Happy Activism
Six ways to make our movement strong and feed our spirit. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 How do we make environmental organizations attractive to large numbers of people? And how do we keep these folks engaged for the years, even decades that it will take to create a sustainable society? My interest here is not to enumerate people’s reasons for activism but rather, based on these reasons, to articulate principles that movement organizers should follow to bring people to the cause.
- Here to stay, here to fight: How Asians transformed the British working class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 During the blisteringly hot summer of 1976 a group of Asian workers, predominantly women, walked out on strike at a small factory in north west London. Most were recently arrived migrants from Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya and were as unlikely a group of militants as you were likely to find that year. The Grunwick strikers acted spontaneously, without a union to back them and without knowing whether they could count on any wider support. Yet their determination and courage during a dispute that would last until the summer of 1978 would transform the politics of race in the labour movement—and in doing so would have huge ramifications for British society in general.
- Here We Go Again, Trash-Talking The Working Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This column begins with a brief story about the author's two grandmothers who lived in trailer homes.
- Here's How To Craft A Winning Climate Message
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A guide to fighting back against dirty energy industry spin when discussing the climate crisis. The Climate Solutions for a Stronger America messaging guide is based on data from a repeat national survey of likely voters. Researchers examined the data to determine how to successfully communicate climate issues and identified three top-performing messages.
- The hidden treasures of Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A small room on a rooftop in the occupied Gaza Strip’s crowded Beach refugee camp resembles a miniature archaeological museum. It is the workshop of Nafez Abed, 55, who studies archaeological artifacts in order to replicate them in exquisite detail. Abed copies antiquities photographed in history books and ones he’s seen during visits to archaeological sites across Gaza, which many a civilization has passed through, as well as in other Arab countries and Europe.
- Hillary Clinton, The Vote, and Contemporary Feminism's Class Blindness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The feminist fight for libreration has been sidelined.
- Hillbilly Elitism
The American hillbilly isn't suffering from a deficient culture. He's just poor. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is not aimed at that underclass (few books are), but rather a middle- and upper-class readership more than happy to learn that white American poverty has nothing to do with them or with any structural problems in American economy and society and everything to do with poor folks' inherent vices.
- Hip-Hop Ain't Dead
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Many rap artists used their words to question oppression. This is where hip-hop began, a radical middle finger to the system that created the need for such an outlet.
- A historic turning point in Brazil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 President Dilma Rousseff's suspension is a historic turning point in Brazil -- the end of an era of Workers' Party (PT) national governments that began in 2002 with the election of Lula. The PT won four presidential elections, two with Lula (2002 and 2006) and two with Dilma (2010 and 2014). This political crisis and historic turning point is intertwined with an equally deep economic crisis -- in 2015 GDP shrank by 3.8 percent in Brazil and, taking into account IMF projections for 2016, GDP might shrink by a further 3.5 percent. These data suggest that now there is an economic crisis similar to the crisis of 1929-31, when Brazilian GDP shrank by 8.1 percent.
- A History of the Barricade
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The barricade is the iconic tactic of historic class struggles, and its history is engagingly explored in Hazan's history, finds William Booth.
- History of the Equals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Mahdi Ganjavi interviewed Professor pETER Linebaugh during his visit with a special focus on two of his major contributions to a Marxist study of "history from below": The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, and The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.
- A History of Silencing Israeli Army Whistleblowers: From 1948 Until Today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One might expect that only historians would care to revisit the 1948 war that created Israel. And yet the debate about what constitutes truth and myth from that period still provokes raw emotions.
- A History of Student Movements and Activism at Evergreen State College and the Greater Nation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Students and student movements have played a major role in struggles for reform and revolution in the United States and around the world. Before I turn to Evergreen, I will give a few examples, mainly from the United States in the 1960’s. I will also share a few conclusions based on many years of activism with student movements.
- A History of Violence
Living and Dying in Central America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 This is a book about one of the deadliest places in the world: Central America.
- The History Thieves
Secrets, Lies, and the Shaping of a Modern Nation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Ian Cobain uncovers the role of secrecy in the British state - and the lies, omissions and misrepresentations we've been fed to maintain the facade of a fair and just Britain.
- The History Thieves - Review
How Britain covered up its imperial crimes Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 A review of Ian Cobain's book The History Thieves, an engrossing study which identifies secrecy as a 'very British disease', exploring how, as the empire came to an end, government officials burned the records of imperial rule.
- Holocaust survivor and activist for justice Hedy Epstein dies at 91
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, 91, died at her home in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, on May 26, 2016. An internationally renowned, respected and admired advocate for human and civil rights, Hedy was encircled by friends who lovingly cared for her at home.
- Homes Demolished in the South Hebron Hills
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Israeli authorities have destroyed 24 homes in the South Hebron Hills. The homes lie within an area which Israel claims as Firing Zone 918, in which approximately 1000 Palestinian civilians live in 8 villages.
- Homonationalism and Queer Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For most young queers today, still, the image of a "worker" is white, male and straight. You can't understand the realities of class without an intersectional approach - an intersectional approach fused with some of the key insights of contemporary radical queer theory.
- HotLink RSS Feed
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 RSS feed listing new and updated items about Publicity, Media Relations, Public Relations, and Fundraising.
- A house divided: Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Something remarkable happened over the summer of 2015. Immediately after Ed Miliband resigned following Labour's defeat in the general election, the grip exercised by Blairism over the Labour Party had seemed set to continue grimly on. The field competing for the Labour leadership was confined to various shades of uninspiring Blairites, with the supposedly "left" candidate, Andy Burnham, rushing to distance himself from the unions. Even after Jeremy Corbyn threw his hat in the ring, most (including Corbyn himself) assumed he would be soundly beaten.
- How a Nearly Successful Slave Revolt Was Intentionally Lost to History
More than 500 slaves fought for their freedom in this oft-overlooked rebellion Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 on the night of January 8, 1811, more than 500 enslaved people took up arms in one of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history. They carried cane knives (used to harvest sugar cane), hoes, clubs and some guns as they marched toward New Orleans chanting "Freedom or Death."
- How a PR company manufactured the Labour coup - Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As the chaos surrounding Jeremy Corbyn continues at an unprecedented rate, The Canary can exclusively reveal more elements to the Labour coup that has been unfolding since the EU referendum result. In an overarching investigation, more links have come to light between Portland Communications, its subsidiaries and parent company, members of staff both there and at the Fabian Society and the Progress wing of the party.
- How a Selective Boycott Can Boost External Support for Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The pro-Palestine solidarity movement could enlarge its following, convince more influential supporters, and get past trivial, harmful and sectarian disputes -- if it wants to. A boycott must be humanist, as is the cause of supporting Palestinian self-determination. Boycotting humanism allows the cynical internal corrosion of any political movement of the left.
- How Big Oil seeps into Canadian academia
Canada's oily universities Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For years, Royal Dutch Shell has tried to portray itself as one of the good guys in the battle against climate change. It recently completed improvements to an oil upgrader in Fort Saskatchewan, near Edmonton, to capture up to a third of its greenhouse gas emissions - equivalent to removing the annual pollution of about 250,000 cars.
- How can we destroy capitalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Corporate Watch's new publication, 'Capitalism, What is it and how can we destroy it?' provides an accessible introduction to capitalism and explores how we might bring about its ending. What is capitalism? An economic system built on private property, markets, exploitation and profit, enforced by state violence. But also, digging deeper, a culture of fear and passivity, in which we learn to see the natural world, other people, and even ourselves, as objects to be owned and managed, bought and sold.
- How Did We Get Here? What Lies Ahead?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We need to understand the reasons why Trump won the 2016 U.S. election. This requires recognizing the uniqueness of this election on multiple fronts. Trump’s victory was just as much about the Democratic Party's implosion as it was about the triumph of Trump's "outsider" political campaign. The Republican victory was not driven by the party's ascendance among the public at large. If anything, the party is in big trouble looking ahead.
- How Did We Get Into This Mess?
Politics, Equality, Nature Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 This selection from George Monbiot's journalism, assesses the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do.
- How The Guardian Undermines Jeremy Corbyn and the Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 teleSUR spoke to David Cromwell and David Edwards, co-editors of Media Lens, about The Guardian and corporate media's bias against Labour party leader Jeremy Cobyn.
- How Israel aims to redefine 'ethnic cleansing'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Netanyahu’s controversial comments have thrown another obstacle in the way of Palestinian statehood, analysts say.
- How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party's anti-Semitism crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last year, socialist stalwart Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the UK’s Labour Party by a landslide. Since then, there has been a steady flow of claims by Israel’s supporters that Corbyn has not done enough to combat anti-Semitism.
- How Israel Uses Water as a Weapon of War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Entire communities in the West Bank either have no access to water or have had their water supply reduced almost by half. This alarming development has been taking place for weeks, since Israel’s national water company, "Mekorot", decided to cut off – or significantly reduce – its water supply to Jenin, Salfit and many villages around Nablus, among other regions. Israel has been 'waging a water war' against Palestinians.
- How Most Aid to the Palestinians Ends up in Israel's Coffers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While Europe may think of itself as part of an enlightened West, using aid to defend Palestinians' rights, the reality is less reassuring. The aid may actually be making things significantly worse.
- How Not To Fund Infrastructure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Recycling is supposed to be a good thing, so when the federal Liberals quietly announced that "asset recycling" would be part of their strategy for meeting their much-ballyhooed infrastructure promises, not many eyebrows were raised. They should have been. Asset recycling is an obscure code word for selling our public goods for private profit. It's privatization by another name.
Don't have the taxes to pay for new buses? It's okay, you can sell your electricity utility to pay for them instead. In fact, this is precisely what the Ontario Liberal government is doing. Already 30 per cent of the profitable Hydro One have been sold and another 30 per cent will be sold before 2018. A public Hydro One could more directly fight climate change, lower energy costs for the poor or work with First Nations on whose lands generation often happens. A private Hydro becomes an instrument for profit first with other goals secondary.
What the Liberals have started in Ontario will soon be rolled out across Canada. Here are the problems with these schemes.
- How Propaganda (Actually) Works
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Political propaganda employs the ideals of liberal democracy to undermine those very ideals, the dangers of which, not even its architects fully understand.
- How Putin Derailed the West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Whitney argues that Washington is involved in a grand project to remake the world in a way that better meets the needs of its elite constituents, the international banks and multinational corporations.
- How the Easter Rising changed the world
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Chris Bambery argues that the Easter Rising relaunched the struggle for independence in Ireland and inspired national liberation movements globally.
- How the left should deal with the referendum results
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With many of the old political certainties breaking up, the left have to rise to the challenge.
- How the Media Manipulated the Democratic Primary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Though it might not always seem like it, the news media is composed of human beings. Humans aren't, can’t be, and possibly shouldn't be, objective. Still, there's a reasonable expectation among consumers of political news that journalists of all political stripes strive to be as objective as possible. At their minimum, media outlets ought to be straightforward about their biases. They certainly shouldn't have, or appear to have, their thumbs on the scales.
- How the One Percenters Divorce: Offshore Intrigue Plays Hide and Seek with Millions
Firm that practices no matrimonial law nonetheless plays big role when the superrich around the globe decide to split Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Offshore companies used 'in a game of hide and concealment' after marriages break down
Documents list luxury cars and yachts, lavish homes, and art collections. Spouses face a costly battle to prove ownership of offshore assets in protracted divorce proceedings.
- How The Press Hides The Global Crimes Of The West: Corporate Media Coverage Of Chad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the essential functions of the corporate media is to marginalise or silence acknowledgement of the history -- and continuation -- of Western imperial aggression. The coverage of the recent sentencing in Senegal of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, for crimes against humanity, provides a useful case study. The verdict could well have presented the opportunity for the media to examine in detail the complicity of the US, UK, France and their major allies in the Middle East and North Africa in the appalling genocide Habré inflicted on Chad during his rule - from 1982 to 1990. After all, Habré had seized power via a CIA-backed coup.
- How the West Creates Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Terrorism has many forms and many faces, but the most terrible of them is cold cruelty.
And so the West linked terrorism with Islam, which is one of the greatest cultures on earth, with 1.6 billion followers. In order to make Islam a worthy enemy, the Empire had to first radicalize and pervert countless Muslim movements and organizations, then create the new ones, consequently training, arming and financing them, so they could really look frightening enough.
- How the West's Economic Sanctions are Inflicting Suffering on Ordinary Syrians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The US and EU economic sanctions on Syria are causing huge suffering among ordinary Syrians and preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid, according to a leaked UN internal report.
- How the White Helmets Became International Heroes While Pushing U.S. Military Intervention and Regime Change in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Created by Western governments and popularized by a top PR firm, the White Helmets are saving civilians while lobbying for airstrikes.
- How to Make Union Meetings Interesting and Useful
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Meetings should give members a sense of power by bringing them together. They can see and feel that they are not alone, that others have similar problems, and that others have found solutions. They can learn from each other, combine ideas, and build something bigger.
- How Western Military Interventions Shaped the Brexit Vote
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Michael Hudson argues that military interventions in the Middle East created refugee streams to Europe that were in turn used by the anti-immigrant right to stir up xenophobia.
- Human nature
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A review of Jason W Moore's book on world-ecology, Capitalism in the Web of Life.
- Humans will be remembered for leaving a 'plastic planet'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Hungary: Politics and the Refugee Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Long before Daesh/ISIS appeared, climate change and globalization had shoved over 1.5 million Syrians off the land and out of their villages. Today over eight million have been displaced, along with 1.5 million Iraqis who came to Syria looking for refuge.
- Hunger in Venezuela? A Look Beyond the Spin
Special Report Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Venezuala has food shortages when it comes to specific foods, but there have been grassroots and governmental responses.
- Hybrid War Hyenas Tear Brazil Apart
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The gloomy and repulsive night when the female President of the 7th largest economy in the world was the prey of choice fed to a lynch mob of hyenas in a drab, provincial Circus Maximus will forever live in infamy.
- The Hypocrisies of Terror Talk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The religious identity of terrorists and the place where terror strikes shapes the rhetoric that media uses to describe the perpetrators and places.
- I, Daniel Blake
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 I, Daniel Blake is a 2016 drama film directed by Ken Loach and written by Loach's frequent collaborator Paul Laverty. It stars Dave Johns as Daniel Blake, who is denied employment and support allowance despite his doctor finding him unfit to work. Hayley Squires co-stars as Katie, a struggling single mother whom Daniel befriends.
- I Don't have to be what you want me to be
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 'A strange fate befell Muhammad Ali in the 1990s', Mike Marqusee writes in Redemption Song, his wonderful, illuminating study of 'Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties'. ‘The man who had defied the American establishment was taken into its bosom. There he was lavished with an affection which had been strikingly absent thirty years before, when for several years he reigned unchallenged as the most reviled figure in the history of American sports.' The global outpouring of grief, affection and tribute to Ali this weekend has been moving and heart-warming. Yet, there is a part of me that thinks that, as affection has washed away the old contempt with which he once was greeted by large sections, especially of American society, we have also lost something of the sense of Ali's true greatness.
- I Found My Voice in Spanish, a Language Once Used to Subjugate My Ancestors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Author Shirley Campbell explains how her Afro-Caribbean parents decided not to speak to her and her siblings in English, perhaps as an attempt to give them one less reason to be different in Spanish-speaking Costa Rica.
- 'I KNEW I WAS WITNESSING A TERRIBLE EVIL'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Today marks 50 years since the South African apartheid government declared District Six, in the heart of Cape Town, a 'whites only' area from which all non-whites would be forcibly removed.
- I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump's Biggest Fans. Here's What They Won't Tell You.
How Donald Trump took a narrative of unfairness and twisted it to his advantage. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Trump masculinizes benefits, but with a key proviso: restrict government help to real Americans.
- I Was a CIA Whistleblower. Now I'm a Black Inmate. Here’'s How I See American Racism.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 From the moment I crossed the threshold from freedom to incarceration because I was charged with, and a jury convicted me of, leaking classified information to a New York Times reporter, I needed no reminder that I was no longer an individual. Prison, with its "one size fits all" structure, is not set up to recognize a person's worth; the emphasis is removal and categorization. Inmates are not people; we are our offenses. In this particular prison where I live, there are S-Os (sex offenders), Cho-Mos (child molesters), and gun and drug offenders, among others. Considering the charges and conviction that brought me here, I'm not exactly sure to which category I belong. No matter. There is an overriding category to which I do belong, and it is this prison reality that I sadly "compare unto the world": I'm not just an inmate, I'm a black inmate.
- I Was Sick for a Year After an Oil Spill. Five Years Later, Pipeline Accidents Are Worsening
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Early in the morning on July 2, 2011, I walked down the gravel road on our Montana farm to let the goats out to graze for the day. I found an oily rainbow sheen on the Yellowstone River flowing through our hay fields and pasture, plus large clumps of crude oil sticking to trees, cattails and brush. The oily water was in our sloughs, our pond and the creek that runs along the eastern edge of the farm. I checked the local news on my phone and found that an Exxon oil pipeline had ruptured underneath the Yellowstone River upstream. More than 300 people upstream from us were evacuated, but no one had thought to notify those of us further from the spill. The smell of hydrocarbons was overwhelming. In the end, more than 63,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the Yellowstone River from what we later learned was a "guillotine cut" in Exxon's Silvertip pipeline, which lay in a trench only four to five feet under the Yellowstone River.
- Iceland Jail Top Bankers For 46 Years, Europe 'Outraged'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Iceland has differed from the rest of Europe and the US by allowing bankers to be prosecuted as criminals, rather than treating them as a protected species.
- The Iceland women's strike, 1975
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A short history of the strike, or day off, by the of women in Iceland for equality with men on 24 October, 1975.
- Iceland's Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 After its financial crisis, Iceland put bankers in jail. But it didn't rein in capital. In reality the responses to the 2008–9 Icelandic banking crash were only modestly progressive and failed to bring about any kind of shift to the left. They have also been much more contested locally than most international media accounts reflect.
- Ideas for the Struggle: required reading for activists in these challenging times
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Arguing why the ideas presented in Marta Harnecker's collection of essays, 'Ideas for the Struggle', are essential and important for present-day activists and organizers.
- An Idiot's Guide to Prosecuting Corporate Fraud
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A new group called Bank Whistleblowers United have just pushed out a comprehensive plan they think would put the executive branch in the United States back in the business of enthusiastically identifying, indicting, and convicting financial fraudsters -- restoring accountability while protecting the public.
- If You Like Obama, You'll Love Trump!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Oh, what fun we have with the nonsense that flows out of the mouth of Donald J. Trump. The man is suffocatingly banal, racist, dishonest, inarticulate, uninformed, uneducated, narcissistic, a bully, just plain stupid, and an asshole (or in the immortal words of my people -- a schmuck!) I would guess that as the boss of his own enterprises for many years, with the power and the habit of firing people, he eventually became deeply accustomed to not having his thoughts seriously questioned or challenged, to the extent that he really believes the crap that comes out of his mouth and doesn’t really understand what others actually think of him.
- I'll bet you didn't know you own billions of dollars in coal stocks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Exposing the investments and other involvements of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in the fossil fuel industry.
- I'm Right and You're an Idiot
The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016
- Images of Militarized Police in Baton Rouge Draw Global Attention
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Photographs and video of heavily armed police officers wearing body armour and helmets arresting protesters in Baton Rouge over the weekend reverberated on social networks and in the world's media, focusing new attention on the militarization of police forces across the United States.
- An Immediate End to Police Brutality and Murder of Black People by Police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Black Panther Party remains unfulfilled fifty years after the Party's founding. This truth is a tragic acknowledgement of both the failure of US capitalism to resolve its greatest disgrace and an admission that it may not be able to. The unpunished murders of Black men by police are just the most graphic proof of this truth.
- Imperial silences: From Rhodes to Surabaya
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The campaign last year to have the statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College, Oxford, has provoked more discussion of the British Empire and its crimes than we have seen for many years. Rather than keeping quiet about Britain's imperial past, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign has actually flushed establishment apologists out into the open. They have been forced to defend the legacy of a man who, if he had not been British and had not given a substantial bribe to Oxford University, would today be generally acknowledged by everyone as a corrupt fraudster, thief, liar and killer for profit, as someone marked out only by the enormity of his crimes. The hypocrisy that the debate over Rhodes Must Fall has occasioned has been very instructive in itself, but what is intended here is an examination not just of the part played by hypocrisy in the defence of British imperialism, but of the other strategies employed: suppression and amnesia.
- The Importance of Making Trouble: In conversation with Frances Fox Piven
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Coversation with Frances Fox Piven, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City of University of New York Graduate Centre and the past president of the American Sociological Association, about the importnace of social movements and upcoming 2016 US election.
- In Africa, the U.S. Military Sees Enemies Everywhere
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 From east to west across Africa, 1,700 Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and other military personnel are carrying out 78 distinct "mission sets" in more than 20 nations, according to documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act.
- In Defense of Ecological Marxism: John Bellamy Foster responds to a critic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the most important books of Marxist theory published in recent years is Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, in which John Bellamy Foster rediscovered and expanded on Marx’s understanding of the alienation of human beings from the natural world, crystallized in the concept of metabolic rift. In a recent conversation, Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus asked Foster about Moore’s criticisms of ecological Marxism.
- In Israel, an Ugly Tide sweeps over Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In Israel's evermore tribal politics, there is no such thing as a "good" Arab -- and the worst failing in a Jew is to be unmasked as an "Arab lover". Or so was the message last week from Isaac Herzog, head of Israel's so-called peace camp.The shock waves of popular anger at the recent indictment of an Israeli army medic, Elor Azaria, on a charge of "negligent homicide" are being felt across Israel's political landscape.
- In new book, Ilan Pappé says settler colonialism and apartheid best explain Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An analysis of Ilan Pappe's new book, Israel and South Africa - The Many Faces of Apartheid, and how Israel's settler colonization of Palestinians is similar to apartheid in South Africa.
- In or out of the European Union? A tale of two referenda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Andrew Burgin argues for a 'Remain' vote in the Brexit referendum.
- In search of the unseen: an investigation into plastics in our oceans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the biggest threats facing marine life is the 'microplastic' particles found in ocean ecosystems from bottom to top of food chains. Just back from a voyage of environmental exploration in the tropical Atlantic sampling the waters to build up a global picture of this ubiquitous pollutant, Ana Stanic writes of the joys and trials of life on the waves, and the need to keep our oceans clean.
- In Service to Scarcity: The Pursuit of Value as the Production of Poverty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This essay argues that exploring the roots and subsequent development of capitalist value theory over the course of the nineteenth century reveals a Janus-faced project:on the one hand, the development of a popular narrative which insists upon the "natural" inevitability of the scarcity which both backs value and precludes socialism, and on the other, an esoteric discussion of the need to channel the labor-power of society in directions that maintain the scarcity of the goods for which the majority exchange their time.
- In Solidarity with Imprisoned Poet, Ashraf Fayadh
Sentenced to death on charges of apostasy and promoting atheism, Ashraf had his sentence reduced to eight years and 800 lashes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Countless people, including the poet Ashraf Fayadh, are imprisoned because of things they wrote.
- In the belly of the beast
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In these days of intense state and media racism, any book that offers a deeper understanding of the role of anti-racist and black liberation struggles is invaluable. Høgsbjerg’s book provides a thorough and engrossing account of such struggles in the colonial world and in the belly of the imperial beast -- where C L R James lived from 1932 to 1938. James left Britain ten years before the Windrush docked in London; the story of his time in the UK is a valuable insight into the vibrant political organisations built by black people in Britain before what is generally considered to be the start of "Black British History".
- In the footsteps of Gandhi: an interview with Vandana Shiva
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Vandana Shiva is more than just a leading scientist, author and campaigner on green issues and anti-globalisation. She is also among the most prominent of Mahatma Ghandi's intellectual heirs. In this interview, she discusses how this led her to be an outspoken voice on such crucial environmental issues as seed legacy, biopiracy and economic injustice.
- In the US, money talks when it comes to Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Investigates the 2016 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and their allegiance to Israel.
- The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 This book's reflections on the Red and the Green -- out of which arguably the only hope for the future lies -- are populated by the likes of Native American anarchocommunist Lucy Parsons, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Karl Marx, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, SNCC, and countless others, both sentient and verdant.
- India's Dalit cattle skinners share stories of abuse
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 From hospital wards to skinning fields, India's Dalit cattle skinners share stories of abuse and fears for their future.
- Indicting the System with Noam Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In this interview Noam Chomsky brings once more to bear on current and historical events his eviscerating analysis of power systems.
- Indigenous Communities in Guatemala Fight Against the Privatization of Sacred Sites
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In recent years, the popular tourist attraction of Semuc Champey in the Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz has become a point of social conflict for the indigenous Q'eqchi' Mayan communities surrounding the site. On February 8, tensions erupted and led to the occupation of the municipality building of Lanquín by over 200 members of the communities near the tourist attraction. Community members demanded the recuperation of the site. Since that day, residents have maintained management of the park.
- Inequality Among Women Is Crucial to Understanding Hillary's Loss
Working-class women who voted for Trump tell us a lot about feminism's relationship to class politics. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The outcome of the 2016 American election was, like any, multi-causual. In addition to factors of racism and sexism, economic inequality, specifically economic inequality among women, must be identified as an additional culprit.
- Innovation for What? The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Williams discusses why American universities' current trend of advocating innovation ends up prioritizing corporate interests over the gola of accessible education.
- Inside/ Outside the Campus Box
The Cutting Edge Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of David Lanksy's The Cutting Edge.
- Inside the Shadowy PR Firm That's Lobbying for Regime Change in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Posing as a non-political solidarity organization, the Syria Campaign leverages local partners and media contacts to push the U.S. into toppling another Middle Eastern government.
- Interactive map of Latino urban riots and social unrest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A map that displays Latino riots in the United States from 1964 to 2016.
- International arms companies make a killing in Turkey: a case study of the Roboski Massacre
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Today, Turkey continues its brutality in its war against its Kurdish population. The state is imposing new curfews daily in the south-east of the country. Hundreds of citizens have been killed so far, whilst the western mainstream media and politicians remain largely silent about the massacres. Anti-militarist activists in the UK, however, are taking action against atrocities carried out by states such as Turkey.
- International Injustice: the Conviction of Radovan Karadzic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last Thursday, news reports were largely devoted to the March 22, 2016 Brussels terror bombings and the US primary campaigns. And so little attention was paid to the verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for (former) Yugoslavia (ICTY) finding Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic guilty of every crime it could come up with, including "genocide".
- The Internet and Monopoly Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A review of Robert W. McChesney's Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy.
- Interview with director of "Like"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The director of a documentary about Bangladeshi workers who get paid to "like" Facebook posts discusses the people and ideas behind her film.
- An introduction to the Indian Ocean slave trade
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Indian Ocean slave trade encompassed Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with people from these areas involved as both captors and captives. The numbers of people enslaved and the exact length of the trans-Indian slave trade have not been definitively established, but historians believe that it preceded the transatlantic enslavement by centuries. Even though it is largely ignored as an international slave trade, examples of its impact abound. Writing on Indian Ocean slavery frequently mentions African people in China and Persia as well as in the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which also served as central slave markets.
- The Invention of Nature: adventures of Alexander Humboldt, lost hero of science
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Andrea Wulf's book about the remarkable 19th century explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt is welcome, opportune and a pleasure to read, packed as it is with high adventure and amazing discoveries. We have much to learn from him today in tackling the world's environmental crises; reading this book is an excellent - and enjoyable - way to begin.
- Investing in the care economy: a gender equitable alternative to austerity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A new report by the United Kingdom (UK) Women’s Budget Group for the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) shows that sustained investment of public funds in childcare and eldercare services is worthwhile and that it is more effective in reducing public deficits and debt than austerity policies.
- The Iraq War Was an Act of Military Aggression Launched on a False Pretext: Remarks on the Chilcot Inquiry Report
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The following is a transcript of Jeremy Corbyn's remarks in the House of Commons.
- Iraq's greatest danger yet: collapse of 'world's most dangerous dam'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As if Iraq has not suffered enough under Saddam Hussein, the vicious UN sanctions regime, the US-UK occupation and the depradations of Daesh, a new threat looms that could kill a million people or more, and destroy Baghdad and a string of other cities along the Tigris river. The porous rocks beneath the Mosul dam are dissolving away and the entire edifice could collapse at any moment, releasing 11 cubic kilometres of water.
- Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: Who Said What When
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This is a list of quotations is excerpted from Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars.
- Ireland Continues to Remember 1916 and Continues to Betray It (With Some Canadian Help)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Do you remember Ireland’s 1916 commemorations in late March? Do you remember the spectacle? Do you remember all those fighting words and strong images of national independence and national justice? The attention of the world was on Dublin for a few days and Dublin played the part of the rebel city. Well it was all a bit too real and too popular. And for that reason it had to be officially repressed as soon as possible.
- Ireland's Unfinished Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The revolutionary period sparked by the 1916 Easter Rising offered a vision of a truly democratic Ireland.
- Is Law Enforcement "Going Dark" Because of Encryption? Hardly, Says New Report
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Unbreakable encryption -- which prevents easy, conventional surveillance of digital communications-- isn’t a big problem for law enforcement, says a report published by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The report, titled "Don’t Panic," finds that we are probably not "headed to a future in which our ability to effectively surveil criminals and bad actors is impossible" because of companies that offer end-to-end encryption, such as Apple.
- Is renewable energy really environmentally friendly?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Renewable energy sources may have low CO2 emissions at the point of use, but the mines that make the technology possible are often environmentally destructive.
- Is there a vast cowspiracy about climate change?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Cowspiracy movie review: Cowspiracy's argument is based on badly flawed and almost unanimously rejected interpretations of science. Actual science and scientists are practically absent among the many talking heads in the film.
- Is This Class Warfare?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Is there a conspiracy to keep wages from rising or is it just plain-old class warfare? Well, what do you know? Everywhere the global bank cartel has its tentacles, wages are either flatlining or drifting lower."Coincidence", you say? Not bloody likely, I say. There's either policy coordination between the various heads of state and their central banks or wealthy elites have secretly seized the levers of power and imposed their neoliberal dogma when no one was looking.
- ISIS and the Far Right: a Joint Assault on Multicultural Countries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 ISIS's assaults on multicultural countries is to provoke the non-Muslim people of those countries to reject their millions of Muslim fellow-citizens.
- ISIS Was Born In An American Detention Facility (And It Wasn't Gitmo)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The US seems to have a knack for creating, incubating, and training its future enemies. As the late Chalmers Johnson showed in BLOWBACK, this pattern goes back quite far and includes recent struggles with Islamist terrorists. In the 1980s, of course, the US armed and trained the Taliban as well as Osama Bin Laden as part of a proxy war with Russia. Years later, Bin Laden's criminal network, sheltered by the Taliban, attacked the US in Yemen, Kenya, New York, and more. In response to those attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, killing and detaining hundreds of thousands of men. At the time, many people wondered -- none more forcefully than Johnson -- whether the US response to blowback would engender more blowback.
- Islamic Extremism is a Product of Western Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 So what happened to bring Islamic fundamentalism to the forefront of global politics? While there are many factors involved, undoubtedly one of the primary causes is Western imperialism.
- Israel and Academic Freedom: a Closed Book
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It’s not by accident that free speech and association is under attack from coast to coast in ways unseen since the academic purges that targeted largely "radical" Jews of the 1950's brought to us by a guy named McCarthy. He too had this notion that good thought must necessarily adhere to a checklist of sanitized ideas. That safe speech and association demanded a line of logic dictated by the powerful and pervasive.
- Israel continues to sow the seeds of discontent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Israel, it seems, has found a new weapon against Palestinian attacks -- the humble cucumber seed. Soldiers have been handing out seeds at checkpoints with advice to Palestinians -- a nation of farmers until their lands were swallowed up by Jewish settlements -- to stop their recent knife attacks on Israelis and invest in a peaceful future.
- Israel lawfare group plans 'massive punishments' for activists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "Why are we using the word Palestinian? There’s no such thing as a Palestinian person," Brooke Goldstein declared to enthusiastic applause at a meeting of key Israel lobby operatives in New York earlier this month. Goldstein is the director of the Lawfare Project, a legal group that aims, in her words, to "make the enemy pay" -- that "enemy" being mainly comprised of Palestine solidarity activists and students.
The Lawfare Project was founded with the support of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an important forum for anti-Palestinian organizing in the US.
- Israel Moves to Check Its Artists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As a writer/photographer and a tax-paying American citizen, a story in the New York Times about Israel's culture wars made me cringe. It seems the powerful, militarist right in Israel -- so committed to expansion and settlements in the West Bank -- is now trying to suppress ideas among the nation's artistic and literary minds.
- Israel seeks to 'publicly shame' human rights groups
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Israeli government is being accused of implementing a campaign that criminalizes human rights groups.
- Israel spraying toxins over Palestinian crops in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Khan Younis, Gaza Strip - On January 7, 2016, a low-flying agricultural aircraft sprayed herbicides on to Palestinian farmlands along the eastern border, eradicating or damaging up to 162 hectares of crops and farmland along the Israeli border fence. The sprayed areas belong to Israel's unilaterally imposed and poorly delineated "buffer" or "no-go zone".
- Israeli Army Admits Tweeted Hezbollah Map Actually Fake
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Israeli media has been forced to admit a map purported to contain information on Hezbollah positions, distributed to foreign diplomats and on twitter, is a fabrication.
- Israeli fury at unofficial ads on London Underground
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Activists from London Palestine Action put up these posters criticizing Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians all over London's underground train network early Sunday morning. An activist from the group told The Electronic Intifada that they posted 150 copies around at least four different lines on the network.
- Israeli Military Censor Seeks to Expand Control to 'Prominent' Facebook Users
High-Profile Critic Ordered to Submit All Writing to Censors in Advance Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Israeli military censor usually tries to stay out of the headlines. It's not always easy, as several times high-profile Israel-related stories have broken in the US media first, and aren’t "allowed" in Israeli papers for days after.
- Israeli Myths: An Interview with Ramzy Baroud
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For many years, much of the Western world understood Israel based on a cluster of myths, from the early fables of the Zionists making the desert bloom, to Palestine supposedly being a land without people for a people without land. That intricately constructed and propagated mythology evolved over time, as Israeli hasbara laboured to provide a perception of reality that was needed to justify its wars, its military occupation, its constant violations of human rights and its many war crimes.
- Israeli rabbi who advocated rape of 'comely gentile women' during war becomes chief army rabbi
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 “New IDF Chief Rabbi: in times of war it is permissible for soldiers to "have sex with comely gentile women against their will".
- Israel's Bogus History Lesson
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It was presumably intended as an Israeli history lesson to the world. A video posted to social media by Israel's foreign ministry shows an everyday Jewish couple, Jacob and Rachel, in a home named the "Land of Israel". A series of knocks on the door brings 3,000 years of interruptions to their happiness. First it's the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians, Hellenists, Arabs, Romans, Crusaders, Mamluks, and Ottomans – all straight out of Monty Python central casting. Jacob and Rachel are forced by the warring factions to relocate to ever smaller parts of their home until finally they have to pitch a tent in the garden. Their fortunes change only with the arrival of a servant of the British Empire, who returns the title deeds. A final knock disturbs their celebrations. On the doorstep are a penniless Palestinian couple, craning their necks to see what goodies await them inside.
- Israel's Occupation Continues Because Economic and Political Elites Around the World Benefit From It
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 American-Israeli scholar and activist Jeff Halper, co-founder of The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, sought to discover the source of Israel's seeming immunity. He focused on Israel's arms trade, and argues that it was "parlaying its military prowess into political clout," as he writes in a book entitled War Against The People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification. Halper spoke with In These Times about the book.
- It's a Question of What Unites Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An interview with Harold Lavender on accountable structures, systemic change, and the peril and promise of alliances against gentrification.
- 'It's No Longer About Saying No': How B.C.'s First Nations Are Taking Charge With Tribal Parks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On June 26, 2014, the Tsilhqot’in Nation's 25-year court battle came to an end when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled the nation holds title to approximately 1,900 square kilometres of its traditional territory.
- It's Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 The path to a better world can't be found without knowledge of history. "It's Not Over" analyzes attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons for emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the political and economic crises of today. This history is presented through the words and actions of the men and women who made these revolutions, and the everyday experiences of the millions of people who put new revolutionary ideas into practice under the pressures of enormous internal and external forces. This is history that can be applied to today's struggles to shape our world, in which new ideas are emerging to bring about the economic democracy that is indispensable to a rational and sustainable future.
- It's Still the Iraq War, Stupid.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 No rational person could blame Jeremy Corbyn for Brexit. So why are the Blairites moving against Corbyn now, with such precipitate haste? The answer is the Chilcot Report. It is only a fortnight away, and though its form will be concealed by thick layers of establishment whitewash, the basic contours of Blair’s lies will still be visible beneath. Corbyn had deferred to Blairite pressure not to apologise on behalf of the Labour Party for the Iraq War until Chilcot is published.
- I've changed my mind on the gay cake row. Here's why
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Like most gay and equality campaigners, I initially condemned the Christian-run Ashers Bakery in Belfast over its refusal to produce a cake with a pro-gay marriage slogan for a gay customer, Gareth Lee. I supported his legal claim against Ashers and the subsequent verdict – the bakery was found guilty of discrimination last year. Now, two days before the case goes to appeal, I have changed my mind. Much as I wish to defend the gay community, I also want to defend freedom of conscience, expression and religion.
- Jamaica's Culture of Fear Allows Police to Get Away With Murder
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the past decade, the Caribbean island nation's police have killed more than 2,000 people - until recently an average of four people every single week, mostly young men in inner-city, marginalized communities.
- James Connolly: The Irish Rebel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Graphic History Collective is pleased to release GHC member Sean Carleton’s comic book, "James Connolly: The Irish Rebel." Written and illustrated by Sean, the comic book commemorates the life of Irish socialist James Connolly and the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.
- Jeff Sharlet (activist)
Wikipedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Jeff Sharlet (1942–1969), a Vietnam veteran, was a leader of the GI resistance movement during the Vietnam War and the founding editor of Vietnam GI.
- Jeremy Corbyn's supporters are so dangerous they took over the Labour Party before they were even born
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If you were cynical you might wonder if, despite their ability to reach out to people, Corbyn's opponents feel they'd be unlikely to beat him in a straight vote of members.
- Jerusalem: Colonized City
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An interview with author Thomas Abowd.
- the Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust - Key Texts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Blairites' crocodile tears are about defending empire, writes David Moyles in this introduction to The Jews, Israel and the Holocaust by Tony Cliff.
- The JFRP: For a New Communist Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Real change, the kind of change that Occupy Wall Street had hoped to start, can be achieved through -- I know you’re going to find this hard to believe -- a political party. I found it hard to believe, until I read Jodi Dean's book Crowds and Party. Jodi is here to explain to us how a political party can bring about real change.
- How the liberal class enabled the election of Donald Trump
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 In a filmed interview with Afshin Rattansi, John Pilger describes how the collusion and silence of America's 'enlightened' liberal elite, notably its journalists, helped create President Trump.
- John Pilger on Class Vs "Identity"
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 Award-winning journalist & film-maker, John Pilger describes the corrosive impact of "identity" politics and the loss of "class" as a tool to understand the world we live in.
- Journalism, Pro-GMO Triumphalism and Neoliberal Dogma In India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- June Days: Paris 1848
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The euphoria that set in after the revolution in February was short-lived among the workers in Paris.
- Junk Economics and the Parasites of Global Finance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Justin Ritchie intervieww Michael Hudson about economics and global finance.
- Just How Gray Are the White Helmets of Syria?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While thousands of humanitarian organisations around the world are struggling fiercely with diminishing support from governments and the public, one has achieved a surprising amount of support from Western governments in a surprisingly short period of time and gained a surprising attention from mainstream media and ditto political elites: The Syrian Civil Defence or White Helmets.
- Katrina, Climate Justice and Fish Dinners: Social Justice Lawyer Colette Pichon Battle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Colette Pichon Battle gave up a great job working as a corporate immigration lawyer in Washington DC to live in a tent in front of her flooded family home 50 miles from downtown New Orleans. She is now a much honored director of a small but powerful non-profit climate justice human rights firm advocating all along the Gulf Coast. Why the big change in her life? Katrina, climate justice and fish dinners.
- Keep your mouths shut
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The media coverage of union and Nuit Debout protests in France are evidence that publications and channels now serve only the wealthy and influencial.
- Key evidence in EU's risk assessment of glyphosate must not remain 'trade secret'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The chemical industry and the European Food Safety Authority are refusing to disclose key scientific evidence about glyphosate's risks, citing 'trade secrets' protection, writes Corporate Europe Observatory. They must be compelled to publish the 'mysterious three' scientific studies EFSA used to assess glyphosate as 'unlikely' to cause cancer to humans - contradicting the IARC's view.
- Key findings: The Panama Papers by the numbers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The largest cross-border journalism collaboration ever has uncovered a giant leak of documents from Mossack Fonseca, a global law firm based in Panama.
- Key to the Leap: Leave the oil in the soil
Movement Building Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ian Angus and John Riddell argue that using the Leap Manifesto as the basis for building a new socialist movement in Canada must include confronting the climate crisis and the power of Big Oil.
- Killer Instincts: When Police Become Judge, Jury and Executioner
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Those responsible for this policing crisis are none other than the police unions that are helping police officers evade accountability for wrongdoing; the police academies that are teaching police officers that their lives are more valuable than the lives of those they serve; a corporate military sector that is making a killing by selling military-grade weapons, equipment, technology and tactical training to domestic police agencies; a political establishment that is dependent on campaign support and funding from the powerful police unions; and a police state that is transforming police officers into extensions of the military in order to extend its reach and power.
- Killing Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 'Brexit' referendum vote, split 52% to 48% in favour of leaving the European Union, has been exploited by the 'mainstream' media to launch yet another assault on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
- Kingdom of the Unjust
Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 The co-founder of CODEPINK's research on the sinister nature of the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
- Koch Brothers View Universities As Propaganda Machines
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer’s new book, "Dark Money," includes details that bolster concerns publicized by UnKoch My Campus, and students and professors across the USA who have blown the whistle on Charles Koch’s co-optation of higher education programs. Universities are the spine of Charles Koch's lobbying model, which after four decades of finance has grown into an integrated network of professors, public relations agents, lobbyists, pundits, and politicians. Koch foundations started investing in campuses at an exponential pace, starting with just seven campuses in 2005.
- Kunduz Killers Go Free
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On the night of October 3, 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130 gunship repeatedly attacked a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Forty-two people were killed and dozens wounded. The US military plane conducted five strafing runs over the course of more than an hour despite MSF pleas to Afghan, US and Nato officials to call off the attack.
- Labor in the Age of Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Climate change must be stopped. But who will do the stopping? Who, in other words, could be the political subject of an anticapitalist climate revolution? Stefania Barca argues that this social agent could be, and indeed must be, the global working class. Yet to play this role, the working class must develop an emancipatory ecological class consciousness.
- Labor Organizing Across Israel's Apartheid Line: An Interview with Israeli Labor Activist Yoav Tamir
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Yoav Tamir is an organizer with the new Israeli labour union, Workers Advice Center, or WAC-MANN. WAC-MAAN was founded in the late 1990s as (as its name might suggest) a workers' advice center, and began organizing unions and negotiating contracts in 2010. A product of both deepening austerity within Israel as well as the wave of uprisings in the Arab world in 2011, WAC-MAAN organizes both across the racial line and across the Green Line, doing what no other labor organization in Israel or Palestine's history has done: create a multi-ethnic, bi-national workers' movement.
- 'Land Grabbing': exposing the impacts of large-scale agriculture on local communities
Film review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Agriculture is big business and with the EU pumping money at the sector, the corporate profiteers are holding all the aces. The documentary 'Land Grabbing' investigates what happens when well-financed agro-investors take over rural communities' land and water.
- Land of the Free? Harvard Study Ranks America Worst in the West for Fair Elections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 According to the EIP, U.S. elections scored lower than Argentina, South Africa, Tunisia, and Rwanda -- and strikingly lower than even Brazil. Specifically compared to Western democracies, U.S. elections scored the lowest, slightly worse than the U.K., while Denmark and Finland topped the list.
- Landless Workers' Movement on the True Origins of Brazil's Political Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Brazil's Landless Worker's Movement, MST, takes a profound look at Brazil's political crisis, how it affects the working class and how they must respond.
- A Last Chance for the World's Forests?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of 'core forest' -- remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive wildlife and ecological processes -- are vanishing even faster.
- Latest Corbyn Hit-Piece: He earns MP's Salary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If I hadn’t seen for myself that this article "exposing" Jeremy Corbyn was published on the Daily Telegraph’s website, I would have assumed it was a spoof from The Onion – an even more preposterous one than normal.
- Law Professor's Response to Black Lives Matter Shirt Complaint
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A first year law school student wrote a complaint about her professor having worn a Black Lives Matter T-shirt during class. Here is the professor’s response.
- Leak Ties Ethics Guru to Three Men Charged in FIFA Scandal
Secret documents show how deeply the world of soccer has become enmeshed in the world of offshore havens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Four of the 16 FIFA officials indicted in the United States used offshore companies created by Mossack Fonseca. Files show offshore companies used by some soccer players to hold money from image rights deals. Offshore revelations extend beyond soccer to other sports including hockey and golf.
- Leaked TTIP papers reveal 100% corporate sellout
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Secret documents leaked to Greenpeace from the EU-US TTIP negotiations show that environmental protection, climate change mitigation, consumer protection, public health and sustainability are sacrificed throughout to corporate profit and commercial interests.
- Leamington, Ontario: Growing Tomatoes in the Era of Free Trade
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Southwestern Ontario is the historic home of Canadian tomato growers. The bulk of the crop goes to processing, and since 1909 the dominant corporation had been H. J. Heinz, a food giant based in Pittsburgh. But in 2013 the Heinz Corporation was bought by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (26%) and 3G Capital (51%), based in Brazil. It was soon announced that they were planning to close their plant in Leamington. The story has been a snapshot of what has happened to the manufacturing industry in Ontario following the "free trade" agreements with the United States.
- A Leap Toward Radical Politics?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Leap Manifesto is, in a way, Canada's version of the burst of Left and socialist energies that have come with the Bernie Sanders campaign in the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Jeremy Corbyn leadership win in the Labour Party in Britain. As with these, the explosion of popular interest reflects general disquiet about the limits of recent protests demanding changes from the state but having no strategy to transform it, on the one hand; and disappointments with electoral politics and social democratic parties that only seem to reinforce neoliberalism, on the other.
- Left Behind by Good Friday
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In 1969 Bernadette Devlin traveled to the United States on a fundraising tour. At age twenty-two, she was the youngest woman ever elected to Westminster and already a veteran of the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement and the radical student group People's Democracy.
- The Left and the EU
Why Cling to This Reactionary Institution? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Why is it that many people who consider themselves left-wing have such difficulty grasping that the EU is a deeply reactionary institution? The mere fact that those running the EU present it as an internationalist venture dedicated to the creation of a world free of nationalist enmities does not make it so. If we want to examine the EU in its proper light, then we should ignore the high-flown rhetoric in which its supporters indulge, and consider its actual record. And what is the record of the EU, once we penetrate the obfuscatory rhetoric about ‘internationalism’ that surrounds EU policy? Without a doubt, that record is one that should cause those on the left now defending it acute embarrassment, as it starkly contradicts the ideals that the left has always claimed to uphold.
- A Legless Veteran's Struggle
Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, "The Legless Veteran" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Robert Goldstein's Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, "The Legless Veteran".
- Leonard Peltier: 'My Last Hope for Freedom'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Leonard Peltier is a political prisoner and Native freedom fighter who has been unjustly incacerated for 40 years. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee is ramping up efforts for Peltier's clemency under U.S. President Obama’s last year in office. This may be his last chance at freedom and justice. Find out how you can help achieve Peltier's freedom here: whoisleonardpeltier.info.
- Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology, 1976–1981
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This authoritative reference guide is a continuation of Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology, 1964–1975. It starts where the first volume left off, and highlights some of the seminal events and people involved in the fight for gay rights in Canada to the end of 1981.
- Lessons of the Egyptian Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 I almost cannot believe that five years have passed since the chants of "the people want to bring down the system" and "Bread...Freedom...Social Justice...Human Dignity..." Maybe this is because even in my cell I am filled with dreams of freedom and with hope.
- Let's Stop Google from Gobbling Up Our Schools
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In October of 2006, Google launched its Apps for Education, with Arizona State University being its first client. Today there are more than 25 million individual users in both K-12 and higher ed institutions, and 74 of the top 100 universities use Google apps for their university communications and software applications.
- LGBT: a Dissection
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "LGBT" is everywhere these days. But is it here to stay, or is it a passing fad? Where did it come from? Why was it promoted? By whom? And to what end? How did it acquire its seemingly endless variants? The acronym, in its many permutations, designates a movement very different from the gay liberation movement it evolved from. Some might see it as progress, expansion, and greater inclusivity, others as a tombstone for what was once a radical sexual liberation movement.
- Liberal Antiwar Activism is the Problem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Every election season, veterans and their families are used as political pawns. During the Democratic National Convention in Philly, the Khans, the mother and father of a Marine Captain who was killed in Iraq, conveniently filled the role for Hillary Clinton and the Neoliberals. At the Republican National Convention, Patricia Smith gladly took the stage for the Neofascists and talked about the death of her son and the non-scandal that is, Benghazi. In the meantime, anyone who opposes U.S. Empire is shit-out-of-luck when it comes to presidential elections and the two major parties. Here, we should commend Gary Johnson and Jill Stein for remaining principled in their views surrounding foreign policy, militarism, torture and surveillance. They’re the last of a dying breed.
- Liberal Condescension
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election, a debate has erupted on the liberal left about the best way to deal with working class people who voted for Trump. The disagreement, for many of the participants, appears to revolve around whether liberals ought to spend their time giving patronizing lectures about white privilege, or patronizing lectures about other aspects of reality. What people on both sides of the debate seem to share is the assumption that the job of middle-class liberals is to lecture the working class.
- The Liberal Hounding of Julian Assange: From Alex Gibney to The Guardian
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 At what point do we cry foul when we witness the abuse of a political dissident, one who dares to take on mighty vested interests? When his own state, the local legal system and the media all turn on him? When he is forced to seek sanctuary in a foreign embassy for many years, surrounded by state security forces threatening to arrest him if he leaves? When the world’s highest arbiter on the matter of his confinement, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, supports his case? When the state, legal authorities and the media ignore the ruling and continue to demand his arrest?
- Liberals' interim pipeline measures fall short
Band-aid solutions cannot fix deeply flawed pipeline reviews, environmental assessments Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Harper government’s 2012 environmental law rollbacks were a blunt-force trauma to the environmental assessment of pipelines. Last week, the new federal Liberal government prescribed band-aids for an ailing patient that needed more.
- Lies about Assange and UN human rights jurists imperil us all
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The defence secretary, 'comedians' on BBC Radio's News Quiz, and the entire media commentariat have ganged up this weekend up to pour mockery and poisonous lies over Julian Assange and the UN's human rights jurists. As they attempt to fight off the UN's 'guilty' verdict against the British state, they are putting dissidents at risk everywhere.
- Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics... and U.S. Africa Command
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the strangest news developments of our time is the way the media now focus for days, if not weeks, 24/7, on a single event and its ramifications. Omar Mateen's slaughter of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando is only the latest example of this. If no other calamitous or eye-catching event comes along (“‘Unimaginable’: Toddler’s body recovered by divers after alligator attack at Disney resort"), it could, top the news, in all its micro-ramifications and repetitions, for three or four weeks. Such stories -- especially mass killings, especially those with an aura of terrorism about them -- are particularly easy for strapped, often downsizing news outfits to cover. They are, in a sense, pre-packaged.
- "Lies, Lies and More Lies" - GMOs, Poisoned Agriculture and Toxic Rants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As as been well documented, it is the pro-GMO lobby/industry that distorts and censors science, captures regulatory bodies, attacks scientists whose findings are unpalatable to the industry and bypasses proper scientific and regulatory procedures altogether.
- The Lies of Neoliberal Economics (or How America Became a Nation of Sharecroppers)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Michael Hudson and Chris Hedges talk about how America become a nation of 'sharecroppers'.
- The Life and Resistance of a Chinese Worker
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Under China's labour management system, independent unionism is strictly banned, and the state's official trade union body monopolizes worker representation. That means that all of China’s 806,498,521 workers are barred from forming independent organizations to agitate for their interests -- in an economy where the poorest 25 percent of households own just 1 percent of the country’s total wealth, and where long hours, safety hazards, and authoritarian management define life in the factories. This official antagonism has not stopped the emergence of workers' resistance. The number of strikes has been increasing over the past two decades, and as Eli Friedman wrote last year, "on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place."
- Die Linke: Ten Years On
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Political organizations, particularly those committed to radical change, face their greatest tests in times of crisis. In 1914, German social democracy, the international socialist movement’s crown jewel, was brought to its knees by its inability to confront the outbreak of World War I. Two decades later, German Communism’s ultra-leftism proved similarly impotent in the face of the growing Nazi threat, and Europe's most powerful laboUr movement was decimated within a couple of years.
- Listening to Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Trump is a racist and misogynist. But the heart of his message spoke to legitimate working class concerns.
- The Living Legacy of Cornel West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 To some of his critics, West is a bitter intellectual prizefighter past his prime who feels the need to broadcast his paroxysms of rage over feeling snubbed by Obama.
- Living the Spanish Language as the Descendant of Afro-Caribbean Migrants in Costa Rica
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Several generations of the black population have been forced to fight in order to conserve the language they brought with them, and with it all of their accumulated history, wisdom, and identity. They struggle against the rejection of the mestizo majority as well as the governments in office, who have for years denied them Costa Rican nationality, despite being born in the country.
- The Logic of Murder in Israel: A Culture of Impunity in Full View of the Entire World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "Whether he made a mistake or not, is a trivial question," said an Israeli Jewish man who joined large protests throughout Israel in support of a soldier who calmly, and with precision, killed a wounded Palestinian man in al-Khalil (Hebron). The protesting Jewish man described Palestinians as 'barbaric', 'bestial', who should not be perceived as people.
- The Logic of Murder in Israel: A Culture of Impunity in Full View of the Entire World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "Whether he made a mistake or not, is a trivial question," said an Israeli Jewish man who joined large protests throughout Israel in support of a soldier who calmly, and with precision, killed a wounded Palestinian man in al-Khalil (Hebron). The protesting Jewish man described Palestinians as 'barbaric', 'bestial', who should not be perceived as people.
- London tube posters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Israel and its supporters are used to having the mainstream media repeat their talking points. We put up around 150 posters on the tube to shine a spotlight on the support Israel gets from the UK: the government, arms industry, and companies like G4S. Turns out the world loves/hates our tube ads.
- Long Distance High Tech State Terror
Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Andrew Cockburn's Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins.
- The Looting Stage of Capitalism: Germany's Assault on the IMF
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Having successfully used the EU to conquer the Greek people by turning the Greek "leftwing" government into a pawn of Germany's banks, Germany now finds the IMF in the way of its plan to loot Greece into oblivion.
- The Lost Partisans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Italy's April 25 holiday marks the anniversary of the country's liberation from fascism. This day in 1945, antifascist partisan units freed the northern industrial centers of Milan and Turin from the grip of Hitler and Mussolini's remaining loyalists, after Allied forces had swept through the country. Just three days later, in a humiliating epitaph to the twenty-year regime, partisans captured and executed il Duce and his entourage, hanging them upside down in Milan's Piazzale Loreto. Now the resistance is remembered more as representing 'national unity' than working-class resistance to fascism.
- Luxembourg Puts Journalist and Whistleblowers On Trial for Ruining Its "Magical Fairyland" of Tax Avoidance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Luxembourg istrying to throw two French whistleblowers and a journalist in prison for their role in the "LuxLeaks" exposé that revealed the tiny country’s outsized role in enabling corporate tax avoidance.
- Machines
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 The documentary captures the hardships and daily life of workers in a large textile factory in Gujarat, India. Director Jain takes the audience to a place of pre-industrial working conditions and dehumanizing labour that ultimately shows the huge divide between the first world and developing countries. Runtime: 75 min.
- The Mad Violence of Casino Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 American society is morally bankrupt and politically broken, and its vision of the future appears utterly dystopian. As the United States descends into the dark abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism, the unimaginable has become imaginable in that it has become possible not only to foresee the death of the essential principles of constitutional democracy, but also the birth of what Hannah Arendt once called the horror of dark times.
- Mahmoud Darwish, A Poet's Complex Trajectory
Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Khaled Mattawa's Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation.
- Making Green Jobs Good Jobs
Unions organize the clean energy sector Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Jobs versus the environment -- it's an old dilemma that pits unions seeking work for their members against activists rallying against projects like the Keystone XL. An expanding renewable energy sector might provide a way out of this quandary. Solar and wind energy projects can put people to work without imperiling the planet. But will these jobs be friendly to workers, as well as the environment?
- Making Race Disappear
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Black lives are discounted in the eyes of whites and official arms of the state. It is not conspiracy theory to say this. It is hard fact.
- Making the Promises Real: Labor and the Paris Climate Agreement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As nearly 200 nations gathered in Paris approved the UN Climate Change Agreement, the AFL-CIO issued a statement that broke new ground on climate. While the AFL-CIO opposed the Kyoto climate agreement and never supported the failed Copenhagen agreement, it applauded the Paris climate change agreement as "a landmark achievement in international cooperation" and called on America "to make the promises real."
- Missak Manouchian
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Missak Manouchian (1906 - 1944) was a French-Armenian poet and communist activist.
- Maple syrup farmers lose fight against fracking pipeline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A family of maple syrup farmers in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania cannot stop their trees being cut down to make way for a new fracking pipeline project owned by billion dollar oil companies, a federal judge ruled Friday. The Holleran family opposes the seizure of their maple grove to make way for the new 124-mile-long Constitution Pipeline. The group faced contempt of court charges for obstructing tree cutting on their property.
- Mapping American Social Movement Through the 20th Century
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 This collaborative project features maps and other visualizations showing the chronological geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics during the 20th century, including radical movements, labor movements, women's movements, many different civil rights movements, environmentalist movements, and more. Includes interactive maps of more than 1,500 underground, alternative, and other kinds of unorthodox publications from the decade between 1965 and 1975.
- Mapping American Social Movements Through the 20th Century
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 These interactive maps below more than 1,500 underground, alternative, and other kinds of unorthodox publications from the decade between 1965 and 1975.
- Marx as a Food Theorist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Marx developed a detailed and sophisticated critique of the industrial food system in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, in the period that historians have called "the Second Agricultural Revolution." Not only did he study the production, distribution, and consumption of food; he was the first to conceive of these as constituting a problem of changing food "regimes" -- an idea that has since become central to discussions of the capitalist food system.
- Marx and the Earth
An Anti-Critique Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Published: 2017 John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett respond to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx, offering a full-fledged anti-critique. They thus extend their earlier pioneering work on Marx’s ecology, providing the basis for a new red-green synthesis.
- Marx the Feminist?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the face of global economic crisis and the dismantling of social programs under austerity policies, many feminists are re-engaging Marx's critique of capitalism. This return to Marx is necessary if we are effectively to overcome gender oppression, especially since the latest trends in feminism -- or at least those "fit to print" and discussed in the popular press -- place the onus of equal treatment squarely on women's shoulders. Newfound feminists like Sheryl Sandberg advise women to "lean in" and adjust their behaviour to suit the aggressively entrepreneurial norms rewarded in the real world that men lead. As Nancy Fraser aptly puts it, these tendencies within feminism serve as "capitalism’s handmaiden": such identity-centered, cultural critiques have helped obscure capital's dependency on gendered oppressions.
- Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The recovery of the ecological-materialist foundations of Karl Marx’s thought, as embodied in his theory of metabolic rift, is redefining both Marxism and ecology in our time, reintegrating the critique of capital with critical natural science. Marx's materialist conception of history is inextricably connected to the materialist conception of nature, encompassing not only the critique of political economy, but also the critical appropriation of the natural-scientific revolutions occurring in his day.
- Marxism and LGBT politics: a new wave of discussion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Colin Wilson reviews Peter Drucker's book Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism.
- Marxism and the Petition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Many petitions operate only on the reformist appeal to authority (this is especially true of the many online petitions from sites like Change.org), which fits perfectly within the liberal democratic framework. But the petition can operate on more than one level. Its dual nature means that it is often an indispensable tool in building collective power for more radical ends.
- Marxism and the Anthropocene
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As you read this article every breath you take in contains about 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, around a third more than your great grandparents breathed 100 years ago. As well as leading to potentially catastrophic global warming, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has changed the way plants photosynthesise and has also made seas and lakes more acidic, more so than they have been for the last 800,000 years. The effect human activity is having in the world is on such a huge scale that, for a growing number of thinkers, Earth has entered a new geological epoch defined by human activity. Using the Greek word Anthropos (human) they propose to name this epoch the Anthropocene.
- Marxism.ca
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 A gateway to resources about Marxism compiled by Connexions.
- Marx's Ecological Notebooks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This article investigate Marx's natural-scientific notebooks, especially those of 1868, which will be published for the first time in volume four, section eighteen of the new Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe(MEGA). As Burkett and Foster rightly emphasize, Marx's notebooks allow us to see clearly his interests and preoccupations before and after the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867, and the directions he might have taken through his intensive research into disciplines such as biology, chemistry, geology, and mineralogy, much of which he was not able fully to integrate into Capital.
- Marx's Theory of Working-Class Precariousness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the last decade and a half the concept of worker precariousness has gained renewed currency among social scientists. This trend grew more pronounced after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, which left in its wake a period of deep economic stagnation that still persists in large parts of the global economy. Most scholars define precariousness by reference to what workers lack, including such factors as: ready access to paid employment, protection from arbitrary firing, possibility for advancement, long-term job stability, adequate safety, development of new skills, living wages, and union representation.
- The May 18 Gwangju democratic uprising
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The text is by the official May 18 History Compilation Committee of Gwangju. A detailed account of the May 18 popular uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, against the dictatorship's declaration of martial law and for workers' rights in 1980.
- May '68 Revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Mitch Abidor recently spent weeks in France tracking down people who came of age politically in May 1968, to ask them how they viewed that experience, then and now. He went out of his way (with 1–2 exceptions) to talk to people "unknown," in contrast to the "stars" who feature in so many accounts of May. He talked with anarchists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, and even anarchists who had become Stalinists later. We publish this short summary of his results in Insurgent Notes because we like his direct, unvarnished access to participants, while taking our distance from some of his interpretations, which are subject to debate. We (the editors of Insurgent Notes) found Mitch's results sobering, if not downright deflating, because his subjects across the board say that the French working class in May 1968 was not revolutionary.
- The meaning of the school testing obsession
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This article focuses on the new frontiers for the calculation of human productivity in its earliest forms, in early years education in Britain; but the general points are applicable across continents and educational age-phases. It will be argued that the English baseline test is just one example of the policing of capital's interests in our classrooms, but a particularly pernicious one for the way it reaches deep into the experience of the youngest children.
- The Media Against Jeremy Corbyn
The British media has launched an unprecedented campaign of disinformation against Jeremy Corbyn Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The British media has never had much time for Jeremy Corbyn. Within a week of his election as Labour Party leader in September, it was engaging in a campaign the Media Reform Coalition characterized as an attempt to "systematically undermine" his position. In an avalanche of negative coverage 60 percent of all articles which appeared in the mainstream press about Corbyn were negative with only 13 percent positive. The newsroom, ostensibly the objective arm of the media, had an even worse record: 62 percent negative with only 9 percent positive.
- MEDIA IN CRISIS - 1: Why feds should step in to help democracy's watchdogs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A flourishing, capable news media is the oxygen of democracy. In Canada, our traditional oxygen-providers, the mainstream corporate-owned newspapers, are dying. We need to come up with something better to serve our communities.
- MEDIA IN CRISIS - 2: Citizens, government need to plan now to have quality media in future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Canada's mainstream media are in a state of incipient meltdown. They no longer deliver the volume or quality of news that Canadians need to be informed about important happenings in their communities, let alone to participate in a healthy democratic process.
- Media More Outraged by Possible Murder by Putin Than Definite Murder by Obama
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The British government, whose foreign policy is overtly hostile to their Russian counterpart, declared last week that their investigation into the killing of a former Russian intelligence agent in London nearly a decade ago concluded there is a "strong probability" the Russian FSB security agency was responsible for poisoning Alexander Litivenko with plutonium. They further declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin "probably approved" of the act.
- The Media's Emphasis on Russian Hacking is a Diversion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It's highly likely that the flurry of reports on alleged Russian hacking has more to do with a rejection of the status quo than with the act of clandestine meddling.
- Medic Who Killed Palestinian Being Portrayed as 'National Hero'
DM Slams Coalition Members for Backing Execution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Tensions within Israel's extremely narrow right-far-right coalition continue to grow, as the military's investigation into an Israeli medic who shot and killed an already wounded and disarmed Palestinian has become a cause célèbre for the settler movement and for hawks in general.
- Meet the Robin Hood of Science
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The tale of how one researcher has made nearly every scientific paper ever published available for free to anyone, anywhere in the world. On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it.
- Memorial Essay: Benedict Anderson
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The reception of Imagined Communities took its author by surprise. Anderson was like a person who posts a home video online and then discovers the next morning that she is an international celebrity.
- Menwith Menace: Britain's Complicity In Saudi Arabia's Terror Campaign Against Yemen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 'mainstream' Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Since March 2015, a 'coalition' of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and France, has been dropping bombs on neighbouring Yemen. The scale of the bombing is indicated in a recent article by Felicity Arbuthnot - in one year, 330,000 homes, 648 mosques, 630 schools and institutes, and 250 health facilities were destroyed or damaged.
- Messer-Kruse's Haymarket History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book reviews of Timothy Messer-Kruse's two works The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age and The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks.
- Mikmaq say Bay of Fundy developments could harm endangered fish
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 In Nova Scotia, people are concerned about the impacts of big projects on endangered fish in one of the world’s most famous waterways. Two projects are being considered by the province on the Bay of Fundy. Its high and low tides are also home to a number of fish that are on the endangered species list.
- Military Spending is the Capitalist World's Fuel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It is common for activists to decry the enormous sums of money spent on the military. Any number of social programs, or schools, or other public benefits could instead be funded. Not least is this the case with the United States, which by far spends the most of any country on its military. The official Pentagon budget for 2015 was $596 billion, but actual spending is far higher. (Figures for 2015 will be used because that is the latest year for which data is available to make international comparisons.) If we add military spending parked in other portions of the U.S. federal government budget, we’re up to $786 billion, according to a study by the War Resisters League. Veterans benefits add another $157 billion. WRL also assigns 80 percent of the interest on the budget deficit, and that puts the grand total well above $1 trillion.
- Millions of people yearning for a "Brexit" from destructive trade deals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While the votes for Brexit, and the support for Trump, may not always choose the best political framing, politicians and elites would be arrogant to dismiss the widespread discontent with the status quo.
- Milosevic exonerated, as the NATO war machine moves on
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 When Slobodan Milosevic, the former Present of Yugoslavia, was put on trial in 2002 for alleged war crimes, the Western mainstream media went into full hue-and-cry mode in denouncing the man they called "The Butcher of the Balkans." Milosevic's guilt was taken as a given. Anyone who dared to challenge the NATO line was labeled a Milosevic apologist, or a genocide denier, Now, fourteen years later, and ten years after Milosevic died in a prison cell in The Hague without ever having been convicted of anything, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has quietly issued a report which states that, er, well actually, Milosevic was not guilty. That piece of news has been met with complete silence in the same media that trumpted Milosevic's guilt.
- The Mine Wars: West Virginia's Coal Miners March on Public Television
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This riveting history of southern West Virginia's coal industry eventually caught the eye of a national television network.PBS is premiering a two-hour documentary called The Mine Wars as part of American Experience, the network's flagship history series.
- Misrepresenting the White Working Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In McDowell County -- the poorest county of West Virginia , people were open to, even preferred, a real alternative to Trump and Clinton.
- Misrepresenting the White Working Class: What the Narrating Class Gets Wrong
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Most of the time the white working class is invisible in the U.S. But during elections there is a flurry of attention to this "demographic" among political reporters and operatives.
- The Missing Piece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A strong, independent labour movement could lead the struggle for democracy and justice in the Philippines. Rodrigo Duterte's revolution, at least so far, looks like nothing more than a reshuffling of the country's political elite. The election seems to mark a period of continuity, not progressive change, in Philippine politics.
- Monitoring the Miners: Rio Tinto, Drones and Surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Management at the mining giant Rio Tinto have ambitions to take the technology of monitoring employees to another level – quite literally-drones.
- More Propaganda Than News Coming Out of Aleppo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The dominance of propaganda over news in coverage of the war in Syria.
- More tear gas in in Artvin, Turkey as anti-mining protests enter 7th day
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Hundreds of activists gathered in the Black Sea province of Artvin, Northwest Turkey, to oppose plans to build a gold mine in the area. Police again used tear gas and batons to disperse the angry crowd.
- More Than a Few Rogue Cops: the Disturbing History of Police in Schools
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Another week, another video of police abuse surfaces. This time the video shows San Antonio school resource officer Joshua Kehm body-slamming 12-year-old Rhodes Middle School student Janissa Valdez. Valdez was talking with another student, trying to resolve a verbal conflict between the two, when Kehm entered and attacked her. "Janissa! Janissa, you okay?" a student asked before exclaiming, "She landed on her face!" In a statement on the incident, co-director of the Advancement Project Judith Browne Davis wrote, "Once again, a video captured by a student offers a sobering reminder that we cannot entrust school police officers to intervene in school disciplinary matters that are best suited for trained educators and counselors."
- Mortgage Companies Seek Time Travelers to Find Missing Documents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Recruiters are hiring for a job that shouldn’t exist: finding "missing" documents required to "complete" broken chains of title on mortgages entering foreclosure. Since all assignments of mortgage should have been prepared and recorded within days of the transfer or sale -- and the failure to do so irreparably ruptures chain of title -- the companies would seem to be looking for time travelers or magicians.
- Most US Jewish students don't see Israel as 'civilized' or a 'democracy,' Luntz tells secret anti-BDS conference
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Minister Gilad Erdan has organized a secret conference in Jerusalem, with 150 top supporters of Israel.
- Moving forward while celebrating Palestinian art's past
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Unlike Other Springs, on display at the Birzeit University Museum in the occupied West Bank through the end of June, pulls off the heavy feat of looking back while moving forward. Conceived as both a celebration and retrospective, the exhibition is guest curated by the museum's formidable founder, the renowned artist Vera Tamari, who oversaw its transformation from the Ethnographic and Art Museum at Birzeit University into the center of contemporary Palestinian and international art that it is today.
- Moving Target
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 Ruby rides in the backseat of an armoured car while a bodyguard rides shotgun. As a human rights advocate working in Colombia, she speaks out onbehalf of victims of the long-running conflict between government paramilitaries and FARC guerrillas, and dedicates her life to justice despite having to live in fear.
- Mozambique's Movement to End Land Grabs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 To corporations, the forest is only business. To communities, the forest is everything: trees, medicine, culture, spirituality. Land-grabbing and the removal of communities from forests and land breaks the community, displaces access to food and water, and uproots the connection to nature and [local] knowledge. There is an old saying in Africa: the land doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to our children, and the children of our children.
- Muhammad Ali: Free Black Man
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Muhammad Ali spoke truth to power. Even after he became ill with Parkinson's disease and eventually lost much of his verbal skills, he stood by his militant spirit and youth. He never apologized for his words or action.
- Murray Bookchin's New Life
Whatever their limits, Murray Bookchin's ideas should be studied by today's left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Murray Bookchin spent fifty years articulating a new emancipatory project, one that would place ecology and the creative human subject at the centre of a new vision of socialism. Here is a thinker, who in the early sixties, declared climate change as one of the defining problems of the age. Bookchin saw the environmental crisis as capitalism's gravedigger.
- My Mother, Stopped for Driving While Black
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 When the police pulled their guns on my mother, I reached for my phone and told her to be calm and do as they say. My parents and I had just been swarmed by police cars, sirens blaring, as we drove on I-64 through Virginia. Shock and fear consumed my family as we came to a stop and were ordered out of the vehicle at gun point. A third car even showed up to stop traffic. The officers then arrested my mother without any explanation. I felt helpless.
- The myth of the 'brutal savage' and the mindset of conquest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 'brutal savage' meme has enjoyed a resurgence in popular culture and establishment narratives, despite abundant evidence that it's fundamentally wrong. But it suits today's dominant mindset of conquest, conflict and colonialism all too well, and serves to justify the ongoing genocide and expropriation of surviving Indigenous Peoples today.
- The myth of the reactionary white working class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This identity-based presentation of Tuesday's election is a false narrative exploded by the most basic analysis of the data from the election.
- The myth of the reactionary white working class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Following the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, the Democratic Party and media have attributed the results to the ignorance, backwardness and inherent racism and sexism of the "white working class." This identity-based presentation is a false narrative exploded by the most basic analysis of the data from the election.
- The Mythology Of Trump's 'Working Class' Support
His voters are better off economically compared with most Americans. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It's been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump's candidacy as a "working-class" rebellion against Republican elites. Narratives like these risk obscuring an important fact about Trump's voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump's voters are better off.
- The Nagorno-Karabakh Story the US Does Not Want You to Know
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the early morning hours of April 1-2, 2016, Azerbaijan launched a major military offensive into the disputed region Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) that's been controlled and defended by NK Armenian forces since the Russian brokered truce ended a bloody three year war in 1994. While Azeri President Ilham Aliyev was flying back to Baku after meeting 24 hours earlier with John Kerry in Washington who claimed "an ultimate resolution" had been reached, Azerbaijan was already once again at war with the NK Armenians.
- Narrating American Antifascism
Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Christopher Vials' Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States.
- The Nation is Not Divided and Still Prefers Bernie Sanders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The reportage of the presidential primaries has been heavy on personalities and the latest numbers, and light on information useful to voters. Comparisons to a horse race are apt. Were the news to take a documentary approach instead, the campaigns would be revealed as they are: something existing contrary to the public's interests.
- NATO Prepares for War: Confrontation and Insanity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The US-NATO military alliance is gearing up for war, and its meeting 8-9 July, 2016 is yet another step to nuclear confrontation and a gigantic leap backwards in world sanity. The gathering in Warsaw, capital of implacably anti-Russia Poland (NATO member since 1999, when the US-inspired military push towards Russia's borders gathered further momentum), is a symbol of Western determination to menace Moscow.
- Nauka i jej wrogowie
Polish translation of Science and its Enemies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Navajo Diné Fight Uranium Resources Inc. Mining Permits In New Mexico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Navajo Diné community have notched up a victory over Uranium Resources Inc. decades old plan to dig for uranium at Crownpoint and Churchrock, New Mexico, by successfully appealing a state permit for the Colorado company to dump waste into the Westwater Canyon aquifer.
- Nazi Zombies Ate Gloria Steinem's Brain!
Why US Politics Turns Ordinary People into Drooling Morons Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The problem, in a nutshell, is this: when people decide to support a prospective candidate in the US primary races they are putting themselves in the position of defending the indefensible. The very nature of this politico-Darwinist death match means that once you pick your chosen leader you must reject all criticism and suppress all doubt. You must become aggressively defensive and you must, above all, prevent your own wayward brain from thinking those bad thoughts that weaken the image of the immaculate leader. Any chink in their armour will be exploited by the enemies that surround them. Loyalty must be automatic and unconditional. Vigilance must be constant.
- Neoliberalism Is a Political Project
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 David Harvey gives his views on what neoliberalism is, how it unfolds, and what resistance to it looks like.
- The Network
Leaked Data Reveals How the U.S. Trains Vast Numbers of Foreign Soldiers and Police With Little Oversight Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- The New Far-Right Government in Poland
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 IN asked a European comrade who spends a lot of time in Poland to comment on a recent article, "Poland: Anti-government rallies continue as Lech Walesa warns of civil war," in the (Trotskyist) World Socialist Web Site.
- New Film Tells the Story of Edward Snowden; Here Are the Surveillance Programs He Helped Expose
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Oliver Stone's latest film, "Snowden," bills itself as a dramatized version of the life of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the global extent of U.S. surveillance capabilities.
- The New Global Financial Cold War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Interview with Dr. Michael Hudson, a financial economist and historian.
- New GMOs are 'not GM' -- EU folds under US pressure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The EU Commission has caved in to US pressure in TTIP trade talks by deciding to consider organisms modified by new "gene editing" techniques as non-GM -- in violation of the EU's own laws. The move could make the 'new GMOs' exempt from labeling and from health and environmental testing.
- The New Red Scare
Reviving the art of threat inflation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An examination of miltary escalation through the Cold War, and how the United States continues to use 'threat inflation' as a means of increasing military spending by pointing towards China as well as renewing fears of Russia.
- New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning described this phenomenon: "If we think that authorities are watching our online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain things just to avoid seeming suspicious."
- New videogame gives you a tough course in capitalist theory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The video game Crisis Theory aims to teach players about capitalism.
- A New Wave of Climate Insurgents Defines Itself as Law-Enforcers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Grassroots movement organizations from every continent will hold a global week of action called Break Free From Fossil Fuels in May 2016. They envision tens of thousands of people mobilizing worldwide to demand a rapid transition to renewable energy. Events will include nonviolent direct actions targeting extraction sites or infrastructure; pressure on political targets to shift policies around fossil fuel development; and support for clean energy alternatives.
- New York Police Have Used Stingrays Widely, New Documents Show
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices.
- The New York Times Outrage at Trumps Refusal to Demonize Russia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Donald Trump is criticized by the American media for behaving in a diplomatic manner towards Russia, as opposed to vilifying Russia.
- The New York Times Suddenly Embraces International Law To Condemn Russia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As the Syrian Arab Army dug in for a fight against the self-declared Islamic State on September 17, they were struck by an air raid that killed 62 soldiers and injured 100 more. The culprit was a foreign military that has never been attacked by, and has not declared war on, Syria. Two weeks later, that same nation’s military killed 22 soldiers in a strike inside Somalia, another country which it had never been attacked by nor declared war on. The very next day the New York Times published a stinging editorial decrying flagrant violations of international law by an "outlaw nation."
- The NGO-Industrial Complex - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Review of "Paved with Good Good Intentions: Canada's development NGOs from idealism to imperislism" by Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay.
- Nine Out of 10 Americans Tested Positive for Monsanto's Cancer-Linked Weedkiller Glyphosate
A probable human carcinogen is found in far too many foods Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If you participated in the glyphosate test project launched last year by the Detox Project (formerly Feed The World) and Organic Consumers Association, you probably failed. A staggering 93 percent of Americans tested positive for glyphosate, according to the test results, announced on May 25, 2016.
- 1956: Hungary's lost revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 21st century anti-capitalist movement owes a debt to the heroic and inspiring working-class uprisings in Hungary.
- No Shortcuts
Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Examines case studies of successes and failures of labour and social movements in recent history, arguing for the need for mass organization and bottom-up organizing which empowers ordinary people at the community level.
- No Unity of the Police and the Community is Possible or Desirable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 After the police murders of Alton Sterling, 37, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile, 32, of St. Paul, Minnesota, we are asked to embrace the police, to form a partnership, to work together. From President Barack Obama on down, Democratic and Republican party politicians have called upon the police and communities to unite to solve our common problems.
- No way to remember anything
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An analysis of the 2011 Egyptian revolution reproduces the same mistakes on the left that led to the revolution’s defeat in 2013.
- Noam Chomsky and Over 100 Intellectuals Denounce 'Savage' Media Treatment of Britain's Jeremy Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "We do not expect journalists to give any elected leader an easy ride," a letter published in The Guardian and signed by more than 100 intellectuals reads, "but Corbyn has been treated from the start as a problem to be solved rather than as a politician to be taken seriously."
- Noam Chomsky Announces Las Vegas Residency
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Noam Chomsky tells Al Jazeera "I'm not an absolute pacifist"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In an interview with Al Jazeera English’s flagship current affairs show, 'UpFront', MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky, a long-standing critic of US foreign policy and overseas interventions, said he supported U.S. air strikes against ISIL.
- The noble cause of the Heathrow 13
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With the 'Heathrow 13' protestors expecting custodial sentences today for their occupation of a Heathrow runway last July, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP writes that their direct action followed years of official lies and broken promises, and forms part of a long tradition of direct action protests in defence of democracy.
- The Nonviolent History of American Independence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Often minimized in our history books, the tactics of nonviolent action played a powerful role in achieving American Independence from British rule. Benjamin Naimark-Rowse wrote, "the lesson we learn of a democracy forged in the crucible of revolutionary war tends to ignore how a decade of nonviolent resistance before the shot-heard-round-the-world shaped the founding of the United States, strengthened our sense of political identity, and laid the foundation of our democracy.'
- Not Such A Lonely Crusade
The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Brian Dolinar's The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation.
- Notes on a Future Politics - Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the aftermath of the 2016 US election, Garvey argues that no variety of liberalism, progressivism or social democracy will be adequate for addressing the multiple global crises of capitalist society nor will they be adequate for providing a genuine alternative to the many millions of people who are drawn to varieties of populist or fascist politics.
- Notes on a Future Politics? Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This essay is intended to enable those of us associated with Insurgent Notes and others to imagine how we might contribute to the emergence of an emancipatory, anti-capitalist mass politics in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.
- NSA learning how to snoop on pacemakers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The NSA is seeking new ways to satisfy its hunger for raw data by exploiting the so-called internet of things, an emerging network connecting objects such as vehicles, home appliances and biomedical devices. "We're looking at it sort of theoretically from a research point of view right now," the spy agency's Deputy Director Richard Ledgett told a conference on military technology at Washington's Newseum on Friday.
- NSW protesters: 'We will break these laws'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "This is a law to protect the rich. We will need to break these laws to protect our democratic rights," Aboriginal activist and lead NSW Senate candidate for the Socialist Alliance team in the federal elections Ken Canning, said on March 15, 2016. Canning was addressing protesters who had occupied the road outside State Parliament following a rally, called by Greens MLC David Shoebridge, against the state government's new laws attacking the right to protest.
- The NYPD Is Kicking People out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven't Committed a Crime
And it's happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The morning of May 4, 2011, Jameelah El-Shabazz watched out the window of her Bronx apartment as a team of police officers fanned across the rooftop of Banana Kelly High School. The 43-year-old mother of five said she didn’t think much of the scene -- drug raids were common in her neighbourhood.
- NYT Advocates Internet Censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The New York Times wants a system of censorship for the Internet to block what it calls "fake news," but the Times ignores its own record of publishing "fake news."
- Obama to sign AIPAC-promoted trade bill that legitimizes Israeli occupation and fights BDS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The U.S. Senate has passed the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 by a 75-20 veto proof margin. The large trade policy bill includes anti- BDS trade legislation promoted by AIPAC and introduces new U.S. policy language by including all "Israeli-controlled territories" as part of Israel.
- The Occupation of the American Mind
Israel's Public Relations War in the United States Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 An eye-opening look at pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S. Narrated by Roger Waters and featuring leading observers of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the film explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel's favour.
- Occupying Trump?
Five years after its formation and demise, Occupy is mostly a study in what to avoid for the anti-Trump movement. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Instead of creating a movement that materially attacked the institutions of the 1 percent, many members of the Occupy movement vowed to transform themselves and raise awareness at the individual level. Some responses to Trumpism have fallen into the same trap - treating the election as an opportunity for soul-searching or a reason to rail against individual Trump voters.
- Occupying Trump?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Five years after its formation and demise, Occupy is mostly a study in what to avoid for the anti-Trump movement.
- Off the Rails - The Rise and Fall of the Streetcar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A history of the streetcar in the United States, beginning with the need for a modern, cost-efficient form of public transit, to its surging popularity, and ending with the General Motors conspiracy that sought to destroy rail-based public transit.
- The Old Braceros Fight On
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Dozens of men assemble to remember their lives as contract guest workers in the United States and discuss the latest news or lack thereof in their decades-old movement to recover the 10 percent that was deducted from their paychecks and supposedly deposited in a savings account created for the return to Mexico under the old Bracero Program.
- On Activism and Organizing: There is a Distinction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What's the difference between an organizer, an activist, and someone who is just plain fighting for their life, on a personal level? Often, there is no discernible distinction, as these roles often blend together in ways that could never be separated. But for some people, there is no such complexity. I point this out because, in recent years, there has been a verbal shift in social justice spaces towards referring to everyone involved as an organizer. As a person who believes that we too often negate the meanings of words by transforming them into umbrellaed concepts, I have to say my piece about the matter.
- On Brexit, Borders, Being Offensive (But not being in a Hollywood movie)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Kenan Malik recently gave a long interview to Dutch journalist Marco Visscher about Brexit, migration, democracy, politics, being offensive, growing up in racist Britian, and not being in a Hollywood movie. The interview has been translated from English to Dutch then (roughly) back to English, so may not read very coherently in places. Malik has edited it lightly. It was published in Knack under the headline Het 'Europese migratiebeleid is ten diepste immoreel' (‘European migration policy is deeply immoral’).
- On Lenin and the Right to National Self-Determination
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 I’d suggest that the Leninist formulations of policy on the national question do not deserve to be taken seriously as poles of debate on the matter. More precisely, they should be viewed as all but completely hypocritical.
- On the Frontlines of Peace
The Life of Daniel Berrigan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Certain events in one's life often determine the choices made later in that same life. These crucial events can be of a personal nature -- a romance, a family death, the birth of a child, or something less universal -- or they can be events that take place in the public sphere. One such event of the latter category in my life occurred May 17, 1968.
- On the Nature of Police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Having a group of reluctant citizens charged with the enormous responsibility that came with being a cop was preferable.
- On the Uprisings in France
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 At the beginning of March 2016, France's now ultra-liberal Socialist Party (PS) government officially revealed a labour reforms bill whose objective was to promote the competitiveness of businesses operating in France. The bill, commonly referred to as the El Khomri (the country's Labour Minister) law, was instantly perceived by most leftist factions as a fundamental attack on workers rights and a downright sabotage of the French Labour Code ("Code du Travail"), considered one of Europe's most progressive. The law allows for companies to reach "agreements" with its staff over working conditions without the need to negotiate with trade unions, subjecting workers to employers' arbitrary decisions (in regards to longer hours and lower overtime pay) without any legal protection. It also facilitates mass sackings and individual lay-offs by relaxing French law's constraint on firing and hiring, and casts aside the sacrosanct 35-hour work week in favour of a lengthened, more "flexible" one.
- One by One, South Sudan Tries to Name Its War Victims
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In South Sudan, where a vicious civil war has been raging, no government office or nongovernmental organization has kept a tally of the names of those killed by government forces, rebels, and other armed groups. But in a country in which automatic weapons are more plentiful than civil rights, and local journalists are regularly under assault, a tiny civil society group is trying to step into the breach by naming all of the names. It began on the first anniversary of the civil war's outbreak, when a small group of volunteers unveiled a list of 568 names of the people - from toddlers to centenarians - killed in the war to that point. Naming the Ones We Lost was a first step in what the organizers knew would be a long journey to grapple with the immense loss of South Sudanese life over the previous year. Today, the project goes by a slightly different name, Remembering the Ones We Lost, and has a radically expanded mission with a recently launched website [http://rememberingoneswelost.com/main]. The goal of the website is nothing short of remarkable - it aims to name all victims of conflict and armed violence in South Sudan since 1955.
- 100,000 California Indians Killed During Gold Rush Genocide
Bloody Gold; the California Gold Rush and state sponsored genocide Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Legislation with roots in Manifest Destiny and dehumanization helped lead Euro-Americans to commit the greatest act of genocide in American history.
- One Palestinian Man's Mission to Make Urban Agriculture More Sustainable
Life and Health are the most precious things humans can have Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Introducing Said Salim Abu Naser, a proponent of sustainable agriculture living and working in Gaza City, Palestine, along the Mediterranean Coast. Abu Nasser has created a 200-square-meter (2,000-square-foot) micro-farm using a hydroponic system and homemade organic pest-control solutions consisting of garlic, pepper, soap and more.
- One woman's brush with Sharia courts in the UK: "It ruined my life forever"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The UK government is conducting an inquiry into the operation of Sharia courts which is being boycotted by a number of women's organisations because its remit is too narrow, and the panel of judges is not seen as 'independent' enough. Parallel to this, the Home Affairs Committee has also launched an inquiry into whether the principles of Sharia are compatible with British law.
- Only in America: an Indiscreet Selfie Can Put A Kid in Prison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Did you know that if you are an American under 18 years old and you use your cell phone to send a nude "selfie" of yourself to a friend, you can be convicted of manufacturing and distributing "child pornography" and sent to prison? This is how expansively prosecutors, whose main purpose in life is to ruin as many people as possible, interpret laws passed to protect children from sexual exploitation.
- An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ta-Nehisi Coates recently criticized the Bernie Sanders campaign for Sanders’ pessimism regarding black reparations for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. When asked during a campaign event whether he would support reparations, Sanders responded with characteristic bluntness, saying that "its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil," before adding that a push for formal reparations for slavery would be politically divisive.
- An Open Letter to the British Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Dear friends and comrades, To a foreigner who has been living and working in the United Kingdom for the last sixteen years, the immediate post-referendum situation appears highly paradoxical. It seems as if the shock has been of such a magnitude that even the most celebrated British virtues -- sense of humour, understatement and, above all, solid common sense -- have faded away.
- Open Source Software: a necessary tool to build our movements | What's Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Software companies are exploitative and other companies should invest in unionized products, condem work to lower wages and act in solidarity with other workers in the software industry.
- Operation Smoke and Mirrors: In the Chicago Police Department, If the Bosses Say It Didn't Happen, It Didn't Happen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On May 31, 2016, the city of Chicago agreed to settle a whistleblower lawsuit brought by two police officers who allege they suffered retaliation for reporting and investigating criminal activity by fellow officers. The settlement, for $2 million, was announced moments before the trial was to begin.
- The Opposite of Transparency: What I Didn't Read in the TIPP Reading Room
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 TTIP, the EU-US free trade deal, has secrecy written all over it. Those responsible for it live in dread of any public scrutiny. If it was up to me, I would give everyone who's interested the chance to make up their own minds on the text of the agreement in its current form.
- Organic Farmers Are Not Anti-Science but Genetic Engineers Often Are
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Henderson argues that biotechnologists conflate anti-science with anti-genetic engineering, and that genetically engineered crops are being commercialized without proper testing.
- Organic Farmers Are Not Anti-Science but Genetic Engineers Often Are
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- The Organized Left and the Death of "Pragmatic" Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Shifting political winds are battering the establishment, as the breeze flows to the back of the populists. The left-populist Bernie Sanders didn't conjure the hurricane but adjusted his sails to it. As the political storm grows apace with rising income inequality, new social attitudes are bringing fresh expectations, transforming politics as we know it.
- Organizing In Mexico: It's Tough, Often Brutal, And It Means Taking On The State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The system in Mexico operates to the detriment of independent unions. Although the Mexican system of labour relations initially conferred real benefits on workers and peasants whose organizations supported the government, it now functions to maintain a status quo where benefits flow only to corrupt union leaders.
- Orlando: Home-Grown Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In some ways the most shocking thing about Orlando may be that it's hardly shocking at all, in context. Only the scale is unusual.
- Oscar Hangover Special: Why "Spotlight" Is a Terrible Film
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 I am astonished (though I suppose I shouldn't be) that, across the past few months, ever since Spotlight hit theatres, otherwise serious left-of-centre people have peppered their party conversation with effusions that the film reflects a heroic journalism, the kind we all need more of. I was in Boston in the Spring of 2002 reporting on the priest scandal, and because I know some of what is untrue, I don't believe the personal injury lawyers or the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team or the Catholic "faithful" who became harpies outside Boston churches, carrying signs with images of Satan.
- The Other Slavery
The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 16, 2016
Working class organizing Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Working to change things for the better, fighting to prevent things from getting worse, remembering the past to illuminate possibilities for the future: as always, that is the focus of Other Voices. In this issue, we pay special attention to working class organizing. There can be no meaningful change without the active participation of the majority of the population: working people. Yet much activism ignores this obvious reality, while the organized labour union movement has put much of its reliance on 'professionals' who see organizing as a top-down technique rather than a grassroots movement. Several articles in this issue look at aspects of these issues. We also delve into the relationship between feminism and socialism, and look at the so-called 'sharing economy,' which produces increasingly exploited and precarious work, and immense profits for super-rich corporate owners.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 30, 2016
Conflict of interest Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 This issue of Other Voices shines a light on the murky world of conflict of interest, the hidden reality that often underlies appearances of neutrality, objectivity, and due process. Conflicts of interest are inherent in capitalism, a system founded on the premise that the state and society should be subordinated to economic self-interest and the accumulation of private wealth. Scientists who are supposed to be studying the effects of GMOs are funded by agribusiness corporations. Doctors who receive money from pharmaceutical companies write articles promoting the drugs produced by those companies. Decisions about pipelines are made by regulators who have spent years working in the oil industry, and who will be heading back to jobs in the industry after their stint 'regulating' it. Politicians receive campaign funds from corporate lobbyists.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 20, 2016
Connexions Enters Its Fifth Decade Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 This issue of Connexions Other Voices falls on the 40th anniversary of the publication of the very first Connexions newsletter, which was published in February 1976. That first issue carried the title "Canadian Information Sharing Service", which was also the name of the collective which compiled it, from submissions from across Canada. Within a couple of years, the name of the publication became "Connexions" and then, a little later, "The Connexions Digest".
In addition to our own history, in this issue we spotlight black history as our topic of the week. We look at the Haitian revolution, when slaves confronted the French empire and won; black resistance against the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, and the meaning and limits of anti-racism. We also look at the Kurdish liberation movement in Rojava, the dangers posed by geoengineering, and we mark the publication of the Communist Manifesto on February 21, 1848.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 5, 2016
International Women's Day Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 In this issue of Other Voices, we mark International Women's Day. An article written by Alexandra Kollontai in 1920 talks about the early history of this event, which grew out of a proposal put forward by Clara Zetkin at the 1910 International Conference of Working Women. A key focus at that time was winning the vote for women, with the slogan "The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism". The link between women's rights and socialism became even clearer a few years later, in 1917, when a Women's Day march in St. Petersburg turned into a revolutionary uprising which led to the overthrow of the Czar and the Russian Revolution.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 26, 2016
Forests and trees Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 For countless centuries, forests, and the trees in them, have been seen as sources of life, livelihood, and spiritual meaning. For capitalism, however, forests are sites of extraction and profit-making, or obstacles in the way of 'development.' In this issue, we look at some of the threats to forests worldwide, and the ways in which people are resisting and defending the forests.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 9, 2016
Corporate Crime Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Corporations have increasingly become legally unaccountable for their behaviour. Yet all too often corporations break the law and engage in criminals acts which would be severely punished if they were committed by ordinary individuals. These illegal acts range from deliberate health and safety violations that cost lives, to land seizures, to environmental negligence that contaminates lands and waters. Most of these illegal acts are never prosecuted, and those that are, are usually dealt with by a fine that corporations can treat as a cost of doing business.
There are movements demanding that corporations be held accountable for their crimes in a serious way, and, specifically, that corporate executives should face jail time when the corporation they are in charge of engage in behaviour that causes death, injury, and illness. Our topic of the week for this issue of Other Voices is Corporate Crime, and a number articles, as well as a book, a film, and a website, explore aspects of the problem.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2016
Science and its enemies Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - May 7, 2016
Destabilization and Regime Change Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 When governments get too far out of line -- the most outrageous offence, from the point of view of imperial power, is pursuing policies that help ordinary people at the expense of transnational corporations and local elites -- then they have to be overthrown. The preferred method is a destabilization campaign followed by a coup. This issue of Other Voices focuses destabilization and regime change.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - May 7, 2016
Tax Evasion Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Employing a network of accountants, tax lawyers, corporate shells, tax havens, secret bank accounts, and other methods, the 1% have become extremely adept at evading even the low rates of taxation they are subjected to.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 18, 2016
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 This issue of Other Voices features a wide range of issues. The topic of the week is homophobia, the hate that led to 49 deaths in Orlando last week, but which is present in greater or lesser form in every part of the world.
We are always concerned, not only with what is wrong with the world, but what to do about it.
This issue carries an excerpt from Umair Mohammed's book 'Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism' in which he warns against the pitfalls of individualist and consumer-oriented approaches and argues in favour of collective action to build an effective movement.
Derrick Jensen considers some of the arguments in favour of pacifism and finds them wanting. He agrees that creative approaches to social change can oftentimes make violence unnecessary, but that sometimes violence is a necessary response to violence.
Another article looks at the decline of liberation theology, targeted as a threat by both the Vatican and secular power structures.
Kenan Malik considers the issue of "cultural appropriation" and asks why so many on theso-called left are more interested in criticizing Justin Bieber's hairstyle than in fighting capitalism.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 2, 2016
Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, and Contempt for Democracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Brexit, the British vote to leave the European Union, has thrown the political elites into turmoil and confusion. The referendum was supposed to be a safe political manoeuvre, a way to produce an appearance of democratic legitimacy for the profoundly undemocratic structures of the EU. The gambit turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation, as millions of people turned out to express their opposition to a state of affairs that is leaving the majority worse off while enriching a small minority. This issue of Other Voices looks at the Brexit referendum, elite loathing for democracy, and the related attempt to get rid of Labour's leftwing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 23, 2016
Workers and Climate Change Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Working people -- and most of us are workers -- are affected by climate change in every aspect of our lives. As climate change worsens, our lives will worsen. If we are successful in bringing about the needed rapid change away from a fossil fuel based economy, working people are the ones who stand to bear most of the costs, including the cost, for millions of workers and their families, of losing their jobs.
Many elements of the environmental movement have been guilty of ignoring working people, while others actually blame ordinary working people for climate change and the injustices associated with it. Yet it is working people who are dying, in many places, even now, from excessive heat in factories, fields, construction sites, and homes. And million of working people stand to lose their jobs, homes, and communities in the transition to a low-carbon or no-carbon economy.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - August 13, 2016
Sports and Politics Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Sports and politics have always been intertwined, though perhaps never as much so as in the current era. In the modern sports era, survival and success depend largely on the favour of corporations, whose power to provide or withhold funding and sponsorships now shape every aspect of sport, including athletes' incomes and lifestyles. It is now difficult to remember that only a few decades ago, corporate logos were strictly forbidden at Olympic events, while athletes were prohibited from accepting any kind of payment for their involvement in sports. The corporate conquest of sports closely parallels the corporate colonization of nearly all aspects of modern life. Accompanying this in recent years has been the increasing injection of militaristic content into sports spectacles. In Canada, hockey games are now commonly preceded by rituals honouring militarism. In the United States, similar spectacles have been staged for years. In this issue, we feature resources which remind us that resistance to the commercialization, corporatization, and militarization of sports is also part of our heritage.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 10, 2016
Back to School Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Education - about the world, and about social change in particular - is a key element in the work that Connexions does. In this issue of Other Voices, we explore a few aspects of the ways in which education and educational institutions are changing. We also look at ways in which education is used to bring about change.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 7, 2016
Depression and Joy Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 It's a difficult thing to measure, but there are strong reasons for believing that the number of people struggling with depression has increased significantly in recent decades. Despite the evidence that this is a social problem, and not merely an individual misfortune, the solutions and escapes on offer are almost all individual: pharmaceuticals and therapy, on the one hand; self-medication with alcohol, streets drugs, television, etc., on the other. Certainly there are individual circumstances and individual causes, but when millions of people are experiencing the same thing, we need to be looking not only at the individual, but also at the society.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 27, 2016
Alternative Media Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 A special issue on alternative media.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 20, 2016
Fake News Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 "Fake news" is the latest mania to convulse the mainstream media. All at once, we're being subjected to an outbreak of hand-wringing articles and commentary about obscure websites which are supposedly poisoning public opinion and undermining democracy by spreading "fake news." Since we don't like to be left out when a new fad comes on the scene, Other Voices is jumping on the bandwagon too, with this, our last issue of 2016, devoted to "fake news." Our focus, however, is not so much on the crackpots and trolls making mischief on the fringes, but on the dominant actors in the fake news business: governments and the corporate and state media.
- Our Guns, Our Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For the past several decades, this country has been periodically caught up in anti-gun fear and hysteria, some generated deliberately by self-serving political forces and some by presumably well meaning liberals whose knowledge of firearms - and of hunting and sensible individual/family self-defense - usually adds up to Zero.
- 'Our Only Fear Was That He Might Pull His Punches' - BBC Caught Manipulating The News
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2016 The position of BBC political editor plays an important role in this propaganda system. His or her function is essentially to tell the public what leading politicians say or even 'think'. It is certainly not to question power or challenge government authority in any meaningful way.
- Our 10 pledges to rebuild and transform Britain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Jeremy Corbyn - 10 Pledges to Rebuild and Transforme Britain: Full employment and an economy that works for all; A secure homes guarantee; Security at work; Secure our NHS and social care; A national education service, open to all; Action to secure our environment; Put the public back into our economy and services; Cut income and wealth inequality; Action to secure an equal society; Peace and justic at the heart of foreign policy.
- Ours to Hack and To Own
The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision For the Future Of Work and A Fairer Internet Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 The activists who have put together Ours to Hack and to Own argue for a new kind of online economy: platform cooperativism, which combines the rich heritage of cooperatives with the promise of 21st-century technologies, free from monopoly, exploitation, and surveillance.
- Out in the Open
Remarks on the Trump Election Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With the Republicans' monopoly control over the government, even those who normally focus on electoral politics must realize that for some time to come the main struggle will be outside the parties and outside the government. It will be grassroots participatory actions or nothing.
- Outrage Against Big Pharma! Activists Protest "Obscene" Conference
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It was in their fancy tailored suits and with suspicious eyes that Big Pharma CEO's and investors got interrupted by protestors as they came and went from the (too-big-to-fail) JP Morgan-sponsored conference on "health care" (read: profit care) at the elite Westin St. Francis hotel on Union Square in San Francisco on Monday, the 11th of January 2016.
- Outrage as plant bosses acquitted over fatal toxic spill in Hungary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Prosecutors had demanded prison terms for those on trial after alumina works disaster killed 10 and wrecked villages.
- Paid Off in Passion: The Life Lessons of John Ross's Rebel Reporting
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A book review of Rebel Reporting, written by Cristalyne Bell and Norman Stockwell.
- Pakistan: The hell of sexual harassment in the workplace
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In increasingly competitive Pakistani work situations, women continue to be targets for men with power.
- Pakistan's Gramsci: Remembering Sibte Hasan (1916-1986)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 2016 marks the birth centenary of Pakistan's own Gramsci, the pioneer of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) in undivided India and of the Communist Party in Pakistan, Sibte Hasan. Like the famed Italian thinker and activist, Hasan endured repeated jail terms, first during his sojourn in the United States, and then in Pakistan in 1951-55, and again during the Ayub dictatorship. It's surprising that despite Hasan’s iconic stature in the Indian subcontinent, very little is known about his biographical details.
- Palestine's 'Prayer for Rain': How Israel Uses Water as a Weapon of War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Israel has been 'waging a water war' against Palestinians, according to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah. The irony is that the water provided by "Mekorot' is actually Palestinian water, usurped from West Bank aquifers. While Israelis, including illegal West Bank settlements, use the vast majority of it, Palestinians are sold their own water back at high prices.
- Palestinian villagers tilled their land so well, Israel is now confiscating it from them
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The separation barrier will cut residents of Al-Walaja from their lands by the end of the year; the beauty of the terraces they cultivated for decades was used as one of the main reasons for announcing the area a national park.
- Palestinians' access to water in 2015
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Thirsting for Justice finds that Palestinians' access to water was worse in 2015 than in 1995 due to Israel’s discriminatory water regime.
- Pan-Africanism, feminism and finding missing pan-Africanist women
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There are numerous women in the African Diaspora who have worked for the liberation of Africans under the banner of Pan-Africanism. They must be rescued from political obscurity. Pan-Africanism as a revolutionary ideology must firmly embrace feminism.
- The Panama Papers
Politicians, Criminals and the Rogue Industry That Hides Their Cash Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Panama Papers is a global investigation into the sprawling, secretive industry of offshore that the world’s rich and powerful use to hide assets and skirt rules by setting up front companies in far-flung jurisdictions. Based on a trove of more than 11 million leaked files, the investigation exposes a cast of characters who use offshore companies to facilitate bribery, arms deals, tax evasion, financial fraud and drug trafficking.
- Panama Papers show that capitalism is working perfectly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While corporate fraud is gargantuan in its scale, it is not the expression of a system that "isn't working". In fact, this is the way the system is designed to work.
- Panama Papers: The Power Players
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This interactive presentation produced by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) explores the stories behind the use of offshore companies of politicians and their relatives and associates -- more than 100 in all. Among them are 12 current or former country leaders and 33 other politicians and public officials with direct connections to structures in tax havens. Their names appeared inside a cache of 11.5 million leaked files from Panama's Mossack Fonseca, one of the biggest offshore service providers.
- Panamanian Law Firm Is Gatekeeper To Vast Flow of Murky Offshore Secrets
Files show client roster that includes drug dealers, Mafia members, corrupt politicians and tax evaders - and wrongdoing galore Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Founding partners of Mossack Fonseca had international pedigrees and backgrounds in the worlds of money, power and secrets. The law firm helps clients respond swiftly to changes in laws, shifting business from one secrecy jurisdiction to another. Among additional services offered are yacht and plane registrations, and, for some clients, handling of finances. Mossack Fonseca kept a low profile -- until recent scandals brought international attention.
- Pandora's box: how GM mosquitos could have caused Brazil's microcephaly disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In Brazil's microcephaly epidemic, one vital question remains unanswered: how did the Zika virus suddenly learn how to disrupt the development of human embryos? The answer may lie in a sequence of 'jumping DNA' used to engineer the virus's mosquito vector - and released into the wild four years ago in the precise area of Brazil where the microcephaly crisis is most acute.
- Patently Biased
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Journalists share responsibility for the increasing commercialization of scientific research.
- The path to power: 'Let's commit to the long haul'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The following discussion of strategy for social change, by Umair Muhammad, was first published under the title "An Altered Position," as an afterword to the second edition of his book Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism.
- Peaceful warrior: Permaculture visionary Bill Mollison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Australian educator, author and co-inventor of Permaculture, Bruce Charles 'Bill' Mollison, died on the 24 September 2016 in Sisters Creek, Tasmania. He has been praised across the world for his visionary work, and left behind a global network of 'peaceful warriors' in over 100 countries working tirelessly to fulfill his ambition to build harmony between humanity and Mother Earth.
- Pemulwuy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Pemulwuy (aka Pimbloy, Pemulvoy, Pemulwoy, Pemulwye) (c1750 - 2 June 1802) was an Aboriginal Australian man born around 1750 in the area of Botany Bay in New South Wales. He is noted for his resistance to the European settlement of Australia which began with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. He is believed to have been a member of the Bidjigal (Bediagal) clan of the Eora people.
- A Pen to Battle Fascism
Remembering George Seldes (1890-1995) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 During the course of his life, George Seldes repeatedly accused the American Press of "covering itself in filth" when glorifying fascist regimes, no matter how brutal and undemocratic, as long as it was in the name of anti-Communism.
- Pentagon Spent Over $500 Million Making Fake Al-Qaeda Videos
Troops Would Litter Videos Around Sites of Raids Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It has already been well-documented that the Pentagon spent a substantial amount of money on propaganda during the occupation of Iraq, running pro-occupation commercials and also covertly getting pro-occupation news stories into the media around the region. It turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. It has now been revealed that there was a third program ongoing, in which a London-based PR agency was paid $540 million to make fake al-Qaeda propaganda videos for Pentagon use.
- Pentagon's War on the Earth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We are waging war. We are the Nation of War. We destroy. We kill. Everyone fears us. Fewer and fewer admire us. But our fighting forces -- and their attendant industries which manufacture the bombs, bullets, and ballistic delivery devices -- also wage a war on the clean air, clean water, and clean soil many Americans falsely regard as protected by legislation fought for by those trying to protect our environment.
- People power: how Montana stopped the biggest coal mine in North America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Campaigners are celebrating after defeating plans to build America's largest open pit coal mine. In an epic 'David and Goliath' battle, Montana activists challenged the project, and all the politicians and businessmen that supported it, with fierce opposition, protests and demonstrations. The outcome spells hope for all in the fight against dirty energy.
- The Perfect Organizer - Almost
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Fred Ross, Sr. was as close to the perfect embodiment of the myth of the organizer as is humanly possible. Cesar Chavez called him "my secret weapon". In "Finding and Making Leaders," Nicholas Von Hoffman, Saul Alinsky's favorite organizer, said, "The good organizer ... judges his work a success when he can leave the organization without even being missed. He is rare, rarer than first-rate leadership, but he exists ... and he can work in almost any situation."
- Petroleum Disaster in the Great Bear Rainforest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Outrage is the only word for what people are feeling after a tug and fuel barge, owned by Texas-based Kirby Offshore Marine, crashed on rocks in the heart of B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest on October 13, 2016. It’s been leaking 200,000 litres (59, 024 gallons) of diesel fuel into the sensitive marine ecosystem ever since.
- Pharma Greed Run Amuk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Congress, especially its GOP members, created the Martin monster. Martin Shkreli is only one of the monsters the GOP Congress has created. Probably our best hope is that one or many, like Shkreli, will overreach in an outrageous greed that our government has condoned for decades. Like errant spoiled children, pharmaceuticals (Pharma) have run roughshod over an obliging Congress and a consuming public since politicians -- in effect -- gave them license to steal.
- Philanthropic colonialism: embedding agribusiness and GMOs into African agriculture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Perhaps all the 'do gooders' busy forcing industrial models of agriculture onto poor but independent African farmers really do think they are helping them. But if so they are deeply deluded. All they will achieve is the takeover of export-oriented agribusiness and GMOs, the destruction of agroecological farming systems, and a future of debt and landlessness.
- Philippines islanders unite to resist 'land grab' palm oil companies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Farmers on Palawan are being tricked into giving land away to palm oil companies with local government support, writes Rod Harbinson. Under the palm oil company 'leases' the farmers lose all rights to their land, never receive any money, and are saddled with 25 years of debt. Those who resist the land grabs are now in fear for their lives following the murder of a prominent campaigner.
- Philippines secret death squads: officer claims police teams behind wave of killings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Thousands of people have been killed since Rodrigo Duterte became president and, according to one officer, secret police teams are partly responsible.
- Philosophy journal spoofed, retracts hoax article
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A philosophy journal that focuses on the teachings of philosopher Alain Badiou has apparently fallen victim to yet another Sokal hoax, and has retracted a fake article submitted by authors trying to expose the publication's weaknesses. The paper, "Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-)Being-Queer," attributed to Benedetta Tripodi of the Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Romania, is apparently the work of two academics, who submitted the absurd article to Badiou Studies to expose its lack of rigor in accepting papers.
- Pipeline Rights vs Private Property Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The U.S. natural gas industry views private property with less reverence than it did when the shale gas revolution began 10 years ago. Companies are chomping at the bit to build new pipelines that will move natural gas and natural gas liquids to profitable markets. However, building a single long-haul pipeline is a timely and costly endeavour that often requires working with hundreds of individual private property owners to create a right of way.
- Planetary Crisis: We are not all in this together
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Liberal environmentalists insist that we are all passengers on Spaceship Earth, sharing a common fate and a common responsibility for the ship's safety. In reality, a handful of Spaceship Earth's passengers travel first-class, in plush air-conditioned cabins with every safety feature, including reserved seats in the very best lifeboats. The majority are herded into steerage, exposed to the elements, with no lifeboats at all. Armed guards keep them in their place.
- Police Blast #NoDAPL Activists With Water Cannons in Sub-Freezing Temps
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Law enforcement unleashed concussion grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures on peaceful water protectors battling the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota late Sunday.
- Police Go on Fishing Expedition, Search the Home of Seattle Privacy Activists Who Maintain Tor Network
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Seattle police descended on the Queen Anne condo of two outspoken privacy activists with a search warrant early this morning, leaving them shaken and upset. Jan Bultmann and David Robinson, a married couple and co-founders of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, said they were awakened at 6:15 a.m. by a team of six detectives from the SPD knocking on the door. Bultmann said were made to sit outside as the officers, who had a search warrant, examined their equipment.
- Police Intimidation: From Dalton Trumbo to Deep Green Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security agents have contacted more than a dozen members of Deep Green Resistance (DGR), a radical environmental group, including one of its leaders, Lierre Keith, who said she has been the subject of two visits from the FBI at her home.
- Political correctness demands diversity in everything but thought
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For 50 years I've been painstakingly cataloguing the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of US foreign policy, building up in the process a very loyal audience. To my great surprise, when I recently wrote about the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of the Islamic State, I received more criticism from my readers than I've gotten for anything I've ever written. Dozens of them asked to be removed from my mailing list, as many as I'd normally get in a full year. Others were convinced that it couldn’t actually be me who was the author of such words, that I must have been hacked. Some wondered whether my recent illness had affected my mind. Literally! And almost all of the Internet magazines which regularly print me did not do so with this article.
- Political Correctness: Handle with Care
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Racial, gender, and ethnic diversity matters, of course, but political correctness (PC) tied to bourgeois identity politics can be deadly to left thinkers and activists and to the causes of peace and social justice.
- The Political Is Political: In Conversation With Yasmin Nair
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An activist and writer based in Chicago, Nair is one of the founders of Against Equality, a group that was born in 2009, initially as an online archive of pieces that were critical of the gay-marriage movement and mainstream gay politics.
- Political Revolution -- What Is It?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The editors discuss Bernie Sanders' concept of a political revolution, as well as the terror attack in Orlando.
- Politics of the New Normal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For those of us on the socialist left, the biggest issue is what will come from the passion and commitment of millions of voters and tens of thousands of activists who are feeling the Bern.
- Politics on the Plate: Mob Wives, GMOs and Salt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 How can we broaden our movement to appeal to and involve the majority of people out there who do not seem to be aware, do not seem to care or are just too apathetic?
- Polyamory and Polygamy: Is the Media Right?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There are a few of repeated themes emerging in many of the articles railing against polyamorous marriage.
- Poor fetishes, poor critiques: gentrification as violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Hating on hipsters is not the answer to gentrification. If we want to reclaim our cities, we should organize for genuinely affordable housing in common, argues Gloria Dawson.
- PostCapitalism: A reply to Pete Green
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- The Postmodern Left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2016 The international Left promotes its own image rather than engaging in the bitter reality of resistance against neoliberalism. It does not need to believe in postmodernism because it is postmodernism.
- The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The rise of neoliberalism across the globe for decades, and its continued resilience since the 2007-2008 financial crisis in particular, forces us to ask why there has not been a more successful resistance against it.
- Poverty, Militarism and the Public Schools
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What's the difference between education and obedience? If you see very little, you probably have no problem with the militarization of the American school system -- or rather, the militarization of the impoverished schools ... the ones that can't afford new textbooks or functional plumbing, much less art supplies or band equipment. My town, Chicago, is a case study in this national trend.
- Power Games: A Political History of the Olympic Games
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016
- The Precautionary Principle: the basis of a post-GMO ethic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 GMOs have been in our diets for about 20 years. Proof that they are safe? No way - it took much, much longer to discover the dangers of cigarettes and transfats, dangers that are far more visible than those of GMOs. On the scale of nature and ecology, 20 years is a pitifully short time. To sustain our human future, we have to think long term.
- President Trump?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 No matter what happens, the old US party system is broken. Donald Trump is like no major candidate in living memory.
- Private Banks: Creating Money Out of Thin Air
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In his book The Joy of Tax: How a Fair Tax System Can Create a Better Society, Richard Murphy, UK Tax Justice Network co-founder, offers a radically pioneering approach to tax and fiscal policy. Murphy is one of the first economists to link tax policy to the 400- year-old reality that nearly all money is created by private banks out of thin air.
- Private Profits vs Public Policy
The Pharmaceutical Industry and the Canadian State Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 According to Joel Lexchin, "Given the central role that medicines play in keeping us healthy, it is essential that we understand the policy environment that governs drug development, from the initial basic research to the sale of the manufactured produces to the patients that use them."
- Progressive Movement Security and Self-Defense
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A comprehensive list of security measures organizers should take to protect themselves and their groups from government, corporate and right-wing surveillance and persecution.
- The Promise of a Revolution
Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, and the Origins of the Council Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Ralf Hoffrogge's Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, and the Origins of the Council.
- Propaganda Techniques of Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Washington’s quest for perpetual world power is underwritten by systematic and perpetual propaganda wars. Every major and minor war has been preceded, accompanied and followed by unremitting government propaganda designed to secure public approval, exploit victims, slander critics, dehumanize targeted adversaries and justify its allies’ collaboration. In this paper Petras discusses the most common recent techniques used to support ongoing imperial wars.
- Prospects for an Alt-Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Examining the limitations and issues with prevalent approaches of younger progressives and how a more effective 'alt-left' movement might be formed.
- Provoking Nuclear War by Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
- Psychiatry's 'Defect Model of Mental Illness:' a Path for Those it Has Failed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For some depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing people, it feels better to believe that they are essentially defective, as it provides them with a defense of sorts against insulting accusations that they are malingering. But the defect model of mental illness doesn't work for everyone.
- Public Servants or Corporate Security?
An Open Letter to Law Enforcement and National Guard in North Dakota Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Detailing the role of the National Guard and law enforcement services as protecting corporate interests opposed to public safety in the context of the North Dakota pipeline protest action, and appealing to these public servants to consider the impact and implications of their role in the conflict.
- Public transit is a women's issue
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Drimonis highlights the problem of sexual harrassment of female passengers and the failure of transit officials to address this problem.
- Puerto Rico: a Junta By Any Other Name
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Empire is once again fashionable. The financial crisis that is presently gutting the island of Puerto Rico plays out like the world's worst case of botched assisted suicide. The sell of its municipal funds and its constitutionally guaranteed promise of repayment to investors has plunged the island into a very precarious situation for its millions of citizens and the opportunity of a lifetime for hedge fund vultures.
- The Queer Movement Today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A year after marriage equality was legalized nationwide in the United States, and two months since the June 12, 2016 massacre at a gay club in Orlando, the LGBT movement confronts a contradictory future.
- Queer Progress
From Homophobia to Homonationalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 A political memoir by a leading gay rights and AIDS activist.
- A queer take on Safe Schools and identity politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In recent weeks, the debate over the Safe Schools Coalition anti-bullying program has intensified, taking what is in many ways a bizarre turn. The brief suspension of program architect Roz Ward from her position at La Trobe University has reopened the debate about whether Safe Schools is 'cultural Marxism' by stealth, the program once again coming under fire from conservatives across the country. Even trans advocate and member of the ADF Catherine McGregor has weighed in. One of the more interesting elements of this, however, has been the debate it has created about the role gender and sexual politics can and should play within Marxism. Here enters Guy Rundle. In the pages of Crikey, Rundle penned a treatise on the program and what he considers the failures of 'queer theory'. Rundle believes Safe Schools (via queer theory) presents the view that 'gender and sexuality are infinitely fluid'. He argues, however, that such a view denies the material realities of sexuality and gender, not to mention his view that 'almost no-one really believes it -- and they certainly do not let it shape their lives'.
- Rabbis deny 1 in 10 Jews the right to marry in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Supreme religious body faces growing backlash as critics compare Israel's religious freedoms to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
- Rabbis deny 1 in 10 Jews the right to marry in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Supreme religious body faces growing backlash as critics compare Israel's religious freedoms to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
- Race, class and the election of Trump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An analysis on the 2016 US presidential election.
- Race and class in the United States: J. Sakai and the politics of revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Doug Greene offers a critique of J. Sakai's 1989 work, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat.
- Race, class and police murder in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the aftermath of the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas, Texas on July 7, 2016, the American media and political establishment has sought to portray the police killings of unarmed people and widespread protests against police violence as proof of deepening and unbridgeable racial divisions in the United States.
- Race, Gender, and Class Politics in the US Primaries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The US has some of the largest feminist organizations in the Western world. I should also add that it has the largest organization for the elderly, the AARP. In spite of this, the US is the country where African Americans, women, and the elderly have fewer political, civil, and social rights. African Americans, women, and the elderly have the least health benefits among their equivalents in other developed countries. The primary reason for this underdevelopment of human rights is the absence of powerful socialist forces and parties, rooted historically in the working class. This reality, however, is rarely mentioned in the US. It is presented as too "ideological" or antiquated.
- Race Without Class: the "Bougie" Sensibility of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Racial Liberalism: The Case of Interwar Detroit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The paradox at the heart of contemporary racial politics is what sociologists and political scientists call "colorblind racism:" How is it that the United States is a country where racism is supposed to be politically, socially, and morally unacceptable yet simultaneously where inequalities are quite neatly organized along racial lines?
- Racialism, art and the Academy Awards controversy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Should artwork be categorized and presumably appreciated according to whether it represents a male or female, black or white perspective? Many critics, influenced by the prevailing ideology, set up this basic standard: women gain more from art produced by women, Jews from work created by Jews, African-Americans from "African-American art," etc. In ideological terms, these critics, in their obsession with race, are spouting a conception of society and art identified historically with the extreme right.
- Racist housing? How postwar suburban development led to today's inner-city lead poisoning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The lead poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan is just the tip of a vast iceberg of lead contamination afflicting mainly urban black communities. A rigid 'race bar' on postwar suburban housing and mortgages left black families in inner cities, exposed to flaking lead paint in run down housing, leaded gasoline residues and lead pipework. Now is the time to correct this shocking historic injustice.
- Racist of the year, Ian Khama: Not Botswana's finest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 General Ian Khama, the President of Botswana, and his frequent outbursts against the Kalahari Bushmen are among the most horrifying instances of racism of recent times. His sentiments are extremely troubling.
- Radical Digressions RSS Feed
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 New and interesting items from Radical Digressions, featuring progressive comment and analysis from a libertarian socialist perspective.
- Radical economics, Marxist economics and Marx's economics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The major global crises of the mid-1970s and 2008-9 provoked debates among the ruling class about the best economic policies to manage capitalism. For socialists and activists the question was different, and debates about whether and to what extent capitalism could be reformed to avert crisis and instil a more humane and fair system became even sharper.
- Radioactive waste and the nuclear war on Australia's Aboriginal people
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Australia's nuclear industry has a shameful history of 'radioactive racism' that dates from the British bomb tests in the 1950s. The same attitudes persist today with plans to dump over half a million tonnes of high and intermediate level nuclear waste on Aboriginal land, and open new uranium mines. But now Aboriginal peoples and traditional land owners are fighting back.
- Rainbow Capital, Queerness, and Black Lives Matter's Shocking Reformism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Though I support BLM’s policy goals and shock-tactics, their lack of analysis of the forces behind the oppression of Black and other people seems to put them in an awkward place. Their use of shock tactics makes them too radical for the reformists, while their emphasis on piece-meal reforms and little else alienates the radicals. It puts them in a kind of activist nether-space that makes unity difficult.
- Rainbows and Weddings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It is utterly ironic that not a hundred years ago the West tried to "civilize" us by criminalizing homosexual conduct, and now the West wishes to "civilize" us by decriminalizing the homosexual conduct that it criminalized in the first place, all the while producing us as the "barbarians" that they have the duty to correct.
- Raising Hell for Labor
Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Jane McAlevey's Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement.
- Rape as Colonial Legacy
The Beginning and End of Rape Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Sarah Deer's The Beginning and End of Rape.
- Rasmea Odeh's Appeal Gains
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Palestinian activist and Chicago community leader Rasmea Odeh is gaining ground in her struggle for a new trial, following her 2014 conviction for "unlawful procurement of naturalization."
- Reactionary Tide in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The oligarchic reaction against the leftist governments never ceased during the past 15 years, but now it has achieved some very substantial victories.
- Reading CAPITAL - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Review of "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital" by Michael Heinrich.
- Reading Eduardo Galeano Through Palestinian Eyes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano is best remembered for chronicling five centuries of colonialism, genocide, pillage, and structural inequality in the Americas. His pen dug through the bleeding heart of Latin America, unearthing forgotten stories of resistance, exploring the roots of injustice and exploitation, and amplifying the voices of the outcasts and misfits.
- Reading and Returning to Denise Levertov
A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Donna Hollenberg's A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov.
- The real cause of Trump: rampant neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Examining how the response from the traditional left to the 2016 US Election fails to recognize the failings of neoliberal policies and attitudes that contributed to the election of Trump.
- The Real Link Between Israel's Forest Fires and Muezzin Bill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Examines and contextualizes the discriminatory 'muezzin bill', which would ban the broadcasting of Muslim calls to prayer in Israel.
- The Real Secret of the South China Sea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The South China Sea is the ultimate geopolitical flashpoint of the 21st century. The future of Asia is at stake.
- The Realist's Dilemma
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Brazil's Workers' Party thought accommodating capital could save them. That was a grave mistake.
- Realities of Zionism - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Review of "Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution" by Moshe Machover and "False Prophets of Peace Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine" by Tikva Honig-Parnass.
- Reassessing Podemos
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Podemos has come an immense distance in a very short time. It represents a clear choice by millions of people in the Spanish state to vote against corruption, institutionalised greed and contempt for voters, but also against austerity. As such, it weakens the ruling class in the Spanish state and strengthens the anti-austerity side in Europe. The success of Podemos in December is a cause for celebration and a source for lessons and parallels.
- Rebranding The Conquistadors As Social Justice Warriors - The Guardian, Corporate Sponsorship And 'Branded Content'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Like most newspapers, the Guardian is struggling financially and is desperately worried about a dwindling stream of advertising revenue. The paper's declared intent of becoming 'the world's leading liberal voice', with rapid expansion in the US and Australia, has backfired, leading to the need for significant cuts including likely job losses. As a result, the paper is heading ever deeper into the murky world of 'branded content' to raise much-needed funds from corporate advertisers.
- Rebuilding A Class Movement
In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization in the United States Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Kim Moody's In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization in the United States.
- Recolonized by the Past
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It began as a campaign at the University of Cape Town to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood on the campus. For the protestors, the statue represented everything that Rhodes himself stood for: racism, colonialism, plunder, white supremacy, and the oppression of black people.
- Redeeming Chávez's Dream
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The world press, suddenly aware of the deepening crisis in Venezuela, is relishing in the Bolivarian Revolution's woes. But its coverage rarely goes deeper than images of poor people clamoring for food. The photos index the situation's seriousness, but they do not capture its complexity.
- Reflections on the Brussels Attacks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Debate and reflection are urgently needed with respect to the political violence that is being unleashed in various forms in the West and non-West.
- Refugees and Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The process of escaping violence has turned into a "journey of death" for millions of refugees. For Syrian refugees it is also a journey of "no return."
- Reimagining the Harper's Ferry Revolt
The Good Lord Bird Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of James McBride's The Good Lord Bird.
- Religious Zealots Ready for Takeover of Israeli Army
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In a surprise move, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week forced out his long-serving defence minister, Moshe Yaalon. As he stepped down, Yaalon warned: "Extremist and dangerous elements have taken over Israel." He was referring partly to his expected successor: Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose trademark outbursts have included demands to bomb Egypt and behead disloyal Palestinian citizens.
- Remembering Ahmad Rahman and Ron Scott
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Addressing the lives and accomplishments of Ahmad Rahman and Ron Scott.
- Remembering Argentina's Mothers of the Disappeared
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Campaign Nonviolence is a movement to build a culture of active nonviolence. We share the stories of nonviolent action, drawing lessons, strength, and strategy from the global grassroots movements for change. This week commemorates the 39th anniversary of the first protest of the Argentina's Mothers of the Disappeared.
- Remembering Nonviolent History
Freedom Rides Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 By May 1961, federal law had already ruled that segregation on interstate public buses was illegal. Southern states, however, maintained segregation in seating, and at bus station bathrooms, waiting rooms and drinking fountains and the Interstate Commerce Commission refused to take action to enforce federal law. To change this, the Civil Rights Movement (CORE, SNCC, NAACP) began a series of Freedom Rides on May 4th, 1961.
- The Repression in Bahrain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Bahrainis are calling their government's intensified repression of all opposition "the Egyptian strategy", believing that it is modelled on the ruthless campaign by the Egyptian security forces to crush even the smallest signs of dissent.
- Requiem for a Black Trotskyist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 News of the death of former United Auto Workers staff member Ernie Dillard came by way of a phone call on Bastille Day 2016. The subsequent silence about his passing in the radical and mainstream press is an accusatory reminder of the extent to which the memory of the Left has been confiscated from those who require it most.
- Rescuing Memory: the Humanist Interview with Noam Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Response to May '68 Revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 "May '68 was another step in the modernization of French capitalism." So was 1789, but it was a lot more too.
- The Retreat of the Intellectuals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ellen Meiksins Wood saw a great danger in the reluctance of today's intellectuals to criticize capitalism.
- The Return of Crisis: Everywhere Banks are in Deep Trouble
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Financial markets the world over are increasingly chaotic; either retreating or plunging. Our view remains that there’s a gigantic market crash in the coming future -- one that has possibly started now.
- The Return of the Coup in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Venezuela and Brazil are the scenes of a new form of coup d'etat that would set the continent's political calendar back to its worst times. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the brutal model for the demolition of democracy is set forward by the continental oligarchic right and the hegemonic forces of US imperialism who wish to impose their model in the region.
- The return of the "grand narrative"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Throughout the world, a rising tide of social struggle is upending the proclamations by anti-Marxist intellectuals that the "grand narratives" of working-class struggle and socialist revolution have been superseded.
- Reverse Robin Hood: Six Billion Dollar Businesses Preying on Poor People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Many see families in poverty and seek to help. Others see families in poverty and see opportunities for profit. Here are six examples of billion dollar industries which are built on separating poor people, especially people of colour, from their money, the reverse Robin Hood.
- Review: Ashwin Desai, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A book review: Ashwin Desai, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island.
- Review: Kate Evans, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Red Rosa does not aspire to be an authoritative biography but, perhaps as a result, it is a more compelling book. What's compelling about it? The graphics have a lot to do with it; it's an extended comic strip (although the author might take offense with that characterization). The events, both intimate and very public, of Luxemburg’s life and the words and deeds of her political activity are portrayed in vivid graphics. When reading the book, it's impossible to feel detached from them. At the same time, those events, words and deeds are presented seriously, without trivialization. This is no "Rosa Luxemburg for Dummies."
- Revisit the province's royalty regime and make De Beers compensate Attawapiskat fairly.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last month, the remote Cree community of Attawapiskat was front-page news. The community has been grappling with a devastating suicide crisis -- and more than 100 residents -- as young as 11 and as old as 71 -- have attempted suicide. This crisis reflects the despair facing the community over dilapidated housing, lack of mental health services and social infrastructure. But it is roots are in colonialism -- and worsened by corporate greed.
- The Revolt of the Fragments
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It was, without question, a bloody nose for the political establishment, the biggest it has received for decades. And many have read the unexpected success of the Leave camp in the British EU referendum straightforwardly as a revolt against the political class and as a victory for democracy. Yes, it was a revolt against the political class in London and in Brussels. But the referendum result was also far more complicated than that.
- Revolution für soziale Gerechtigkeit und Demokratie!
Vorschläge für eine offensive Strategie der LINKEN Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In den nächsten Jahren wird sich entscheiden, in welche Richtung sich diese Gesellschaft bewegt. Sie steht an einem Scheideweg: Zwischen rechter Hetze und neoliberaler Konkurrenz auf der einen Seite, Demokratie, Solidarität und sozialer Gerechtigkeit auf der anderen Seite. Werden größere Teile der Erwerbslosen, Prekären, Geringverdienenden und die abstiegsbedrohte Mittelschicht sich den Rechtspopulisten zuwenden und damit den Weg für eine noch unsozialere, autoritäre und antidemokratische Entwicklung bereiten? Oder gelingt es, Konkurrenz und Entsolidarisierung zurückzudrängen und ein gesellschaftliches Lager der Solidarität zu bilden?
- Revolution Never Sleeps: Nuit Debout in France and Beyond
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The movement Nuit debout -- 'night on our feet' or 'stand up night!' -- is a potent reminder of the existence of an indefatigable global struggle against the neoliberal credo and all of its devastating consequences. Although it has deep roots, like all sociopolitical movements, it has come into its own since the prolongation of a March 31st, 2016 general strike (grève générale) and mass protest against French labor reforms, which aim at further consolidating class power and rendering the status of the labor force even more precarious. It quickly mutated like so many other recent movements from a circumscribed protest into an extended and rapidly spreading occupation.
- The Revolutionary Art of Failure
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Martin Espada's Vivas to Those Who Have Failed.
- Revolutionary Feminism, Communist Interventions vol. 3
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The third volume of the Communist Interventions reader series, on Revolutionary Feminism. A century of debates between communist, anarchist, and radical feminist militants on women's oppression and capitalism.
- A Revolutionary Speech: Patrice Lumumba and the Birth of the Republic of Congo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first democratically elected Prime Minister, was executed on 17th January, 1961. He had been beated and tortured in a culmination of two assassination plots by the Belgian government and the CIA, ordered directly by President Dwight Eisenhower to 'eliminate' the charismatic leader, with the cooperation of British intelligence and Katangan authorities.
- Revolutionary workers' movements and parliaments in Germany 1918-23
A reply to Tony Phillips Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Richard Levins: Scientist, Activist and Friend
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 American scientist Richard Levins, philosopher of science, titan of ecology, forebear of agroecology, renowned authority on the social and ecological dimensions of disease, and friend of Puerto Rico, has passed away.
- Rigged
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 2016 Republican presidential primary was rigged. It wasn't rigged by the Republicans, the Democrats, Russians, space aliens, or voters. It was rigged by the owners of television networks who believed that giving one candidate far more coverage than others was good for their ratings. The CEO of CBS Leslie Moonves said of this decision: "It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS." Justifying that choice based on polling gets the chronology backwards, ignores Moonves' actual motivation, and avoids the problem, which is that there ought to be fair coverage for all qualified candidates (and a democratic way to determine who is qualified).
- Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 There has been an enormous upward redistribution of income in the United States in the last four decades. In his most recent book, Baker shows that this upward redistribution was not the result of globalization and the natural workings of the market. Rather it was the result of conscious policies that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of ordinary workers while protecting and enhancing the incomes of those at the top. Baker explains how rules on trade, patents, copyrights, corporate governance, and macroeconomic policy were rigged to make income flow upward.
- The right-wing, racialist attacks on the film Free State of Jones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The new film written and directed by Gary Ross, Free State of Jones, about a white farmer in Mississippi, Newton Knight, who led an insurrection against the Confederacy from 1863 to 1865, has come under sharp attack by right-wing elements in the American media. By right-wing elements, we mean the "new right" of identity politics advocates.
- The Rise and Fall of Liberation Theology in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Liberation Theology in Latin America has been an integral part of progressive movements. The Vatican, with the support and guidance from the United States, has sabotaged Liberation Theology in Latin America. Their aim has been to maintain the status quo and stop the progressive forces from taking control.
- The RNC Comes and Goes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Throughout the week, journalists got plenty of newsworthy stories, from Melania Trump's plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s speech to the arrests of 18 protestors at Public Square.
- Roaming Charges: Whitelash, White Heat?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Debunking Whitelash Theory in the context of the 2016 US presidential election and more.
- Robot Cops Are Racist, Too
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As an institution, the police is racist through and through -- irrespective of whether or not particular cops harbor racist views. This is because, among other reasons, as an institution the police is an appendage of the larger institution of property. And property, in the US at the very least, is inextricable from racist dispossessions, and reproductions, of wealth. That is, in addition to manifesting other aspects of domination, property is racist.
- The Rogue Agency
A USDA program that tortures dogs and kills endangered species Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A look at the disturbing and cruel animal control practices of the USDA, a branch of the US Fish and Wildlife Service at the time, which has included accidental poisonings of domestic animals as well as endangered species.
- Rojava: reality and rhetoric
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A detailed critical analysis of the "Rojava revolution".
- The roots of Israel's most racist law
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Israel’s most draconian laws may have been passed by the current right-wing government, but the stage was set long ago by the Israeli Left. With a majority of 65 votes, the Knesset approved last week the extension of an order to prevent family reunification in Israel. Of Palestinian families, of course. Jews are welcome to continue and reunify as much as they please.
- Rosa Lives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The revolutionary thought of Rosa Luxemburg continues to inform and inspire anticapitalist movements today.
- Rosa Luxemburg and the Growth of the Labor Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Today is the 97th anniversary of the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the leading exponents of revolutionary socialism in Germany in the early 20th century. Both were prominent figures in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) up to the First World War and, alienated by the reformist and pro-war politics of the SPD, founders of the Spartacus League in 1916. Both were killed by right-wing Freikorps death squads -- which had support from the Social Democratic government -- on January 15, 1919. The following is an excerpt from Gerald Friedman's Reigniting the Labor Movement (Routledge, 2007). Friedman describes Rosa Luxemburg's revolutionary politics and her understanding of the role of the mass strike -- not as the means for a decisive “one hit” victory for the working class, but as part of what Friedman terms a "long-term process of consciousness-building through participation in class struggle."
- Rosa Luxemburg for Our Time
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Does Rosa Luxemburg leave feminists a theoretical and political legacy? That is, does she give us any theoretical guidance as to how to understand women's oppression? If so, what is it?
- Rosa Luxemburg of Our Time
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Does Rosa Luxemburg leave feminists a theoretical and political legacy? That is, does she give us any theoretical guidance as to how to understand women’s oppression? If so, what is it?
- Royal greed and oppression sold as culture in Swaziland
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Swaziland’s King Mswati III passes suppression, unaccountability and royal opulent spending in the face of drought, starvation and poverty, as traditionally "Swazi" values. Sonkhe Dube, a young exiled activist, begs to differ.
- The Ruling Class's Hatred of Trump is Different Than Yours
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The master class's fear and loathing of Trump – one of their own, sort of – can be detected in the normally Republican-leaning corporate elite.
- Russia's Intervention and Syria's Future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There's a lot of hypocrisy in the present complaint by the Obama administration that most Russian strikes are directed against the non-ISIS Syrian opposition. And yet, Washington's hope is that Putin will not only prevent the regime's collapse and consolidate it, but also help in reaching some kind of political settlement of the conflict. For the time being this is more wishful thinking than anything else.
- Russia's truckers protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Russian government leniency towards protesting truckers indicates that the country's social crisis could overshadow its noisy diplomacy.
- Russkies at the Doorstep
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In a year noted for crude political discourse, eagerly serialized in the mainstream media, the MSM are themselves bellowing anti-Russian rhetoric, conspiracy theory, and fear-mongering.
- Salvadoran Women Combatants
Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Jocelyn Viterna's Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador.
- Salvadoran Women Respond to Violence with Community Service, Music, and Individual Efforts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Outside of the peace negotiations that resound in the media and governmental organizations, one of the strongest solutions to the scourge of gang violence in El Salvador has come from individual initiatives and groups dedicated to women. This work with female youth and ex-gang members, both in and outside of prison, is part of a movement that seeks to collaborate with peace processes in which women have rarely been taken into account. At the same time, it addresses the social structure that intensifies violence against women.
- Save the Tiger, Keep the People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On the fate of India’s forest-dwelling peoples: and how many will be aware that so many of them are being illegally evicted as part of the drive to conserve flora and fauna? Despite having co-existed with tigers and other animals for centuries, many of India's tribal peoples are currently being persecuted in the name of conservation.
- Scandal! Exxon knew about climate change, boosted denialism, misled shareholders, went carbon heavy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the world's biggest energy companies has been caught out in what may be the biggest ever climate scandal. Way back in the 1980s ExxonMobil knew of the 'potentially catastrophic' and 'irreversible' effects of increasing fossil fuel consumption, but chose to cover up the findings, spread misinformation on climate change, and go for high carbon energy sources.
- Scapegoating by the Political Right: A Mask for Privilege
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A historical context for the role of scapegoating of minorities in the 2016 US election examining similar practices by privileged groups to maintain power in modern history.
- Science and its enemies - Farsi text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- La science et ses ennemis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Science and its enemies
Introduction to the April 23, 2016 issue of Other Voices Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
- Science and its enemies - Chinese text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- The Scourge of Youth Detention
The Northern Territory, Torture, and Australia’s Detention Disease Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Australia tolerates gulags that house intrepid asylum seekers, and other similarly deemed undesirables.
- Secret Armies, Shadow Wars, Silent Unaccountability
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We live today in an era of postmodern war. It's a two-front war -- the first being the virtual front of threats, posturing, and arms buildups we persist in waging, Cold War-style, against state-based mirror-images of ourselves (Russia and China); the second being the dirty front we wage in the shadows against irregular, non-state thugs and pygmy tyrants who use their weaknesses as strengths, asymmetrically, to turn our strengths into weaknesses.
- The Secret Struggle Against Apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the 1960s, a group of leftists risked everything to revive the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
- Securing communal land rights for Tanzania's Indigenous Peoples
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Commuting between land rights negotiations in the city and herding goats on the plains, Edward Loure is at once a traditional Maasai and a modern urbanite. That ability to straddle the two very different worlds he inhabits has been key to his success at having 200,000 acres of land registered into village and community ownership.
- The security - digital complex
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With the rise of the Internet and the globalisation of electronic data, there has been a shift in the university-military-industrial complex to a new security-digital complex -- a public-private hybrid that is both narrower and more far-reaching.
- See You at the Barricades! Three Books That Revive the Memory of the Paris Commune
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For socialists and communists of over a century, the Paris Commune was a defining event. From March 18 to May 28 in 1871, following the collapse of the French Republic and the Prussian siege of the capital, the Communards swore to defend Paris until they were overwhelmed by the French army itself. Karl Marx himself called the temporary self-government of the population the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
- The Seeds of Spin: Decoding Pro-GMO Lies and Falsehoods
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If you are in some way critical of genetically modified food and agriculture or have some concerns that remain unaddressed, here is a brief interpretive (satirical) guide for navigating the seedy world of pro-GMO spin.
- The Seemingly Endless Indignities of Air Travel: Report from the Losing Side of Class Warfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For most of my alleged adult life I have wanted to live in a third world country, and now that my native United States has kindly accommodated this wish, all I do is bitch. It's bad enough that our income and wealth disparity rivals that of Guatemala, now our tax dollars are actively promoting this ever-deepening caste system.
- A Seismic Shift Toward Socialism in the U.K. Labour Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Jeremy Corban's unexpected 2015 rise to the leadership of the U.K. Labour Party and his recent resounding victory over the right-wing forces within the party that tried to dislodge him are sending shockwaves throughout Europe - waves that could reach the shores of the U.S. if events continue to unfold in the same direction.
- The Senseless Death of Tobeka Daki
Auctioning Health and Life to the Highest Bidders Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Details the circumstances of the death of Tobeka Daki of South Africa, implicating the exorbitant drug prices of pharmaceutical corporations.
- Sex, Needs, and Queer Culture
From Liberation to the Post-Gay Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 The belief of many in the early sexual liberation movements was that capitalism's investment in the norms of the heterosexual family meant that any challenge to them was invariably anti-capitalist. In recent years, however, lesbian and gay subcultures have become increasingly mainstream and commercialized -- as seen, for example, in corporate backing for pride events -- while the initial radicalism of sexual liberation has given way to relatively conservative goals over marriage and adoption rights. Meanwhile, queer theory has critiqued this homonormativity, or assimilation, as if some act of betrayal had occurred.
In Sex, Needs and Queer Culture, David Alderson seeks to account for these shifts in both queer movements and the wider society, and he argues powerfully for a distinctive theoretical framework. Through a critical reassessment of the work of Herbert Marcuse, as well as the cultural theorists Raymond Williams and Alan Sinfield, Alderson asks whether capitalism is progressive for queers, evaluates the distinctive radicalism of the counterculture as it has mutated into queer, and distinguishes between avant-garde protest and subcultural development. In doing so, the book offers new directions for thinking about sexuality and its relations to the broader project of human liberation.
- Shakespeare belongs to us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We don’t know a great deal about William Shakespeare’s life. The records are scant and, in the absence of personal testimony, we know nothing of his intimate feelings or thoughts.
- The Sharia debate in the UK: who will listen to our voices?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Over 300 abused women have signed a statement opposing Sharia courts and religious bodies, warning of the growing threat to their rights and to their collective struggles for security and independence.
- Glenn Shelton
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Glenn Shelton, a retired president of Michigan Mailhandlers Local 307 who never stopped fighting for the rights of working people, and a member of Solidarity, died March 24, 2016, after a battle with cancer.
- The shocking story of Israel's disappeared babies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 New information has come to light about thousands of mostly Yemeni children believed to have been abducted in the 1950s.
- Showdown in the Malheur Marshes: the Origins of Rancher Terrorism in Burns, Oregon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 During the spring of 1995, shortly after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, James Ridgeway and I spent a couple of weeks traveling across the West for a series of stories in the Village Voice that chronicled the rise of militant new rightwing movements of militias, white supremacists, Christian Identity sects and anti-government groups, including a profile of central Oregon rancher Dwight Hammond, now at the centre of the armed seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters near Burns.
- Siberia's Heavenly Lake and 'small peoples' of the High North at risk from oil drilling
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A vital nature preserve in western Siberia, and the indigenous peoples that inhabit it, are at risk from oil development. Oil giant Surgutneftegas is already active in the Numto Park, but now they want to extend operations into its fragile wetlands, putting at risk snow cranes, the Heavenly Lake, and the survival of the Nenet and Khanty peoples.
- The Silence of the Left: Brexit, Euro-Austerity and the T-TIP
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The media in the United States have treated the British vote against remaining in the European Union (EU) as if it is populist “Trumpism,” an inarticulate right-wing vote out of ignorance at being left behind by the neoliberal economic growth policy. What is left out of this picture is that there is a sound logic to oppose membership in the EU.
- Silencing America as It Prepares for War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts.
- Six steps back to the land: an agricultural revolution for people and countryside
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What's the point of farming? To produce an abundance of wholesome food, writes Colin Tudge, while supporting a flourishing rural economy and a sustainable, biodiverse countryside. Yet the powers that be, determined to advance industrial agriculture at all costs, are achieving the precise opposite. It's time for a revolution in our food and farming culture, led by the people at large.
- Slime, Shorebirds, and a Scientific Mystery
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Examining the impact of large developments near the Fraser River estuary in British Columbia on migrating populations of shorebirds, which have been found to depend on a biofilm in the area to sustain their long flights.
- The Slippery Slope: Rolling Downward, No Brakes, Nuclear War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Policy is not a discrete entity; indeed, instead, it is a cumulative force, broadening in scope and direction, as it -- in this case -- plunges toward self- and global-annihilation. Destruction is in the very air we breathe, as though Thanatos looming overhead, because exceptionalism is reaching a point of satiety and feelings of emptiness and alienation make other than war and dominance meaningless.
- The 'slow genocide' of Brazil's Guarani people must stop
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Land theft, agribusiness and violence pose an existential threat to Brazil's Guarani people. They maintain a powerful resolve to regain their historic lands, and even have the law on their side - but the tribe will need international support to prevail against murderous ranchers and farmers, corrupt politicians and a paralysed legal system.
- "Small really is beautiful", claims new report on England's farming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A report on the benefits of small-scale farming practices in England, arguing that land size should not be used to exclude farms from receiving subsidies.
- The smug style in American liberalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The smug style in American liberalism has been growing these past decades and in 2016 it has even found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private.
- Snoops in the Reading Room
F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of William J. Maxwell's F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature.
- Snowden leak: MI5 has gathered so much data it may actually be missing 'life-saving intelligence'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 British spies may have missed potentially "life-saving intelligence" because their surveillance systems were sweeping up more data than could be analyzed, a leaked classified report reveals. The document, given to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was sent to top British government officials, outlining methods being developed by the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, to covertly monitor internet communications.
- The Socialism of the Black Panthers
A new documentary on the Black Panther Party overlooks the group's socialist core. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An analysis on the documentary on the Black Panther Party, "Up From Liberalism".
- Socialism.ca
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 A gateway to resources about socialism, socialist history, and socialist ideas, compiled by Connexions.
- Socialist Register 2016
Volume 52: The Politics of the Right Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Today the left faces new challenges from political forces amassing on the radical right. The 52nd volume of the Socialist Register presents a serious calibration and a careful political mapping of these forces. It addresses pivotal questions on the reordering of the new right. These essays - very broad in terms of themes and places - speak to the global challenges the new right poses for the left at this historical moment.
- Socialist Register 2017
Volume 53: Rethinking Revolution Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 This 53rd volume of the Socialist Register addresses the question of the meaning of revolution in the twenty-first century. Coming to terms with the legacy of 1917 is obviously one aspect of this. ‘October’ was a unique event that provided inspiration for millions of oppressed people, and also became an inevitable point of reference for socialist politics in the twentieth century. The twenty-first century left needs to both understand and transcend this legacy through a critical reappraisal of its broad effects – both positive and negative – on political, intellectual and cultural life everywhere as well as on the other revolutions that took place over the last century. But the main point of the volume is to look forward more than back. All revolutions emerge in conjunctures saturated with unique contra-dictions, contingencies, class alignments and struggles.
- Socialists Discuss During the DNC
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On the steamy evening of July 27, 2016 in Philadelphia a raucous audience of close to 800 gathered to discuss electoral politics and movement-building. This was day three of Socialist Convergence, organized by a coalition of left organizations to create a socialist presence during the Democratic National Convention.
- A Solution for Kashmir
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What would justice for those suffering under Indian occupation in Kashmir look like?
- Some Pundits Think the Solution to Right-Wing Populism Is Less Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The core orthodoxies of neoliberalism are under attack by populist forces, and commentators are scrambling for a response. Some are suggesting more left-wing red meat. Others, a moment of self-reflection. But a number of pundits are doing that most noxious of political commentary pastimes -- equating right and left responses to the failures of globalization and advocating that "elites" should fight back against the forces of inconvenient democracy.
- Sorry, Not Sorry: Neither the Media Nor Their Owners are Going to Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Detailing the failures of the corporate media in coverage of the 2016 US election, and how these problems are systemic due to the corporate ownership structure.
- Sound & Fury
Just What Does Brexit Signify? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Not since Y2K thretened to plunge the planet into chaos has a story provoked overwrought handwringing comparable to that triggered by Britons voting to withdraw from the European Union. By common assessment, Brexit signifies something profound. History itself has seemingly gone off the rails. Darkness threatens to cover the earth.
- Sources Calendar RSS Feed page
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 RSS news feed for the Sources Calendar, which lists items of interest to journalists and the media.
- Sources HotLink - May 26, 2016
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 This issue takes a look at the good and bad of governments. Stateside, the NSA and CIA are at it again. Repeating mistakes in spite of media scandals and public outcry. Spies will be spies. In Uganda, censorship flexes its muscles and free elections become less free. In the Russian cyberspace, a though provoking debate is being had over the limitations of free speech. Finally, in the Middle East, we have a bit of hot and cold. The Pakistani Senate celebrates a victory for democracy and the freedom of speech.
- Sources HotLink - June 30, 2016
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2016 Articles about the FBI and the information it gathers, Donald Trump and the media, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in suppressing information.
- Sources Select News
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2016 RSS news feed featuring news releases, announcements, expert comment, views, and opinion from members of Sources, the resource for journalists, writers, editors, researchers, producers, and other media professionals in Canada and abroad.
- South Africa's conservation success story: the 'Black Mambas' mean business!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A unique, all female anti-poaching unit has transformed the conservation picture in South Africa's Kruger National Park. In just three years the Black Mambas have cut poaching by more than 75%, removed over 1,000 snares, and become role models for local youth. And this weekend they arrive in the UK to collect Helping Rhinos' 'Innovation in Conservation' Award.
- Spain in Our Hearts
Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Hochschild shares tales of some of the roughly 2,800 Americans who participated in the Spanish Civil War. He shows how the war was a brutal, cruel mismatch from the beginning, with Franco's fascist forces strengthened by 80,000 Italian troops supplied by Mussolini, as well as weapons and airplanes provided by Hitler in exchange for war-related minerals. Additionally, Hochschild uncovers the story of how Texaco, headed by an admirer of Hitler, Torkild Rieber, provided Franco with unlimited oil on credit, shipped it for free, and supplied invaluable intelligence on tankers carrying oil to the Republican forces.
- Spearheading the Neo-liberal Plunder of African Agriculture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development, according to a new report by the campaign group Global Justice Now. With assets of $43.5 billion, the BMGF is the largest charitable foundation in the world. It actually distributes more aid for global health than any government. As a result, it has a major influence on issues of global health and agriculture.
- The specter of geoengineering haunts the Paris climate agreement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 in a capitalist framework negative emissions technologies appear to offer the only possible way out. Geoengineering is the specter that haunts the text adopted in Paris and gives it meaning. The fact that the Agreement does not mention "energy transition" is not a regrettable lapse in generally good text, but proof by omission that the negotiators have chosen to bet on geoengineering instead of confronting fossil capital.
- Spies and shadowy allies lurk in secret, thanks to firm’s bag of tricks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Panama Papers reveal how spies and CIA gun-runners use offshore companies to stay hidden. Offshore world blurs the line between legitimate business and the world of espionage.
- Splendors and Miseries of the Antiracist 'Left'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- The stagnation of the Dutch Socialist Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Socialist Party (SP) is one of the parties that emerged to the left of traditional social democracy in the last decade of the 20th century. In electoral terms, it is one of the most successful. At its peak in 2006, the SP got 25 out of 150 seats (16.6 percent of the vote), becoming the third party in the House of Representatives. With the European Parliament (2014) and provincial (2015) elections it eclipsed the Labour Party (PvdA) for the first time, becoming the biggest party of the left in the Netherlands. Until Syriza's election victory in 2015 the Dutch SP was the only left reformist party in Europe to win a bigger share of the vote than the traditional social democratic party.
- Stairway to Tax Heaven
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A news role-play game featuring three fictitious characters: Juan Penalti (Soccer Player), Polly Tissien (Politician) and Edmund von Kronen (Business Executive). Welcome to the secret world of offshore. Your goal is to navigate this parallel universe and hide your cash away. Don’t worry! Lawyers, wealth managers and bankers are there to help you. Pick a character and don't get caught.
- Standing Against Counterrevolution
The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: The Fate of the Russian Revolution, Volume 2 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Sean Matgamna's The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: The Fate of the Russian Revolution, Volume 2.
- Standing Rock and Imperialism Itself
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An article about the Dakota Access Pipeline.
- State of emergency in US city after water poisoned
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Flint has faced a lead-saturated drinking water disaster affecting almost 100,000 residents over the past 18 months.
- The State of the Left: Many Movements, Too Many Goals?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Sanders campaign has proven a couple of important things about today's political reality in the United States.
1) A substantial number of Americans are interested in redistributing wealth and making government work for the 99 percent
2) That is impossible within the current electoral system in the United States.
- State, power and bureaucracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The theory of bureaucratic state capitalism in Russia and elsewhere characterises the International Socialist Tendency and distinguishes us from most other Marxist parties worldwide. So a study of the development of Leon Trotsky's ideas on the Russian bureaucracy is of particular interest. This book reveals one of the greatest Marxists struggling to come to terms with a wholly new phenomenon, the Stalinist bureaucracy.
- Statement on Another Attack by the Far Right on Christians and Democracy in Pakistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 More than 72 people including children were killed, and more than 200 injured, in a suicide bombing in Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Bagh.
- Statistics in the Information War
An Instructive Example from Hama, 1982 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Examines the manipulation of information in the case of the 'Hama massacre' of 1982 to advance the US's regime change policies regarding Syria.
- Still Wavy After All These Years: Flower Geezer Turns 80
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- Stop Exploiting LGBT Issues to Demonize Islam and Justify Anti-Muslim Policies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the late 1990s, Eric Rudolph -- raised Catholic and affiliated for a time with a Christian Identity sect -- bombed abortion clinics and a gay bar, insisting they were venues of immorality and evil. Last July, an Orthodox Jewish Israeli attacked the marchers in the Jerusalem LGBT pride parade, stabbing six of them, and one of them, a teenager, died of her wounds; justifying his attacks by appealing to Talmudic punishments for homosexuality, he had just been released from a 10-year prison term for doing the same in 2005. Yesterday, a Christian pastor from Arizona, Steven Anderson, praised the slaughter of 49 people in an Orlando LGBT club on the ground that "homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts" and are "pedophiles."
- A Story from El Salvador: Julio Molina, Saving Historic Memory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Julio Molina dedicates himself to preserving the "historic memory" of the generation that was involved in the 12-year civil war that took place in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992 between the rightwing government of the oligarchy and the revolutionaries of the FMLN. "We have many tasks today," he says, "but one of them is the preservation of the historic memory."
- The Strange Death of Hugo Chavez: an Interview with Eva Golinger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 I believe there is a very strong possibility that President Chavez was assassinated. There were notorious and documented assassination attempts against him throughout his presidency. Most notable was the April 11, 2002 coup d'etat, during which he was kidnapped and set to be assassinated had it not been for the unprecedented uprising of the Venezuelan people and loyal military forces that rescued him and returned him to power within 48 hours. I was able to find irrefutable evidence using the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), that the CIA and other US agencies were behind that coup and supported, financially, militarily and politically, those involved. Later on, there were other attempts against Chavez.
- Strike strategy today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Why has the use of the strike in the US become so scarce? While subjective factors are more difficult to quantify, certain basic reasons seem more readily evident. Union membership, particularly in the private sector, is at an all-time low. Most of the unions are heavily bureaucratized, and central labor councils ossified. "Sympathy strikes," long ago outlawed by Taft-Hartley, militate against the sort of broad-based solidarity so essential to an industrial victory. Moreover, many unions have accepted no-strike clauses for the duration of their contracts, effectively tying one hand behind their backs.
- Strike Wave and Worker Victories in Cambodia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In Cambodia the class struggle has resulted in the enactment of a major anti-union labour law this year. Yet more is reported in the media on the long-gone Khmer Rouge than the frequent strikes that occur in the country. Still, the strikes are happening. And more often than not, they are winning.
- Students Are Pulling a Kaepernick All Over America -- and Being Threatened for It
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Students are being threatened with punishment for not participating in rituals surrounding the national anthem or Pledge of Allegiance -- and they are fighting back. Since NFL 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the national anthem in August to protest oppression of people of colour, many Americans, particularly professional athletes and students, have followed suit. But their constitutional right to engage in such gestures of dissent is not always being respected.
- Studs Terkel
Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Drawing from over one hundred interviews of people who knew and worked with Studs, Alan Wieder creates a multi-dimensional portrait of a run-of-the-mill guy from Chicago who, in public life, became an acclaimed author and raconteur, while managing, in his private life, to remain a mensch.
- Study: Fracking, Not Just Fracking Wastewater Injection, Causing Earthquakes in Western Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A groundbreaking study published in Seismological Research Letters has demonstrated a link between hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") for oil and gas and earthquakes.
- Study: NSA Surveillance Has Chilling Effort on Internet Browsing
Users Feared Reading About 'Sensitive' Topics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A new study in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found that traffic on Wikipedia articles considered "sensitive" or terror-related plummeted drastically in the immediate wake of revelations about broad NSA surveillance of Internet use.
- Syria and the Left: Time to Break the Silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The cold, hard reality of the war in Syria is that the violence, bloodshed, and chaos continues unabated while the Left, such as it is, continues on in a state of schizophrenic madness. Different points of view, conflicting ideological tendencies, and a misunderstanding of the reality of the conflict are all relevant issues to be interrogated, with civility and reasoned debate in short supply. The Left does need to seriously self-reflect though about just how it responds to crises of imperialism and issues of war and peace.
- 1953 - 2002 - 2016: Syria and the Reemergence of McCarthyism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A history of McCarthyism, or red-baiting, in US politics to justify or bolster foreign war efforts, and how the recent Syrian involvement has brought about a revival of McCarthyist discourse and tactics in the political and social realms.
- The Syriza Wave
Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 An account of the rise and fall of the Greek left party Syriza.
- Talking about radicalization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the problems with discussing the concept of radicalization is that it can mean all things to all people. In one sense it simply means 'the process by which terrorists become terrorists'. But, radicalization, particularly as it is discussed in political and popular discourse, has also come to embody certain ideas about how that process takes place: For instance, that the acceptance of extremist religious ideas is the first step in leading people to violence; that there are certain stages through which people move from belief to terror; that there are certain tell tale signatures of radicalization; and so on.
- Tatchell's reply: "A new left-wing McCarthyism"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The future of progressive politics is under threat, again. But this time from the left. Historically, socialists and greens have made gains by building broad alliances around a common goal, such as the campaigns against the poll tax and the bombing of Syria. We united together diverse people who often disagreed on other issues. Through this unity and solidarity, we won. Nowadays, we are witnessing a revival of far 'left' sectarian politics and it is infecting the Green Party too. Zealous activists, seemingly motivated by a desire to be more 'left' and pure than rivals, are putting huge energy into fighting and dragging down other campaigners.
- Teamsters and Cops
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Minneapolis teamsters in 1934 knew something we should remember -- police enforce the ruling class's unjust order.
- "The Term has Become Meaningless to Me": on Violence, Social Change, and Nonviolent Communication
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Violence means different things to different people. While some people find it important to show their opposition to acts like touching someone against their will or supporting an oppressive regime, others mill about in confusion around the middle of the space when facing supposedly unambiguous statements such as "murder is violent." Participants from the same family or the same activist group disagree on the classification of certain acts as violent. In our context, two important questions arise out of this apparent incoherence of the term: what are the implications for Nonviolent Communication? And, what does this mean about nonviolence as a political strategy for social change?
- A Terrible Beauty: Remembering Ireland's Easter Rebellion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It's a hundred years since some 750 men and women threw up barricades and seized key locations in downtown Dublin. They would be joined by maybe 1,000 more. In six days it would be over, the post office in flames, the streets blackened by shell fire, and the rebellion's leaders on their way to face firing squads against the walls of Kilmainham Jail. And yet the failure of the Easter Rebellion would eventually become one of the most important events in Irish history - a 'failure' that would reverberate worldwide and be mirrored by colonial uprisings almost half a century later.
- Terrifying Prospects
This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Moustafa Bayoumi's This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror.
- Tharparkar: Pakistan's ongoing catastrophe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 More than 1,500 children under the age of five have died in the Tharparkar district of Pakistan's Sindh province since 2011. Each year, as the death toll climbs, reports are sought, commissions created and emergency plans announced by the provincial government. But none of these seem able to stop the recurring problems plaguing this vast 20,000sq km district.
- There's No Place for Clean Water Under 'Free Trade'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia, where two corporations insist their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.
- These Quakers Are Asking Tougher Questions Than Many in the Press
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 American Presidential candidates these days are accustomed to mainstream reporters quizzing them on process and politics, with a typical media scrum filled with questions about the latest polls, repeated demands for a response to the most recent attack from rival campaigns, and sometimes even vapid inquiries about workout routines or favorite foods. A group of Quakers has been trying to fill the substance vacuum - by training hundreds of activists to stalk the candidates in early primary states and ask them tough questions on issues ranging from immigrant detention to nuclear weapons to the role of money in politics.
- These Senior Citizens Are Destined to Die in Prison -- For Marijuana
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 There are drug war excesses remaining to be rectified. Here are some of the most outrageous.
- They Came for the Children: Truth Commission Sheds Light on Canada's Genocide Against Indigenous Peoples
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Imagine a village with all its children gone. For aboriginal peoples all across Canada, this was their lived reality, not the stuff of imagination. The story of what happened to the children -- who were forcibly removed from their families and sent to military-style camps that were euphemistically called "schools" -- has at last been told, compiled in the monumental six-volume Truth and Reconciliation Report on residential schools for aboriginal children released in 2015.
- They Came to Take a County: Land Seizure Agitators, Propagandists, Politicians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Thanks to the Bundy Gang, public lands advocates became aware of elements of the Land Seizure movement that had been operating in the shadows. The curtain was drawn back on networks of agitators and propagandists: Constitutional "experts" and sheriffs, "patriot" legislators and self-centered sovereign citizens.
- "They Fear Us Because We Are Fearless:" The Life and Legacy of Berta Cáceres
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 I began writing a eulogy for Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores years ago, though she died only last week. Berta was assassinated by Honduran government-backed death squads on March 3, 2016.
- They Throw Us Out of Our Homes But We Get Ice Cream
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If there were any doubt that gentrification has come to my corner of Brooklyn, that was put to rest last weekend with the appearance of an ice cream truck. An ice cream truck painted with the logo and red color of The Economist. Yes, it was just as this reads. Free scoops of ice cream were being given out as a young woman with a clipboard was attempting to get people to sign up for subscriptions to The Economist.
- They Want to Prohibit Us from Dreaming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A 2014 interview with renowned Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated last week.
- The Thiaroye massacre, 1944
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A short history of the mass killing of black soldiers in the Free French Forces who were protesting against non-payment of wages towards the end of World War II.
- Things My Students Don't Know
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 One of the discussion exercises I use in my course on corporate power begins with the bare text of the First Amendment projected on screen at the front of the room. I tell students that this is a recently proposed piece of federal legislation and invite their comments. I also say that if anyone has heard of the proposal, they should remain quiet for the time being and let others speak first.
- Thinking About Suffragette
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Alison Baldree responds to the 2015 flim Suffragette.
- "This Deportation Business": 1920s and the Present
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This article examines the growth of the deportation regime during the 1920s, and explores the enduring ramifications of early deportation practice and the renegotiation of the state's coercive power over migrants.
- This is What Insurgency Looks Like
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The call to Break Free from Fossil Fuels envisioned "tens of thousands of people around the world rising up" to take back control of their own destiny; "sitting down" to "block the business of government and industry that threaten our future"; conducting "peaceful defense of our right to clean energy." That's just what happened.
- This is why everything you’ve read about the wars in Syria and Iraq could be wrong
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A description of how much of the coverage of the wars in Syria and Iraq is second-hand reporting, due to the dangers posed, and subject to political bias and propaganda.
- This vote was about far more than immigration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The vote to leave the EU was fuelled by class divisions, argues Alastair Stephens.
- Thoughtcrimes and Stupidspeak: Our Assault Against Words
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We are tortured with repetitions. How many bloggers do we have in cyberspace, opining in a Duckspeak that gets a Bellyfeel response because those who have an opposing Bellyfeel response listen only to their Duckspeak bloggers. 152 million bloggers as of 2013. 500 million tweets per day. 1.71 billion active users on Facebook. 4 billion YouTube views per day. A Pandora’s Box opened that cannot be closed, perhaps because what cybertech installs can neither be abjured nor rejected. "It's all good" apparently. Perhaps not.
- Thousands Of Israelis Take To The Streets Calling For Palestinian Genocide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Massive rallies and Facebook campaigns calling for Palestinian genocide are ignored by Western mainstream media and Facebook despite concerns and collaborations aimed at stopping "calls to violence".
- Three Myths About Clinton's Defeat in Election 2016 Debunked
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A debunking of the explanations for Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 election commonly given by the Democratic party establishment and Clinton loyalists - in particular the role of racism, sexism, and the loss of key Obama-supporting counties.
- Time for an Independent Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 More than in most presidential cycles, there is reason to hope for a mass breakaway in 2016. Sanders' campaign has revealed that a mass base exists now for an independent party of the left.
- Time to Call US Aid to Africa by Its True Name: Bribery
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Aid, what is it good for? While many Bono-loving, bleeding heart liberals would be appalled at the very thought of questioning the importance of giving money to charity or to the less fortunate, such a belief is rooted in pure fiction. In fact, the seemingly innocuous act of transferring money abroad in voluntary Robin Hood fashion is at the root of most political problems wreaking havoc across the developing world.
- Time to End the 'Hasbara': Palestinian Media and the Search for a Common Story
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Merely being in the company of hundreds of Palestinian journalists and other media professionals from all over the world has been an uplifting experience. For many years, Palestinian media has been on the defensive, unable to articulate a coherent message, torn between factions and desperately trying to fend off the Israeli media campaign, along with its falsifications and unending propaganda or 'hasbara'.
- TIPP
Advancing American Imperialism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Greenpeace has done that part of the world whose representatives are so corrupt or so stupid as to sign on to the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic "partnerships" a great service. Greenpeace secured and leaked the secret documents that Washington and global corporations are pushing on Europe. The official documents prove that my description of these "partnerships" when they first appeared in the news is totally correct.
- TISA 'free trade' deal to force draconian social, environmental, financial deregulation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A leaked text from the 'Trade In Services Agreement' negotiations shows that TISA is set to unleash a massive wave of deregulation affecting social, environmental and financial standards, and force the privatisation of state-run enterprises. So it's not just TTIP, CETA and TPP we have to fight - TISA could be the biggest corporate power grab of them all.
- To escape Trump's America, we need to bring the militant labor tactics of 1946 back to the future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Seventy years after the Oakland General Strike, we should talk about the relevance of the Oakland General Strike tactics for today. It seems do-able, and if it's presented right, could pull a lot of interest to prepare for the kind of labour movement we need - the kind that is ready to stand up to the state and the capitalists.
- To My Less-Evilism Haters: A Rejoinder to Halle and Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 John Halle has taken to calling my CounterPunch article, No Lesser Evil, Not This Time, "idiotic" and part of the "lunatic and sociopathic left". These pathetic and childlike insults are part of a left that spends more time giving itself a thousand cuts than one good jab at the common enemy. I was even more hurt to read that Chomsky, quoted by Halle, thinks my article represents "left…self-destruction" that is "adding new dimensions" through "contemporary irrationality and refusal to think".
- To Sell Weapons, Defense Contractors Make War Seem Fun
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 At the Association of the United States Army's annual exposition at the new, cavernous Washington Convention Center, defense contractors are making their weapons seem fun where in order to score contracts with the Pentagon. AUSA features a who’s who of the military-industrial complex, and the extreme excess of money in the industry is evident everywhere.
- Top Shale Fracking Executive: We Won't Frack the Rich
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Fracking companies deliberately keep their wells away from the "big houses" of wealthy and potentially influential people, a top executive from one of the country's most prominent shale drilling companies told a gathering of attorneys at a seminar on oil and gas environmental law.
- Toronto's Poor
A Rebellious History Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present.
- Total terrorism solution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Hoax highlights failures of military, security approaches to terrorism.
- Toward a socialist future: Children's picture books after the Bolshevik Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the defining event of the 20th century. Its influence extended across virtually every aspect of human society the world over. The scope for study of the revolution and of the social order that emerged from it is immense, though generally overlooked in contemporary art curation. It comes as a welcome exception to see the attempt by London's House of Illustration art gallery in its exhibition, A New Childhood: Picture Books from Soviet Russia, to bring to light the artistic impetus lent by the revolution to children's book illustrations in early Soviet society.
- Towards Workers' Climate Action
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A review of a book and a pamphlet by Paul Hampton, both on the urgent need for workers' action on climate change.
- Towards Workers' Climate Action
Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Paul Hampton's Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity:
Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World.
- Toxic Curve Ball: Why Outdated Assumptions to Determine "Safe Levels" of Toxicants Forfeit the Game
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 By now, a large number of consumers are aware of the hazards of the synthetic compound bisphenol-A (BPA). Effective May 11, 2016, under California state law Proposition 65, products containing BPA must possess a warning label indicating that exposure could result in female reproductive impairment. Independent research on the endocrine disrupting effects of the chemical, commonly used in plastic bottles, the lining of metal cans, and customer receipts, among other applications, has consistently demonstrated toxic effects at low dose exposures. Two recent robust studies from Denmark concur, finding deleterious effects in rats exposed to BPA at doses lower than those considered safe for human ingestion, yet not at several higher doses. Nevertheless, regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) conclude that BPA is safe at the levels at which it is currently in use.
- Toxic Range: the BLM's Growing Chemical Addiction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 BLM is escalating herbicide use on public lands. A primary agency excuse for forsaking sage-grouse ESA protection is the pipe dream that new habitat will be created through radical deforestation, and that fuelbreaks will stop fires.
- Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The world, it seems, cannot get enough of Sokal-type hoaxes. A French journal, Sociétés, has retracted an article allegedly penned by one Jean-Marc Tremblay but actually written by two sociologists, Manuel Quinon and Arnaud Saint-Martin, who spoofed the work of the journal's editor, Michel Maffesoli.
- The Trans Pacific Partnership Will Not Help Struggling Farmers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A recent Associated Press article claimed that Wisconsin dairy producers "see nothing but advantages" if the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) were passed during the final session of Congress. A more accurate statement would be that some dairy producers see nothing but advantages. I am at a loss to understand how dairy producers would see any advantages to yet another "free trade" agreement.
- Transit Activism and the Urban Question in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The demand for free transit has been an important starting point of recent mobilizations in Brazil, notably those that shook the whole country in the summer of 2013. This interview with local activists and researchers João Tonucci and André Veloso zeroes in on transit organizing in Belo Horizonte, the third largest metropolitan area in Brazil.
- A Travesty of Financial History: Bank Lobbyists will Applaud
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Debt mounts up faster than the means to pay. Yet there is widespread lack of awareness regarding what this debt dynamic implies. From Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC to the modern world, the way in which society has dealt with the buildup of debt has been the main force transforming political relations.
- Trident rally is Britain's biggest anti-nuclear march in a generation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Thousands of protesters including Jeremy Corbyn and other party leaders gather in London for CND march and rally.
- Trouble Down in Texas (and Elsewhere)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The U.S. Supreme Court, on March 2nd, 2016, heard arguments in the case of Whole Women's Health vs. Hellerstedt. The judges will be deciding the constitutionality of a 2013 Texas bill (HB2) that places restrictions on clinics where abortions are performed - most within the first eight weeks of pregnancy.
- President Trump: Big Liar Going to Washington or Tribune of the People?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An examination of Donald Trump's challenges to precepts of globalism, interventionist foreign policy, and special interests, how they resonated with public sentiment, and the challenges and potential outcomes of their implementation.
- Trump and Clinton: Censoring the unpalatable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A virulent if familiar censorship is about to descend on the US election campaign. As the cartoon brute, Donald Trump, seems almost certain to win the Republican Party's nomination, Hillary Clinton is being ordained both as the "women's candidate" and the champion of American liberalism in its heroic struggle with the Evil One.
- Trump in the White House: An Interview With Noam Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Noam Chomsky shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election in an interview.
- Trump and the Liberal Intelligentsia: a View from Europe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A new specter haunts the American elites: the candidacy of Donald Trump in the US President election and his success so far in the Republican primaries. The Republican establishment itself hopes to block his rise, even as he is drawing huge crowds into the party. As for the Democrats, they are hoping that his repugnant image will make the election of Hillary Clinton that much easier.
- The Trump Phenomenon, as Seen From Europe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Trump is berated as the latest incarnation of Evil (after Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, the Brexiters): racist, sexist, Islamophobe, a friend of dictators, etc., in short the embodiment of all that arouses the righteous indignation of the human rights defenders. I would like to suggest a different way of seeing Trump. He is above all a capitalist, almost a caricature of the sort of man capitalism produces, encourages and celebrates. He makes money and is proud of it. For him, the bottom line is cost-benefit. Everything comes down to that ratio. Defend the Baltic States? What does it cost, what do we gain? Defend Japan? What does it cost, what do we gain?
- The Truth About Venezuela's Opposition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Western journalists can't admit that Venezuela's opposition is neither democratic nor peaceful.
- The truth behind the Labour coup, when it really began and who manufactured it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An exclusive investigation by The Canary can reveal that the current Labour 'coup' being instigated against Jeremy Corbyn appears to have been orchestrated by a PR company where Tony Blair's arch spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell, is a senior advisor.
- Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel"s "Night"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie Wiesel. It's as foolproof a character reference as is available today, at least within the Judeo-Christian sphere of moral influence.
- Truth Is The First Casualty Of War: Nagorno-Karabakh And Media Misinformation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Crimean War, in mid-19th century, introduced the world to the cardigan, the raglan jersey, and the balaclava headdress. It also introduced a new profession: the foreign correspondent. And almost immediately after the war the axiom "truth is the first casualty of war" was born because of the falsehoods spread by foreign correspondents on both sides.
- TTIP is on the rocks. Let's defeat these toxic trade deals!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The TTIP EU-US trade deal has finally hit the rocks with massive popular opposition on both sides of the Atlantic gaining serious political traction. There's now a good chance that TTIP will be defeated - but first we must make sure that CETA, the equally toxic EU-Canada 'Trojan Horse' deal, bites the dust.
- TTIP: The most dangerous weapon in the hands of the fossil fuel industry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Looks into the impact that the TTIP papers will have on the fossil fuel industry and Climate Action.
- Turbulent 1970s Revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book reviews of Michael Simanga's Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory, and Aaron J. Leonard's and Conor A. Gallagher's Heavy Radicals:
The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists: The Revolutionary Union/
Revolutionary Communist Party, 1968-1980.
- Turkey: A War of Two Coups
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On 15 July 2016 a huge section of the Turkish armed forces attempted to take power from the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP, came very close to its objective, but was ultimately defeated. This article examines the causes of the failed coup and its social and political effects on the Turkish society from a Marxist perpective.
- Turn on tune in - hippie photos unseen for decades
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A recent visit to the Chronicle's basement archives to look for hippie-related photos paid off with some wonderful images that have not been seen in several decades. Many of them were taken in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
- 21st Century Trade Union Conspiracy Trial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It's fitting that the return of the trade union conspiracy trial would take place in Philadelphia, the city of the infamous Philadelphia Cordwainers Trial of 1805, the first known trade union conspiracy case in America. Beginning with the genesis of the first combinations of wage labourers in eighteenth-century England, trade unionism has been perceived and prosecuted as a conspiracy against private property -- and rightly so. What is a trade union but a permanent conspiracy against private property and the inviolable right to private property? Friedrich Engels designated trade unions as schools of war in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1845, and the processes underlying workers' control and workers' power made manifest in trade unionism then remain in operation today.
- 21st Century Trade Union Conspiracy Trial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It's fitting that the return of the trade union conspiracy trial would take place in Philadelphia, the city of the infamous Philadelphia Cordwainers Trial of 1805, the first known trade union conspiracy case in America.
- 2,500 Years of Class Hatred
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Class struggle never existed without hatred of the poor. And neither has racism. Boots Riley's recent article, posted in The Guardian, systematically dispels the myth of black-on-black crime advocated by Bill Clinton. Rather than pointing the image of failure at black people in the US, Riley insists, the mirror should be redirected to class war and the failure of liberal democracy. The condition of black people will advance with economic prosperity, not punitive drug laws.
- Two Views on Marxist Ecology and Jason W. Moore
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On June 6, 2016, Climate & Capitalism published an interview with John Bellamy Foster, in which he for the first time responded to nearly a decade of criticism from Jason W. Moore, who accuses Foster of "Cartesian dualism" and who promotes what he calls "world-ecology" as an alternative to the approach Foster is most associated with, metabolic rift theory and Ecological Marxism.
- UK after the rain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Shabbir Lakha looks beyond the media blizzard surrounding last week's referendum result and identifies anti-racist work as a campaigning imperative.
- UK Tax Dodgers PLC - Google outrage is the tip of an iceberg
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Why are we so surprised at the Google tax heist? It's not because there's anything new about it. It's because our own political class have long had their noses in the trough, and the tax-dodging billionaires that own our mainstream media are anxious to hide the swindle that's keeping them rich, and us poor.
- Ukraine on Fire - The Real Story
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 A documentary film that provides historical perspective for the deep divisions in the Ukraine, and the violent events leading up to the overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych. While covered by Western media as a revolution by the people, the film demonstrates that it was in fact a staged removal from power that was ulitimately crafted by the US government. Runtime: 95 min.
- Understanding the Cataclysm
Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Alexander Anievas' Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics.
- The Unfair Narrative on Global Warming and Development: Why it must be challenged
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Industries that majorly contribute to climate change are being subsidized, while more marginalized industries receive vey little to mitigate the impact of climate change.
- Unimpeded Rivers Crucial as Climate Changes: New Study
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Gravel-bed rivers and their floodplains are the lifeblood of ecosystems and need to be allowed to run and flood unimpeded if species are to be protected and communities are to cope with climate change.
- U.S. Labor - What's New, What's Not?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An analysis of the changing and unchanging elements of the working-class in the contemporary U.S.
- U.S. Labor: What's New, What's Not?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We all know that there's something different about today's working class. One obvious difference is that today's working class produces fewer things "you can drop on your toe," as The Economist famously put it, and more that you can't. What’s actually changing in capitalist production in the United States?
- U.S. Military Operations Are Biggest Motivation for Homegrown Terrorists, FBI Study Finds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A secret FBI study found that anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of "homegrown" terrorism. The report also identified no coherent pattern to "radicalization," concluding that it remained near impossible to predict future violent acts.
- Unreliability, Spinelessness of the Western 'Left'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For years and decades, the so-called 'left' in the West has been moderately critical of North American (and sometimes even of European) imperialism and neo-colonialism. But whenever some individual or country rose up and began openly challenging the Empire, most of the Western left-wing intellectuals simply closed their eyes, and refused to offer their full, unconditional support to those who were putting their lives (and often even the existence of their countries) on the line.
- Unruly Equality
U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Unruly Equality traces U.S. anarchism as it evolved from the creed of poor immigrants militantly opposed to capitalism early in the twentieth century to one that today sees resurgent appeal among middle-class youth.
- Unsafe at any Dose? Diagnosing Chemical Safety Failures, from DDT to BPA
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Piecemeal, and at long last, chemical manufacturers have begun removing the endocrine-disrupting plastic bisphenol-A (BPA) from products they sell. Sunoco no longer sells BPA for products that might be used by children under three. France has a national ban on BPA food packaging. The EU has banned BPA from baby bottles. These bans and associated product withdrawals are the result of epic scientific research and some intensive environmental campaigning. But in truth these restrictions are not victories for human health. Nor are they even losses for the chemical industry.
- The Untold Story of the Black Radical Tradition in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Looking back on the development of Black radical organizations in Canada.
- Uranium Mine and Mill Workers are Dying, and Nobody Will Take Responsibility
In the Southwest, poisoned uranium workers are still seeking justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 To talk to former uranium miners and their families is to talk about the dead and the dying. Brothers and sisters, coworkers and friends: a litany of names and diseases. Many were, as one worker put it, "ate up with cancer," while others died from various lung and kidney diseases.
- The US Economy Has Not Recovered and Will Not Recover
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The US economy died when middle class jobs were offshored and when the financial system was deregulated. Jobs offshoring benefitted Wall Street, corporate executives, and shareholders, because lower labour and compliance costs resulted in higher profits. These profits flowed through to shareholders in the form of capital gains and to executives in the form of "performance bonuses." Wall Street benefitted from the bull market generated by higher profits.
- US Foreign Trade Zones: Connecting Labor Exploitation in a Global Race to the Bottom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 As the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement continues, many Americans are unaware that hundreds of foreign trade zones are already entrenched within the US, and most likely in their own part of the country.
- US Lost Track of Nearly a Million Guns in Iraq, Afghanistan
Officials: Records Remain for Only 48% of the Guns Sent to Warzones Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Early in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the go-to policy for the US in trying to prop up new allied security forces was to dump weapons, en masse, into the countries. It's only now that people are really starting to ask what happened to the 1.45 million guns shipped into those countries.
- US man's bank payment denied because of his dog's 'terrorist' name
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Sometimes terrorists move on all fours. That's what Chase Bank apparently decided when it wouldn't clear a payment for a disabled man's dog walker. It was the dog's name that led to the payment being bounced and the Treasury Department being involved.
- US must stop playing with nuclear hellfire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The chances of nuclear destruction are higher than in the Cold War due to recent US foreign policy actions, including the positioning of armed forces positioned on Russia's borders.
- US Party Elites Hemorrhage at the Edges
Editorial Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 American party politics have been dominated for so long by the "same old, same old" that with months to go until November, 2016 already stands out as an exception. Most clearly in the case of the Republicans, but palpable as well with the Democrats, the "center-right" and "center-left" elites, who have graciously taken turns administering year-in, year-out misery for more than forty years, have lost control. It appears that Washington and Wall Street are loathed by a majority of people across the spectrum.
- US Propaganda Campaign to Demonize Russia in Full Gear over One-Sided Dutch/Aussie Report on Flight 17 Downing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If the danger of the anti-Putin, anti-Russian disinformation propaganda campaign out of the Pentagon and promoted by the US corporate media weren’t so serious, the effort itself might be laughable.
- US sued over tax-exempt donations for illegal Israeli settlements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A group of American citizens is suing the US Treasury because they say the agency is allowing billions of dollars of tax-exempt charitable donations to flow to the Israeli army and support the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
- Vanishing the People's Wealth to Make the Bosses Richer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Imagine you are a shareholder in a big company and the top executives are sitting on huge amounts of cash and are not interested in putting it to work through productive capital investments, research and development, reducing company debt or paying employees a higher wage. What would you want done about it? Since you and other shareholders are the owners of the company, you'd likely say "give us back our money in cash dividends."
- Venezuela's Opposition: Attacking Its Own People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The corporate media would have you believe that Venezuela is a dictatorship on the verge of political and economic collapse; a country where human rights crusaders and anti-government, democracy-seeking activists are routinely rounded up and thrown in jail. Indeed, the picture from both private media in Venezuela, as well as the mainstream press in the US, is one of a corrupt and tyrannical government desperately trying to maintain its grip on power while the opposition seeks much-needed reforms. In fact, the opposite is true.
- A Very Brazilian Coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On one level, the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff seems like vintage commedia dell’arte. For instance, the lower house speaker who brought the charges, Eduardo Cunha, had to step down because he has $16 million stashed in secret Swiss and U.S. bank accounts. The man who replaced Cunha, Waldir Maranhao, is implicated in the corruption scandal around the huge state-owned oil company, Petrobras.
- Victorian Class War -- Bloody Sunday at Trafalgar Square
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Patrick Murfin recalls a part of UK history, Bloody Sunday at Trafalgar Square.
- Victory Assured on the Military's Main Battlefield -- Washington
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 When it comes to Pentagon weapons systems, have you ever heard of cost "underruns? I think not. Cost overruns? They turn out to be the unbreachable norm, as they seem to have been from time immemorial. In 1982, for example, the Pentagon announced that the cumulative cost of its 44 major weapons programs had experienced a "record" increase of $114.5 billion. Three decades later, in the spring of 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the military’s major programs to develop new weapons systems -- by then 80 of them -- were a cumulative half-trillion dollars over their initial estimated price tags and on average more than two years delayed.
- Victory in Shutting Down Oakland Coal Port
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On July 19, 2016, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to turn down the application for export of coal to Asia through a bulk commodities terminal under construction at the city's port.
- Viva la Revolucion
Eric Hobsbawm on Latin America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Viva La Revolucion is Hobsbawm's magisterial work on Latin America, the fruit of forty years' writing about the continent.
- Vladimir Putin Is the Only Leader the West Has
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A Reuters news report under the names of presstitutes Robin Emmott and Sabine Siebold shows how devoid the West is of honest, intelligent and responsible journalists and government officials.
- Voting Under Socialism
It'll be more meaningful - but hopefully won't involve endless meetings. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- VW, GM and Takata: the Case for Jailing Corporate Executives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Making the case that executives at VW, Takata and General Motors should be jailed for corporate crime. The crimes committed by the corporations they head are extremely serious, and have caused and will cause hundreds of deaths. Why are the perpetrators allowed to get off simply by writing a cheque to cover the fine, instead of going to jail the way other criminals do?
- The Wages of Neoliberalism
Poverty, Exile and Early Death Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Economist Michael Hudson says neoliberal policy will pressure U.S. citizens to emigrate, just as it caused millions to leave Russia, the Baltic States, and now Greece in search of a better life. A research team from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York estimates 875,000 deaths in the United States in year 2000 could be attributed to social factors related to poverty and income inequality.
- A Walking Tour of New York's Massive Surveillance Network
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 So it felt a bit risky to be climbing up a street pole on Wall Street to closely inspect a microwave radar sensor, or to be lingering under a police camera, pointing and gesturing at the wires and antenna connected to it. Yet it was also entirely appropriate to be doing just that, especially in the company of Ingrid Burrington, author of the new book "Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure," which points out that many of the city's communications and surveillance programs were conceived and funded in response to the attacks.
- The Wanted 18
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A claymation comic that showcases the BDS movement through the establishment of a Palestinian dairy co-operative in Beit Sahour.
- War Against the Kurds Renewed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 For show, Erdogan's airforce carried out a few symbolic raids against ISIS, but in reality the aerial offensive was against the Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq.
- War crime? Israel destroys Gaza crops with aerial herbicide spraying
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Gaza farmers have lost 187 hectares of crops to aerial spraying of herbicides by Israel hundreds of meters within the territory's borders. The action, carried out in the name of 'security', further undermines Gaza's ability to feed itself and may permanently deprive farmers of their livelihoods. It may also represent a war crime under the 1977 Protocol to the Geneva Conventions.
- War from above, resistance from below
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A review of Donny Gluckstein (ed), Fighting on all Fronts: Popular Resistance and the Second World War. As Donny Gluckstein points out in the introduction to this book, understanding the nature of the Second World War is fundamental to our understanding of the world today. Liberal and left wing opinion sees it as a war between democracy and fascism, or "progress and reaction" as Eric Hobsbawm described it. This leads some to see the Allies' victory as the straightforward triumph of democracy and ushering in American prosperity for all. For example, the Confederation of German Trade Unions has suggested, without any hint of irony, that workers today should get behind the idea of "a new Marshall plan" as the basis for a "progressive strategy" for the crisis-ridden European Union.
- The War on Democracy in Latin America: Interview with John Pilger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Journalist, writer and filmmaker John Pilger granted this exclusive interview where he talks about the US war on democracy in Latin America. "Modern era imperialism is a war on democracy. Genuine democracy is a threat to unfettered power and cannot be tolerated", he says.
- The 'war on drugs' is a war on culture and human diversity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The 'war on drugs' is presented as a necessary battle against social evils. But from the Andes to the Caribbean, prohibition has criminalised both religious and cultural expression. And it's a war that is strictly for the global poor: people in Colorado can grow pot - so why not Colombians?
- The War on Memory Begins in Argentina
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Within less than a month of the inauguration of the new Macri/Cambiemos government in Argentina, the new leadership, or gestión (management) as they prefer to be called, acted in a great sweeping hurry. Argentine congress, full of opposition parliamentarians from the Frente Para la Victoria Party that lost the presidential race by 2% of the vote, was closed for the summer holidays that take place in the ardent month of December, as much of the urban population of Argentina seeks to carelessly flock to the seaside.
- The War on Savings: the Panama Papers, Bail-Ins, and the Push to Go Cashless
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The bombshell publication of the "Panama Papers," leaked from a Panama law firm specializing in shell companies, has triggered both outrage and skepticism. In an April 3, 2016 article titled "Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak," UK blogger Craig Murray writes that the whistleblower no doubt had good intentions; but he made the mistake of leaking his 11.5 million documents to the corporate-controlled Western media, which released only those few documents incriminating opponents of Western financial interests.
- "A warm reminder of humanity's less barbaric traits"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016
- A Warning From the B.I.S.: the Calm Before the Storm?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is worried that recent ructions in the equities markets could be a sign that another financial crisis is brewing. In a sobering report titled "Uneasy calm gives way to turbulence" the BIS states grimly: "We may not be seeing isolated bolts from the blue but the signs of a gathering storm that has been building for a long time."
- Warning: This May Injure Your Modesty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian novelist and journalist who, in February, was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for "injuring public modesty". In August 2014, Akhbar al-Adab, a state-funded literary magazine, had published an excerpt from his third novel, Istikhdam al-Hayah (Using Life), which had been previously approved by Egypt's censorship authority. In the excerpt, the narrator smokes hashish, drinks alcohol with his friends, and enjoys a sexual relationship with a woman. Hani Saleh Tawfik, a 65-year-old Egyptian, filed a case against Naji, alleging that reading the excerpt had caused him to experience heart palpitations, sickness, and a drop in blood pressure.
- Was Brexit a Working-Class Revolt?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The malevelant genius of the Leave campaign was that it managed to go one step further and direct the anger of many previous working-class targets of derision at the even more vulnerable immigrants.
- Was the German Revolution defeated by January 1919?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 John Rose argued in his talk at Marxism 2014 that the German Revolution had effectively suffered terminal defeat by January 1919. The National Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils voted in December 1918 to hand power to the National Assembly after elections to be held in January 1919.
- Washington Launches Its Attack Against BRICS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Having removed the reformist President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Washington is now disposing of the reformist President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff.
- Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Washington Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda."
- Washington's Not-So-Invisible Hand: It's Not Economics, It's Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Scottish philosopher Adam Smith famously noted the "invisible hand" of the market that supposedly shaped the character of economies near and far. The rightwing neoliberal capitalist movement, dominant in the West since the early Seventies, has turned this phrase into the sacrosanct dictum of its secular religion. All human behaviour must be submitted to the "free market." (This is the notional credo, but in practice corporate elites are subsidized, bailout out, and given every possible taxpayer benefit to ensure higher private profits.) So now, when nations fail, it is typically said in the media to be the product of a) a crazed dictator threatening counterintuitive genocide on his own people; or b) foolish state interventions by deranged socialist ideologues.
- Watch Your Back: Chicago Police Bosses Targeted Cops Who Exposed Corruption
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 After Chicago police officers Shannon Spalding and Danny Echeverria filed a whistleblower lawsuit, retaliation against them only intensified.
- Water in a World of Crisis
The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Karen Piper's The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos.
- Water War Against the Poor: Flint and the Crimes of Capital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If ever one wondered about the efficacy of a state government agency imposing officials on local governments, Flint has answered that question forever. In April, 2014, the state-appointed emergency manager, in order to save money, ordered that the city's water source be changed from Lake Huron to the notoriously polluted Flint River.
- We Are All Deplorables
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Those cast aside by the neoliberal order have an economic identity that both the liberal class and the right wing are unwilling to acknowledge. This economic identity is one the white underclass shares with other discarded people, including the undocumented workers and the people of color demonized by the carnival barkers on cable news shows. This is an economic reality the power elites invest great energy in masking.
- We Are All Deplorables
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Chris Hedges on American life, politics and religion.
- We can dream, or we can organize
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The swift rise, and swift crumbling, of the Occupy movement brings to the surface the question of organization. Demonstrating our anger, and doing so with thousands of others in the streets, gives us energy and brings issues to wider audiences. Yes spontaneity, as necessary as it is, is far from sufficient in itself. For all the weeks and sometimes months that Occupy encampments lasted, little in the way of lasting organization was created and thus a correspondingly little ability to bring about any of the changes hoped for. Nor is social media a substitute for mass action.
- We Can't Save the Economy Unless We Fix Our Debt Addiction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Our economy has increasingly been financialized, and the result is a sluggish economy and stagnant wages. We need to decide whether to stop the cycle and save the economy at large, or to stay in thrall to our banks and bondholders by leaving the debt hangover from 2008 intact. Without a debt writedown the economy will continue to languish in debt deflation, and continue to polarize between creditors and debtors.
- We must win back democracy, even if it takes Hedges' revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 While the banks, elites, and the super-rich have been scrambling to try to hold onto their billions following the UK's shocking vote to exit from the European Union, the anger expressed by the leave side was another emotional cry to end the control that corporations and the elite have over everyday people in many Western countries.
- Welcome to Israel's version of apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Moments before an Aegean Airlines flight was due to take off, three Israeli passengers took security into their own hands and demanded that two fellow passengers, from Israel's Palestinian minority, be removed from the plane. By the end of a 90-minute stand-off, dozens more Israeli Jews had joined the protest, refusing to take their seats.
- Welcome to Israel's version of apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A small scene from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolded last week on a Greek airport runway. Moments before an Aegean Airlines flight was due to take off, three Israeli passengers took security into their own hands and demanded that two fellow passengers, from Israel’s Palestinian minority, be removed from the plane. By the end of a 90-minute stand-off, dozens more Israeli Jews had joined the protest, refusing to take their seats.
Like a parable illustrating Europe's bottomless indulgence of Israel, Aegean staff caved in to the pressure and persuaded the two Palestinian men to disembark.
- Wendell Berry's Radical Skepticism
The celebrated farmer and poet shares a message of love in a time of unrest Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 When the celebrated writer, farmer, and elder statesman of the local food movement sat down in front of a sold-out audience at Johns Hopkins University last week, the crowd seemed even more eager than usual to soak in Berry's wisdom in this particularly fraught national moment. The event was a public conversation between Berry and Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of Fast Food Nation, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. And many in the audience -- made up of people who care about the work the Center does to study the intersections between food systems, the environment, and human health -- were likely feeling a great deal worried about the fate of the issues about which they care deeply.
- We're not having it! $15bn KXL lawsuit shows what's wrong with 'trade deals'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 TransCanada has just made a big mistake by bringing its $15 billion lawsuit against the US government for refusing the Keystone XL pipeline, writes Sam Cossar-Gilbert. The move has exposed the real nature of 'trade deals' like TTIP and TPP - and why all democrats must rally to defeat them.
- The West Is Reduced To Looting Itself
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Third World countries were and are looted by being enticed into development plans for electrification or some such purpose. The gullible and trusting governments are told that they can make their countries rich by taking out foreign loans to implement a Western-presented development plan, with the result being sufficient tax revenues from economic development to service the foreign loan.
- Western Media Responds to Latest Ukrainian Sabotage of Crimea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Western governments and media have a problem with the right-wing regime that is governing Ukraine. The country's economy is a shambles. Even the regime's own backers in the West acknowledge the country and its economy are hopelessly mired in corruption.
- Western Propaganda: So Simple But So Effective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Western propaganda is actually a perfect apparatus! It is effective and it is almost fully 'bulletproof'. It 'works'!
- What Die Linke Should Do
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The German right made stunning gains in this month's regional elections. The Left must rise to the challenge.
- What is a Coup? Analysing the Brazilian Impeachment Process
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The debate over whether the regime change in Brazil constituted a coup hinges on whether the impeachment process used to depose President Dilma Rousseff had democratic legitimacy or was an illicit use of formal procedures to undermine the popular mandate granted to the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) by the Brazilian people in the last presidential election. Proponents of the view that the impeachment was legal and that this legality confers democratic legitimacy tend to abstract the impeachment process from its lived context. This abstraction leaves the politics behind the regime change opaque and even irrelevant.
- What is Meant by 'Single-Payer' in the Current Discussion of Health Care Reforms During the Primaries?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Single-payer means that most of the funds used to pay for medical care are public, that is, they are paid with taxes. The government, through a public authority, is the most important payer for medical care services and uses this power to influence the organization of health care. The overwhelming majority of developed countries have one form or another of a single-payer system.
- What is the "Nuit Debout"?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In late February the Michael Moore-style documentary "Merci Patron!" debuted in a few small cinemas in France. The sleeper hit caught a representative of Bernard Arnault, the CEO of the luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) forking over 35 thousand euros in hush money to a couple who were threatening to go public with their layoff from a garment factory.
- What is socialism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The word socialism is the English language's answer to Madonna: consistently topping the popular charts and maintaining its appeal across generations and among ever changing new audiences. It is, according to the Miriam Webster dictionary, the seventh most looked up English word of all time, and in 2015 had more people seeking out its meaning than any other word.
- What is the Next Left?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 I think it is going to be very difficult to build national organizations that function under the control and as an expression of grassroots movements at this point; however, I think there is some real possibility for accomplishing this at the local level.
- What is to be done with the banks? Radical proposals for radical changes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Nine years after the outbreak of the financial crisis that continues to produce damaging social effects through the austerity policies imposed on victim populations, it's time to take another look at the commitments that were made at that time by bankers, financiers, politicians and regulatory bodies. Those four players have failed fundamentally in the promises they made in the wake of the crisis – to moralise the banking system, separate commercial banks from investment banks, end exorbitant salaries and bonuses, and finally finance the real economy. We didn't believe those promises at the time, and for good reason.
- What Principles Rule the World?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 According to Chomsky, the Global War on Terror sledgehammer strategy has spread jihadi terror from a tiny corner of Afghanistan to much of the world, from Africa through the Levant and South Asia to Southeast Asia. It has also incited attacks in Europe and the United States.
- What the Catastrophic Aliso Canyon Methane Leak Teaches Us About Our Addiction to Fossil Fuels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 It’s early December, and I'm sitting in a mega-church packed with more than 500 people. They're here to listen to an update on the efforts to contain an enormous natural gas blowout that occurred more than a month before. Gas from the leak is being blown by prevailing winds right into their community of Porter Ranch, in Los Angeles County, CA.
People are mad.
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Professor of sociology at North Carolina State, Michael Schwalbe, reflects on the intrinsic contradiction of teaching and researching about class in the United States while benefiting from his own class position.
- What would Rosa Parks do today?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 If Rosa Parks was taking action against transit racism today, she likely wouldn’t talk about segregated seating. Instead, she would be calling attention to disappearing service and unaffordable fares in communities that need transit the most.
- What's Class Got to Do With It?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Unsettled by Donald Trump's bigotry and xenophobia, liberal pundits have struggled to understand his improbable anointment as the nominee of the Republican party. Many have sought answers in the experience and behaviour of the white-working class, the bedrock of Trump support.
- What's Driving Got to Do With It? How the DMV is Conscripted to Do the Dirty Work of the Criminal Justice System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In the aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri protests of the death of Michael Brown in 2014, articles were written about the exorbitant fines assessed against residents of Ferguson, mostly minorities, and how these fines both led to and exacerbated a cycle of incarceration and poverty.
- What's Yours Is Mine
Against the Sharing Economy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 The news is full of their names, supposedly the vanguard of a rethinking of capitalism. Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Uber, and many more companies have a mandate of disruption and upending the "old order." But this new wave of technology companies is funded and steered by very old-school venture capitalists. And in What’s Yours Is Mine, technologist Tom Slee argues the so-called sharing economy damages development, extends harsh free-market practices into previously protected areas of our lives, and presents the opportunity for a few people to make fortunes by damaging communities and pushing vulnerable individuals to take on unsustainable risk. Drawing on original empirical research, Slee shows that the friendly language of sharing, trust, and community masks a darker reality.
- What's Yours Is Mine
Against the Sharing Economy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2016 Through original empirical research, What's Yours is Mine shows that the friendly language of the sharing economy actually masks a darker reality.
- When Chinese Labor Strikes
China on Strike Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Hao Ren's edited volume China on Strike.
- When Is Direct Military Intervention Not Direct Military Intervention?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Since 2014, according to official Pentagon figures, the US has carried out 5,337 airstrikes in Syria. Yet the New York Times continues to pretend that the U.S. has not intervened militarily in Syria.
- When Phoenix Came to Thanh Phong
Bob Kerrey and War Crimes as Policy in Vietnam Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On May 16, 2016, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey was named chairman of Fulbright University, a US-backed college with ties to the State Department in Ho Chi Minh City. During his recent visit to Vietnam, President Barack Obama heaped praise on Kerrey, a former Navy SEAL who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. What Obama failed to mention is that Kerrey also supervised one of the most atrocious war crimes of that ghastly war.
- When Soldiers Resist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Let's remember the courageous war resisters who said no to the slaughter in Vietnam.
- When They Lock Up the Truth: Khadija Ismayilova and the Latin America Connection
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Azerbaijan, a former Soviet country with remarkable oil and gas reserves has been controlled for decades by the Aliyev family.
- When Thoughtful People Think Illogically
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This man with whom I corresponded believes Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon were staged and that those involved, even the children, are "crisis actors" -- employed by a government whose aim is seizing guns, passing gun control laws, and creating a climate of fear. I asked about hospital staff, those who treat the injured and the spokesperson that provides information about a patient's condition. His answer, "Crisis actors."
- Where Did Our Red Love Go?
Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Paula Rabinowitz's, Ruth Barraclough's, and Heather Bowen-Struyk's Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century.
- Where does ISIS come from?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A review of Abdel Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate.
Rosa Luxemburg said that capitalism would end in either socialism or barbarism. Looking at the Middle East, as hopes of democracy and social justice have been dashed by counter-revolution and violence, and at the West’s depictions of Islamic State or ISIS, barbarism might seem to have triumphed. Abdel Bari Atwan, editor for 25 years of the Arabic daily AlQuds AlArabi and now running the news website Rai al-Youm, is well placed to give an informed account of the origins, ideology and spread of ISIS.
- Where is this Digital Watergate Propaganda Campaign Going?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Intelligence sources point out Russian interference in recent elections. However, WikiLeaks-related sources say the Democratic Party’s mail leak was the working of a whistleblower within that institution.
- While you were distracted climate change warning arrived
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 With dire warnings of catastrophic sea level rise and superstorms capable of pitching 1,000 tonne mega-boulders onto shorelines, scientist James Hansen sounded an alarm over continued global warming.
- The 'White Helmets' and the Inherent Contradiction of America's Syria Policy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The danger faced by the White Helmets is not a fiction -- to date, 141 first responders affiliated with the Syrian Civil Defense have been killed while performing their duty. And although their claims of having saved more than 60,000 lives are unverifiable, there can be no doubt that many lives have, in fact, been saved as a result of their work. But let there be no doubt -- despite their oft-cited claims of being neutral and impartial, that the White Helmets are very partisan.
- White Rose Begins Leaflet Campaigns June 1942
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In June 1942, a pair of German university students formed The White Rose, a German resistance movement that used a series of leaflets to decry Nazi militarism and call for an end to the war. Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell wrote the first four leaflets between the end of June and beginning of July. In the fall, Hans' sister, Sophie Scholl, discovered that her brother was one of the authors of the pamphlets, and joined the group. Shortly after, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and Kurt Huber became members.
- Whither the "Political Revolution"?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A new generation is forming its political identity - large numbers of youth, the majority of whom belong to the working class or a collapsing "middle class," have been shaped by the Sanders phenomenon in ways that will last long after this election. They are open to socialist ideas, and many have gained experience in organizing.
- Who is appropriating what?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Last week the novelist Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival. It did not go well. She addressed the question of 'Fiction and identity politics' (apparently the organizers had originally asked her to talk about 'community and belonging', but she had submitted to them a different topic), providing a robust critique of identity politics and of the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’.
- Who the Hell is Supporting Donald Trump?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Somehow the Trump shell game has gained followers. So the question is now, who the hell are these people voting for Trump?
- Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
In rich and poor countries, researchers turn to the Sci-Hub website Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Researchers are increasingly turning to Sci-Hub, the world's largest largest 'pirate' website for scholarly literature. Sci-Hub is becoming the world's de facto open-access research library.
- Why America's Judges Should be Chosen by Citizen Juries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Judges should not be chosen by popular vote, nor by politicians. Both approaches are undemocratic and deeply flawed, perhaps even absurd, despite the fact that the former is in widespread use at the state level, and the latter has always been used at the federal level (in the form of appointment by the President and confirmation by the Senate). A far better option is for judges to be chosen by juries drawn from the public by random selection.
- Why are our environmental groups supporting weak climate targets?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The federal government's recently announced that all Canadian jurisdictions must adopt a carbon pricing scheme by 2018 with a minimum price of $10 per tonne. The price must rise to reach $50 per tonne by 2022. The goal of reducing emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 will not get Canada anywhere close to its promises to the United Nations. Canadians probably believe that our major environmental groups are busy lobbying and pushing the federal and provincial governments to do much more. But no, this is not the case.
- Why Black Lives Matters Is Taking on Police Unions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Black Lives Matter argues that the police associations have to be challenged head-on because of their power in preventing change.
- Why Blacks Vote for "Pragmatism"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 African Americans are probably the most pragmatic voting bloc in the country. African Americans more than any other ethnic group understand white supremacy, racism and class exploitation.
- Why capitalism causes oppression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An examination of capitalism and how the aggressive competitive drive to accumulate wealth exploits and marginalizes individuals and social groups.
- Why changing our diets won't save the Earth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Received wisdom says that to save the planet we have to change our eating habits. Elaine Graham-Leigh explains why the received wisdom isn't just wrong, it blames working people for a crisis they didn’t cause.
- Why Chomsky and Zizek are wrong on the US Elections
Chomsky and Zizek clashed on voting in the US elections, but the views of both are critically flawed. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek, while both critical of Hillary Clinton, are opposed on whom they declare to vote for in the 2016 US election. In opting for Clinton or Trump, Chomsky and Zizek both avoid the crucial question of actual voters and how and why they voted the way they did, and are fixated on the abstract illusion of being on the left or right side of a vacuous argument.
- Why Corbyn so terrifies the liberal elite
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Most Labour MPs would rather destroy their own party than let Jeremy Corbyn and his backers make it fit for its 21st century purpose.
- Why Do We Expose Ourselves?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Among critics of technological surveillance, there are two allusions so commonplace they have crossed into the realm of cliché. One, as you have probably already guessed, is George Orwell's Big Brother, from 1984. The other is Michel Foucault’s panopticon -- a vision, adapted from Jeremy Bentham, of a prison in which captives cannot tell if or when they are being watched. Today, both of these touchstones are considered chillingly prophetic. But in Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt has another suggestion: Both of them are insufficient.
- Why I Choose Optimism Over Despair
An Interview With Noam Chomsky Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Noam Chomsky explores the possibilities for a better human society.
- Why I had to face down the bullies trying to silence my supposedly 'offensive' stance on Islam
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 This week marked the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. The atrocity was a brutal attack not just on human life but also on the principle of free speech, one of the pillars of human civilisation. In the aftermath of the killings, people across the world united to express their support for that essential liberty.
- Why Is the Truth on Syria Difficult To Decipher?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 According to Steven Kinzer, the American media's misinformation on Syria is leading to the kind of ignorance which is enabling the American government to pursue any policy, however imprudent, in the war-torn Arab country. The US government can "decree the death of nations" with “popular support because many Americans - and many journalists - are content with the official story," he wrote.
- Why Israel has silenced the 1948 story of Nazareth's survival
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A rarely told story of the 1948 war that founded Israel concerns Nazareth's survival. It is the only Palestinian city in what is today Israel that was not ethnically cleansed during the year-long fighting. Other cities, such as Jaffa, Lydd, Ramleh, Haifa and Acre, now have small Palestinian populations that mostly live in ghetto-like conditions in what have become Jewish cities. Still others, like Tiberias and Safad, have no Palestinians left in them at all.
Nazareth was not only an anomaly; it was a mistake.
- Why Israel has silenced the 1948 story of Nazareth’s survival
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A rarely told story of the 1948 war that founded Israel concerns Nazareth's survival. It is the only Palestinian city in what is today Israel that was not ethnically cleansed during the year-long fighting. Other cities, such as Jaffa, Lydd, Ramleh, Haifa and Acre, now have small Palestinian populations that mostly live in ghetto-like conditions in what have become Jewish cities. Still others, like Tiberias and Safad, have no Palestinians left in them at all.
- Why Israel is blocking access to its archives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Israel is concealing vital records to prevent darkest periods in its history from coming to light, academics say.
- Why "Lesser Evilism" Is A Loser
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Interview with Jill Stein, the 2016 presidential candidate of the Green Party.
- Why Occupy Wall Street Must Include Deamdn for Honest, Observably Counted, Unrigged Elections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Too many critical parts of our electoral process are controlled by private partisan corporations. The counting of our votes is now controlled by these corporations' software inside computerized "black boxes" – entirely in secret.
- Why Patrick Moore calls GMWatch "a bunch of murdering bastards"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 According to Patrick Moore, GMWatch are "low-life" "murdering creeps", "profiteering on ignorance". Not to mention, "a bunch of murdering bastards" with an "anti-human, murderous agenda." How come?
- Why Progressives Love the New Cold War
The anti-Russian hysteria coming from the left isn't surprising Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Clinton campaign's effort to turn the 2016 US election into a referendum on Vladimir Putin is causing some liberals to question how the tactic appears contradictory to Clinton's other goals and beliefs. Examining support for US war efforts since WWI shows the current Cold War tactics of Clinton have many precedents from liberal politicians.
- Why Qaddafi had to go: African gold, oil and the challenge to monetary imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What was NATO's violent intervention in Libya really all about? Now we know, writes Ellen Brown, thanks to Hillary Clinton's recently published emails. It was to prevent the creation of an independent hard currency in Africa that would free the continent from economic bondage under the dollar, the IMF and the French African franc, shaking off the last heavy chains of colonial exploitation.
- Why Scientists Are Amazed at Oilsands Smog Levels
Air pollution report in Nature shocks even Canada's top researchers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On any hot day Shell and Syncrude tour guides used to call the gasoline-like vapours that wafted from Fort McMurray's huge open-pit bitumen mines "the smell of money." But a new study in Nature has another name for the stench: air pollution and megacity volumes of it.
- Why Sitting Bull was right about Washington's lack of integrity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 That integrity is a foreign land where Washington is concerned is an inarguable fact. In the latest example, the failure to complete the construction of a nuclear disposal plant agreed with Russia once again leaves Washington's credibility in tatters.
- Why the Food Movement is Unstoppable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Even today, in more than a few countries, food is the organising principle behind the main challengers of existing power structures. In El Salvador, the National Coordinator of its Organic Agriculture Movement is Miguel Ramirez who recently explained: We say that every square meter of land that is worked with agro-ecology is a liberated square meter. We see it as a tool to transform farmers’ social and economic conditions. We see it as a tool of liberation from the unsustainable capitalist agricultural model that oppresses farmers.
- Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the centrepiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime. The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript. That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the law of the United States of America.
- Why the New Silk Roads terrify Washington
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Almost six years ago, President Putin proposed to Germany 'the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.' This idea represented an immense trade emporium uniting Russia and the EU, or, in Putin's words, "a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of dollars."
In a nutshell: Eurasia integration.
Washington panicked.
- Why the Newberry Library Is Collecting Black Lives Matter Artifacts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Archivists hope to crowdsource historical documentation of today's civil-rights movements.
- Why the Working Class?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Workers are at the heart of the capitalist system. And that's why they are at the centre of socialist politics.
- Why They Left
Brexit wasn't the first time Europeans rejected the EU, and it won't be the last. Here's what the Left should do. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Leave victory in the British referendum represents a moment of political confusion -- a hiatus in the opposition between social classes. No class appears capable of directing events. The ruling class has no clear plans for the future, and seems temporarily stunned.
- Why This Radical Leftist is Disillusioned by Leftist Culture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 I will always believe in "The Revolution". But I am becoming very frustrated with modern "activist" culture.
- Why Trump Won - And What's Next
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The election of Donald Trump in 2016 shows that American voters wanted 'anything but the above' Obama policies of the previous eight years, policies which were just extensions of the neoliberal regime established in the 1980s in the US since Reagan. However, US Neoliberal policy may not change fundamentally in a Trump regime; just its appearance.
- Why Trump?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Donald Trump is winning Republican presidential primaries at such a great rate that he seems likely to become the next Republican presidential nominee and perhaps the next president. Democrats have little understanding of why he is winning -- and winning handily, and even many Republicans don't see him as a Republican and are trying to stop him, but don't know how. There are various theories: People are angry and he speaks to their anger. People don’t think much of Congress and want a non-politician. Both may be true. But why? What are the details? And Why Trump?
- Why we voted leave: voices from northern England - documentary
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2016 A short look at why those in the north of England mainly voted to leave the EU - from Guerrera Films.
- WikiLeaks Bombshell: Emails Show Citigroup Had Major Role in Shaping and Staffing Obama's First Term
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 According to emails released by WikiLeaks, which came from a hack of the email account of John Podesta, a co-chair of Obama's 2008 Transition Team, we learn that despite the obvious fact that Citigroup was both corrupt and derelict in handling its own financial affairs, Barack Obama gave executives of that bank an outsized role in shaping and staffing his first term.
- WikiLeaks: 10 Years of Pushing the Boundaries of Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We are now entering WikiLeaks 10 year anniversary. The organization registered their domain on October 4, 2006 and blazed into the public limelight in the spring of 2010 with the publication of Collateral Murder. This video footage depicted the cruel scenery of modern war seen from an Apache helicopter gun-sight. It became an international sensation, with the website temporarily crashing with the massive influx of visitors.
- The Witch-Hunters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Washington Post pushes campaign to censor alternative media.
- Witness to a War Crimes Trial: My Heart is Sepur Zarco
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 A frail, elderly woman, covered from head to toe in bright, colorful clothing approaches the witness chair. Her face is almost entirely covered. She is no more than five feet tall, and under all that clothing she can't weigh more than 100 pounds. She sits next to her translator. She speaks only Q’eqchi, one of Guatemala’s 24 officially recognized languages – no Spanish.
The witness speaks quietly into a microphone, and her testimony is harrowing.
- Witnessing revolution in Rojava
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In Rojava, who is the enemy is real simple: the Turkish government. Everyone knows that the Turkish government has supported Daesh [also called ISIS]. If the outside world wants to support Rojava, it's not money they primarily need, it's opening the border.
- Wolfe Erlichman in conversation with Ulli Diemer
October 26, 2016 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An interview with Wolfe Erlichman, who worked as a community worker/organizer in Trefann Court in Toronto in the late 1960s. An audio recording of the interview, and a transcript, are held in the Connexions Archive.
- Women of the Dada and Their Timnes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Thinking about Dada today, it is astonishing that such a small, obscure group should have become such an influence. It was the laboratory for new ideas and unrestrained, uninhibited, playful activity and their works still find joyful resonance in our hearts.
- Women on the frontlines of Kurdish struggles: An interview with JI.NHA women's news agency
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In 2015, Corporate Watch visited Bakur (meaning 'North' in Kurmanji), the Kurdish region within Turkey's borders. We interviewed two journalists from JI.NHA, an all-women news agency made up of mostly Kurdish women, based in Amed. Our meeting with JI.NHA took place just after the Turkish election in June 2015. Since our interviews, the Turkish state has begun a new war on its Kurdish population. Cities have been attacked by the police and military with mortars, tanks and helicopters and every day Kurdish citizens are being murdered. People in cities across Bakur have erected barricades in their neighbourhoods to defend themselves against the violence and are trying to organise autonomously from the state.
- Women's Monumental Struggle
Suffragette Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Barbara Winslow and Alison Baldree respond to Sarah Gavron's controversial 2015 film Suffragette.
- Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Remembering Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood.
- A Word Warrior for Freedom
Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio and Freedom Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Book review of Sonja D. Williams' Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio and Freedom.
- The Workers' Climate Plan & The Federal Climate Consultations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The Government of Canada is leading a process to create a National Climate Strategy, a result of signing the Paris Agreement to limit increasing global temperatures. Over the next 3 months, political leaders will be consulting the public and key stakeholders to propose a new federal climate strategy in October 2016.
- Workers in a lean world: unions in the international economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 In a comprehensive study of current labour relations worldwide, Kim Moody surveys both sides of the picket lines. A bracing riposte to the conventional wisdom concerning the irresistible power of globalization, Workers in a Lean World is a definitive account of contemporary labour relations on a global scale.
- Workers' Memorial Day: North Dakota deadliest state in US
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Tyler Erickson was a floor hand with Heller Casing in Williston, North Dakota, from 2012 until 2014. He specialised in maintaining the casing, which would be lowered into drill holes in what back then were the state’s booming oil fields. Accidents, he says, were a regular occurrence.
- Workers of the World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Trade unionists in the 1920s didn't have much reason for optimism. Labour membership, which had shot upwards amid postwar unrest, crested and then plunged. A decade later, strikes were blocking production across the country, and union density was skyrocketing.
After years of malaise in the labor movement, is a similar upsurge possible today?
- Workers Profiles: Below the Minimum Wage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 An endless supply of alcohol, good music, pool tables, and friendly strangers -- these elements seem like a recipe for a fun time. For those of us who frequent bars and pubs, this kind of environment is exactly what we look forward to at the end of a long day or work week. Imagine working at a bar. It seems natural that bartenders would enjoy their upbeat surroundings at work as much as their customers. Now, imagine being the only worker at a bar. You alone are responsible for cleaning the bar, controlling drunk customers, serving food, buying supplies -- everything all alone during an overnight shift.
- The Working Class, Reconsidered
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The central narrative of post-election analysis asserts that Trump won the election by riding a wave of white working class resentment; a wave that he'd activated and steered in dangerous directions. The narrative is partly right, but it needs to be subject to critical analysis, specifically regarding how we think about "the working class" and the role that "it" played in this election.
- The Working Class: Saskatchewan's Political Orphan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 We all suffer from the absence of working class politics. We are smothered in the business-oriented, neoliberal 'consensus' instructing us to reconcile ourselves to 'the new reality' -- rollbacks in social welfare and universal publicly funded programs; huge tax cuts to business and the rich, driving up public debt and enriching finance capitalism; an end to secure employment and guaranteed benefits; surrendering our dreams of home ownership unless we are prepared to accept a lifetime of debt enslavement; a future of uncertainty and endless personal struggle to sustain ourselves and our children. Flippant commentators now tell us the proletariat has been replaced by 'the precariat', and this will define the future of this new capitalism.
- Workshop Talks: Do job, get fired
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Under the Affordable Care Act, it’s standard HMO practice to offer patients the opportunity to fill out an advance directive as an exercise in considering one's quality of life, not just its prolongation. Frontline healthcare providers have a concrete reason for quality-of-life care concerns. But in the HMO business campaigns promoting quality of life over quantity, things are not really what they appear.
- World Bank Orders Venezuela To Pay Crystallex $1.4 Billion For Gold Mine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 The World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has ordered the government of Venezuela to pay $1.386 billion to Crystallex, a bankrupt Canadian gold mining company, for canceling a 2002 permit to mine for gold in the Imataca Forest Reserve.
- A World War has Begun: Break the Silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.
- Your Apps, Please? China Shows how Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Now China has taken the next step. In November, a select group of Xinjiang residents found their mobile phone service abruptly terminated. Their phone service providers told them to visit their local police station to have the service restored. When contacted, the police told them that they had been detected using a VPN, or downloading foreign messaging software. Remove the software, the police said, and you'll get your connection back.
- Your EU vote is crucial because it won't count
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Here is a prediction about the outcome of today’s UK referendum on leaving the European Union. Even in the unlikely event that the remain camp loses, the UK will still not Brexit. Europe's neoliberal elite will not agree to release its grip on a major western nation. A solution will be found to keep the UK in the union, whatever British voters decide. Which is one very good reason to vote Brexit.
- Zionism and Anti-Semitism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 What is the meaning of Zionism today, almost 70 years after the formation of Israel, and why is it such a buzzword? Are we talking here about a particular form of nationalism or is it something a little bit more complex? What is its agenda?
- 'Zionism is nationalism, not Judasim,' a former Hebrew school teacher explains
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 Former Hebrew school teacher, Tziva Thier clarifies the distinction between Zionism as a political movement and Judaism as a religion, and explains why Israel's acts cannot be condoned by the religion.
- The Zionist educator we should have listened to
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2016 At a time when Israel's education minister sees only Jews as moral, it is worth remembering a prominent Zionist educator who taught us that things could have turned out differently.
2015
- Aaron Swartz and the Fight for Free Information
His Blood is on the Hands of the US Government Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It’s been just over two years since computer prodigy Aaron Swartz took his own life. He was the target of a merciless witch-hunt by the Department of Justice, ultimately choosing death over 35 years behind bars for the crime of releasing information. As someone who transformed the way we all use and love the internet, Aaron should have gotten a medal of honour, not a death sentence.
- Abolish High School
Easy Chair Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Solnit says that we need to recognize that high school doesn't work for most young people, and suggests abolishing it.
- About Canada: Women's Rights
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Introduces readers to some of the many women who changed Canada through their efforst to secure greater equality.
- The Above
Field of Vision Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 In Kirsten Johnson’s The Above a U.S. military surveillance balloon floats on a tether high above Kabul, Afghanistan. Its capacities are both highly classified and deeply mysterious.
- Activism: Marathon or Sprint?
#shifthappens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The 1% are killing the planet partly because the elite players have chosen to look no further into the future than the next fiscal quarter. Meanwhile, our culture exists to train and condition the 99% to maintain an equally narrow perspective.
- Activists Arrested at ArborGen GE Trees World Headquarters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new organizing initiative called "GE Trees Fall" launched with a four day GE trees action training camp outside of Asheville North Carolina, over September 24th to the 27th, 2015.
- Activists Track Down Racist Trolls Who Thought They Were Anonymous and Brilliantly Embarrass Them
A Brazilian group is turning racist social media messages into signs everyone can see. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Recently, the Cleveland Plain Dealer announced it had turned off comments on stories about Tamir Rice because "just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments."
- Adblockers and Innovative Ad Companies are Working Together to Build a More Privacy-Friendly Web
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Eckersley and Toner talk more about the coalition between tracker and ad-blocker companies that will respect a 'Do Not Track' policy.
- Advancing Food Sovereignty to Transform Economies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Food sovereignty can transform local, national, and regional markets to support countries’ domestic economies and allow us to create wealth, both in production and knowledge.
- Afghan media respond to Taliban threats against TV channels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In an alarming statement published on the group's website on Monday 12 October, 2015, the Taliban said the two TV channels are legitimate targets and no employee, anchor, office, news team or reporter associated with either station is safe henceforth.
- Africa rising? The economic history of sub-Saharan Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An overview of the economic history of sub-Saharan Africa since independence (around 1960 for most countries).
- African-American Self-Defense
Guns and the Freedom Struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A Review of "This Noviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Cvil Rights Movement Possible" by Carles E. Cobb. Jr.
- After Paris
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Some have seen the terrorism as the consequence of French foreign policy in Syria. Yet we should be wary of seeing these attacks as a response, however perverted, to French, or Western, foreign policy. The terrorists did not target symbols of the French state, or of French militarism. They did not even target tourist spots. They targeted, rather, the areas and the places where mainly young, anti-racist, multiethnic Parisians hang out. What the terrorists despised, what they tried to eliminate, were ordinary people, drinking, eating, laughing, mixing. That is what they hated - not so much the French state as the values of diversity and pluralism.
- After the Last River
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Vicki Lean has crafted a stunning documentary about the community of Attwapiskat and its stories of risistance, following the impact that diamond mining and decades of government underfunding have had on the environment and the community.
- After the oil spill: ode to the Yellowstone River
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the face of environmental atrocities like the recent spill of crude oil into the Yellowstone River, quiescence be damned! To stop more of the same, we must reclaim from the corporate-captured state the rights of commons and community to decide on how local resources are used.
- After the Sands
Energy and Ecological Security for Canadians Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 After the Sands outlines a vision and a road map to transitioning Canada to a low-carbon society. Despite its oil abundance, with no strategic reserves, Canada is woefully unprepared for the next global oil supply crisis. There's no good reason for Canadians to use much more oil per capita than people in other sparsely populated, northern countries like Norway, Finland and Sweden -- nations that use 27 to 39 percent less oil per person. In After the Sands, Alberta-based political economist Gordon Laxer proposes a bold strategy of deep conservation and a Canada-first perspective to ensure that all Canadians have sufficient energy at affordable prices.
- Against Charity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Snow criticizes the growing social movement 'Effective Altruism', which is characterized by calculating where expendable income is best spent and by encouraging the relatively affluent to channel their capital accordingly.
- Agbogbloshie: Ghana's 'trash world' may be an eyesore - but it's no dump
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Most accounts of Agbogbloshie, the e-waste site in Accra, Ghana, persistently miss the point. Far from being a simple 'dump' for the world's trash, it is a huge recycling operation that pays for the wastes it receives, employs thousands of young men who would otherwise lack jobs, and plays a huge role in the national and global economy.
- The Age of Acquiescence
The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has largely vanished.
- The Age of Aquiescenence
The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? Fraser sets out to solve that mystery.
- The Age of Finance Capital -- and the Irrelevance of Mainstream Economics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Despite the fact that the manufacturers of ideas have elevated economics to the (contradictory) levels of both a science and a religion, a market theodicy, mainstream economics does not explain much when it comes to an understanding of real world developments. Indeed, as a neatly stylized discipline, economics has evolved into a corrupt, obfuscating and useless -- nay, harmful -- field of study.
- The Age of Imperialistic Wars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There is no question that wars and military threats have replaced diplomacy, negotiations and democratic elections as the principal means of resolving political conflicts. Throughout the present year (2015) wars have spread across borders and escalated in intensity.
- An ageing population isn't the reason for stunted economic growth - austerity is
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the 2015 World Economic Outlook, for example, the IMF says: "Potential employment growth is expected to decline further in advanced and emerging market economies compared to pre-crisis rates. This is a result of demographic factors negatively affecting both the growth of the working population and trend labour force participation rates."
But the reality is somewhat different. The IMF analysis is based on 16 countries that excludes more than one billion people from the African continent where half of the population is either 20 years of age or younger.
- The Agony of Saada
U.S. and Saudi Bombs Target Yemen's Ancient Heritage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In addition to the growing number of civilian casualties in the country's seven-month-long war, U.S.-made bombs dropped by fighter jets from a Saudi Arabian-led coalition are pulverizing Yemen's architectural history. These airstrikes are tearing villages apart, forcibly displacing thousands and erasing the country's inimitable heritage, according to the world heritage body, UNESCO.
- Agrica's Tanzania Rice Scheme Has Devastated Local Farmers, Say NGOs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A flagship rice plantation in Tanzania run by UK investors has allegedly destroyed the livelihoods of local smallholder farmers, driven them into debt and impacted the local environment, according to a new report published by the Oakland Institute.
- Agroecology as a Tool for Liberation: Transforming Industrial Agribusiness in El Salvador
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 "We say that every square meter of land that is worked with agro-ecology is a liberated square meter. We see it as a tool to transform farmers''social and economic conditions. We see it as a tool of liberation from the unsustainable capitalist agricultural model that oppresses farmers."
- Agroecology leading the fight against India's Green Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For the women farmers of Tamil Nadu life has long been a struggle, all the more so following the advent of 'Green Revolution' industrial agriculture. So now women's collectives are organising to restore traditional foods and farming methods, resulting in lower costs, higher yields, improved nutrition, and a rekindling of native Tamil culture.
- Air pollution may be damaging children's brains - before they are even born
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Aside causing respiratory and cardiovascular damage, air pollution has also an impact on the brains and nervous systems of unborn children whose mothers suffer high levels of exposure.
- Alan Gross's Improbable Tales on 60 Minutes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In a dramatic segment on CBS News' 60 Minutes titled "The Last Prisoner of the Cold War," former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) subcontractor Alan Gross tells of horrifying experiences in captivity: "They threatened to hang me, they threatened to pull out my fingernails, they said I'd never see the light of day."
- Alarm sounded as TransCanada set to drill in Bay of Fundy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An open letter was released by 20 groups in New Brunswick opposed to TransCanada's plans to begin drilling in the Bay of Fundy. The procedure has the potential to hurt resident's foundations and drinking water, along with the natural environment.
- Albert Woodfox, Gary Tyler
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Albert Woodfox, Gary Tyler - two examples among many of what the racist and bureaucratic "carceral state" in America is about.
- Alberta Oil and the Declince of Democracy in Canada
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 If reliance on oil production undermines democratic participation and governance in Canada, then what does the Alberta case suggest for the future of democracy in other industrialized nations?
- The Alinksy Method: a Critique
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Alinsky approach involved focusing on local issues and not asking basic questions about the economy or about broader social structures.
- All Rights Reserved: Now We Know the Final TTP is Everything We Feared
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement.
- Altered Genes, Twisted Truth
How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Drucker elucidates the scientific facts about genetically engineered foods that the PR myths have been obscuring.
- An Alternative for SYRIZA
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In order to regain sovereignty, a country has to exit not only the EZ, if a member, but the EU itself. Liberated from the noose of the EU treaties and regulations, Greek people will have the freedom to follow a sovereign monetary and fiscal policy and form trade and international alliances to the best of their interests.
- The Amazon tribe protecting the forest with bows, arrows, GPS and camera traps
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With authorities ineffective, the 2,200-strong Ka'apor, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, are taking on the illegal loggers with technology and direct action. Now the Ka'apor are seeking support through NGOs and the media.
- The American Sniper Was No Hero
Assassin-for-Hire Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Despite what some people think, hero is not a synonym for competent government-hired killer.
- American White Separatist Finds Shared Values with Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 If America and Israel have "shared values," as their elected leaders often claim, then how can so many Americans reject ethnocracy in their own country, but support what is happening inside Israel?
- America's Capitalist Religion has Little Room for Science
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The US mainstream press accuse the Pope of being leftist. Evidence? Well, they make the claim that he is leftist because he supports the theory of global warming. My guess is that the Pope also supports the theory of gravity, which, like global warming, has a great body of scientific evidence to support it. But is science now a part of the leftist realm of influence?
- America's Latest War Crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The best that Nobel Peace Laureate President Obama can do after the US bombs and destroys a hospital in Afghanistan, killing 22 people, including 12 volunteer doctors from Doctors Without Borders, is to say, "We're sorry"? No wonder people around the globe hate the US.
- Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People
History and Memory Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 This study of the Congress of African People (CAP) combines historical research and analysis with the author's first-hand experience with the organization, providing the first historical narrative of a consequential player in the Black Power Movement.
- Amnesia and the Armenian Genocide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A century after the methodically planned, organized, and executed destruction of the Anatolian Armenians, this article revisits the causes of this genocide and recognizes its importance for understanding the present.
- Amnesty International Responds to U.K. Government Surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A British tribunal admitted on Wednesday that the U.K. government had spied on Amnesty International and illegally retained some of its communications.
- Anger over China's Deadly Workplaces after Warehouse Explosion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A series of chemical explosions on August 12, 2015 at a warehouse in the northern city of Tianjin is shining a spotlight on dangerous workplace conditions and precarious employment relations in China.
- Anger rises as Brazilian mine disaster threatens river and sea with toxic mud
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Conservationists and engineers battle to reduce the ecological fallout as mud and iron-ore residue from the BHP Billiton-Vale dam collapse flows down the Rio Doce to the Atlantic.
- The anguish of migrants in Macedonia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Milevska talks about the difficulties that migrants and refugees have to endure as cross Macedonia in their way to Western Europe.
- Anthropocene Boosters and the Attack on Wilderness Conservation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A number of academics, commentators, and groups argue that humans have so completely modified the Earth that concepts such as 'wilderness' or 'nature' have become meaningless, and that therefore there is no point in talking about 'preserving' wilderness or natural areas. The idea of 'nature', they say, is just a human cultural construct. Those advancing these ideas use different progressive-sounding labels, such as "pragmatic environmentalists" or "green postmodernism," but their message is that we should forget about wilderness conservation and just get on with the business of 'managing' the planet for human benefit. Not surprisingly, corporate and industry leaders have been jumping on the bandwagon.
- Anti-African Racism in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A collection of articles by David Sheen chronicling the racist attacks against non-Jewish African asylum-seekers in Israel.
- Anti-Capitalism and Queer Liberation
Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Peter Drucker's Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism.
- Anti-Syrian Muslim Refugee Rhetoric Mirrors Calls to Reject Jews During Nazi Era
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 During the 1930s and early 1940s, the United States resisted accepting large numbers of Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi terror sweeping Europe, in large part because of fearmongering by a small but vocal crowd. In recent days, similar arguments are being resurrected to reject Syrian refugees.
- The Anti-Empire Report #140
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Are you confused by the Middle East? Here are some things you should know. (But you'll probably still be confused.)
- Apostasy, Blasphemy and Free Expression in the Age of ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The right to religion comes with a corresponding right to be free from religion.
- Arboricide in Palestine - olive orchard destroyed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Israeli settlers in Palestine's South Hebron Hills last week cut down an orchard of 36 olive trees, in the latest attack of a decades-long war against Palestinian culture and survival in which has seen the cutting, burning and bulldozing of over a million olive, fruit and nut trees.
- Are cows destroying the climate?
Film Review: Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How not to change the world. ‘Cowspiracy’ ignores capitalism and rejects Indigenous peoples’ concerns, while denouncing everyone who eats meat.
- Are Your Devices Hardwired For Betrayal?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Firmware-based attacks are real and their numbers will only increase. Cooper discusses the potential consequences if we don't address this issue now.
- ARIPO Protocol is a tool for foreign takeover of Ghana's agriculture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ghanaian citizens have so far prevented the passage of the Plant Breeders Bill, a UPOV-91-compliant law that would strip Ghanaian farmers of their rights to their own seeds. But there is worse coming from the African Regional Intellectual Property Association (ARIPO). To Ghana’s great credit, and despite determination and pressure from the G7, USAID and its contractors, despite the willing and enthusiastic cooperation of Ghana’s ministers, Attorney General, and both major political parties, Ghana has refused to pass a farmer destroying, sovereignty busting, UPOV law.
- Art and Aesthetics on the Left
An interview with Andrew Hemingway Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Andrew Hemingway is an art historian and Professor Emeritus at University College London. His books include Artists on the Left. American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926-1956 (Yale University Press, 2002) and The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing, 2013).
- The Art of Carnage
Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Gordon Hughes' and Philipp Blom' Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I.
- Arthur Topham's Political Beliefs May Just Be Illegal
The Extraordinary Trial of Arthur Topham: Part 3 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On November 7, 2015, Arthur Topham was convicted of inciting hatred against a racial group, the Jewish people. Mr. Topham maintains a website, Radical Free Press, in which he publishes and comments upon various documents. These documents include The Elders of the Protocols of Zion, various anti-Zionist texts, and a tract entitled Germany Must Perish, first published in 1941 and then satirized by Mr. Topham as Israel Must Perish.
- As rivers re-open to shipping, oil threat to Bangladesh's Sundarbans forest continues
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Bangladesh's Sundarbans forest, home of incredibly rich biodiversity, is under unprecedented threat, writes ASMG Kibria. The recent oil tanker capsize on the Shela river puts the forest at risk of widespread biodiversity loss, but just this week, the authorities re-opened the Shela river to shipping with no restrictions on hazardous cargoes.
- As Turkey Bombed Anti-ISIS Fighters, It Hired Lobbying Firm Tied to 2016 Candidates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On July 24, 2015, Turkey launched a massive military campaign that included sweeping attacks against Kurdish forces as well as minor strikes on Islamic State positions south of Turkey’s border. Just five days later, the Turkish government inked a contract to hire a team of prominent lobbyists to add to its already formidable army of influence-peddlers in Washington.
- Assange's Battle: A Fight for Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Whistle-blowers have become dissidents of the West. In the US, the crackdown on journalists and publishers has reached its height. Despite his campaign pledge to be "the most transparent administration", President Obama engaged in unprecedented persecution of whistle-blowers, worse than all other previous administrations combined. Those who communicate with the press and reveal the secrets of the deep state are seen as insider threats. They have become enemies of the state, often treated as traitors and criminalized.
- Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed: 1990-2015
The Kingpin Strategy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The "kingpin strategy" refers to the elimination of the kingpins dominating cartels. Cockburn analyzes how this method was used by the U.S. government, how it failed to work in the "drug war," and how its adoption, in the form of targeted assassinations in the "war on terror," has similarly been a failure.
- The Assassination Complex
Secret military documents expose the inner workings of Obama's drone wars Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state's power over life and death.
- Assassination Nation
Drones and Targeted Killing Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Since the use of killer drones by the United States began, more than 3500 people have been killed. Many of those killed were civilians. The number of civilians killed depends on how one counts civilians.
- At COP21, the world agreed to increase emissions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Some countries will reduce emissions a little, but other countries will increase them a lot. You would never know this from UN and media reports.
- Atlanta: Notes on the Politics of Respectability
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In Atlanta, Black politics is contained by the churches and civil rights officialdom in a way that is very peculiar compared with anywhere else I have lived.
- The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes
315 years. 20,528 voyages. Millions of lives. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Usually, when we say "American slavery" or the "American slave trade," we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But North America was a bit player. From the trade's beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th, slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747 -- less than 4 percent of the total -- came to North America.
- Attica: The Nightmare That Never Ends
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Today, the incarcerated population in the U.S. has mushroomed to some 2.4 million, seven times the number in 1971, not least as a result of the racist "war on drugs." The prison population grew massively in the 1970s and 1980s in direct proportion to the sharp decline in unionized manufacturing jobs, a measure of how the bourgeoisie has deemed whole layers of the ghetto and barrio masses "surplus." Prisons and jails represent, in concentrated form, the brutality of this racist capitalist society, with severe dehumanization and oppressive conditions directed against an already marginalized and demoralized population.
- Auditing the Greek Debt: Unity of Place, Time, and Action
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The recent debt currently being claimed presents features that make it irregular, illegitimate, illegal, unsustainable, and even odious. Allegedly Greek debts that were accumulated before 2010 were already to a large extent illegitimate and/or illegal.
- Australian Mining Companies Digging A Deadly Footprint in Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Schilis-Gallego discusses Australian mining companies' involvement in violence and human rights violations in Africa.
- Ayatollah BBC and #ExMuslimBecause
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Whilst we mourn our dead in Paris, we must not forget the countless others killed by ISIS and Islamists, including this very month in Lebanon, Nigeria, Mali, Iraq, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan... as well as those executed perfectly legally via Sharia laws in Iran, Saudi Arabia... The refugee crisis is in large part due to this unbridled brutality. In fact, if there ever was a "right" time to challenge Islam and Islamism, it is now.
- Back-Talk from the "Old Stock"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stephen Harper has been talking recently about "old stock" Canadians -- and at the same time stirring up fear and loathing against more recent arrivals in this country, notably those of Muslim faith, in order to mobilize electoral support for his Conservative Party.
- Bangladesh and the shrinking space for free thinkers: 'Don't call me Muslim, I am an atheist'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Writer Taslima Nasreen fled Bangladesh in 1994 when extremists threatened to kill her for criticizing Islam, and has been living in exile since. Her country has, in recent times, seen many intellectuals expelled or killed. In this interview, she speaks about the shrinking space for free thinkers in Bangladesh and says that Islam cannot be exempt from the critical scrutiny that other religions undergo.
- Bangladeshi Tribals Evicted For Tea Plantation Expansion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A Bangladeshi company has been accused of using armed men to evict ethnic minority communities in order to expand a tea plantation in Sreemangal in northeastern Bangladesh.
- Banking Giant HSBC Sheltered Murky Cash Linked to Dictators and Arms Dealers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Team of journalists from 45 countries unearths secret bank accounts maintained for criminals, traffickers, tax dodgers, politicians and celebrities. Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.
- Barter Networks: Lessons from Argentina for Greece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 "How did Argentina survive their economic crisis?"; "Are they doing better now?"; "What happened to the factory takeovers?"; "Did millions of people really participate in the barter network? Did they actually invent new money?" These are some of the many questions I have been asked by Greeks, especially over the past few weeks, related to their economic crisis and the potential for self-organization and survival.
- Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (American Empire Project)
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Examination of the perils of American military bases overseas.
- Batteries and renewables - believe the hype!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Discusses one of the biggest technological developments of our climate-stressed times: the large-scale storage of renewable energy.
- Battlefield America: The War on the American People
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Police forces across the United States have been transformed into extensions of the military. Towns and cities have become battlefields, and the American people are now the enemy combatants to be spied on, tracked, frisked, and searched. For those who resist, the consequences can be a one-way trip to jail, or even death. Battlefield America: The War on the American People is constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead's terrifying portrait of a nation at war with itself. In exchange for safe schools and lower crime rates, we have opened the doors to militarized police, zero tolerance policies in schools, and SWAT team raids.
- Rosalyn Baxandall, Feminist Historian and Activist dies at 76
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rosalyn Baxandall, a feminist historian who was among the first to bring scholarly attention to the historical role of women in the workplace and to expand the meaning of "women's work," has died.
- BBC defends reality show involving poor, dubbed 'Hunger Games'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Britain's Hardest Grafter will pit 25 of Britain's lowest-paid workers against each other for cash prize in series it claims is a 'serious social experiment'.
- Beating Uncle Sam at His Own Game
The Skirmish in the Spratlys Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Washington has thrown down the gauntlet in the South China Sea. If Beijing wants to preserve its independence and surpass the US as the world's biggest economy, it's going to have to meet the challenge, prepare for a long struggle, and beat Uncle Sam at his own game. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.
- Beginning a New Era
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Obama may succeed where previous U.S. administrations -- such as Nixon's and especially Carter's -- failed in their attempts at reestablishing diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba.
- Benign State Violence vs. Barbaric Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The US and UK target for assassination civilians that allegedly have a connection with ISIS. Such operations are performed without a trial. Peppe discusses how the governments of these countries justify one form of extrajudicial killing while demonizing the murders that ISIS commits.
- Between the Power and the Dream
Leon Trotsky Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Paul Le Blanc's Leon Trotsky.
- Beyond The Broken Window
William Bratton and the new police state Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Assistant chief Paul McDonagh was the man with the unenviable task of explaining the Seattle Police Department's drone program to the public. In October 2012, a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that the department had secretly purchased a pair of camera-equipped Draganflyer X6 drones two years earlier. Soon after, McDonagh stood in a local community center before a roomful of citizens, who were shouting "shame" and "murderer" and "no drones, no drones, no drones!"
- Beyond the Spectacle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Our initial reaction to the Rachel Dolezal story was: what's the big deal? America has always been a land of shape shifters, and if she isn't stopped for "driving while black" or followed while shopping, and if her sons are not targeted by cops, then how is she different from the politician who is Italian on Columbus Day and Irish on Saint Patrick's Day?
- Bhopal's Fight for Memory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In December, 1984, unknown poisonous gases burst out from a Union Carbide pesticide plant located in a vicinity of the city of Bhopal in central India. The plant, scheduled for possible closure, was understaffed, not maintained adequately, and had already seen prior deaths from exposure to leaks.
- Bibi Netanyahu's War Dream
An interview with Moshe Machover Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Suzi Weissman interviews Moshe Machover, a founder of the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzen) in the 60's. They discuss the reasons behind Israel's campaign against the Iran nuclear deal.
- The Big Lie at the Heart of the Myth of the Creation of Israel
An Interview with Lia Tarachansky Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lia Tarachansky's heart-wrenching documentary, On the Side of the Road, reveals the Big Lie at the heart of the myth of the creation of Israel.
- Big media versus the people
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A look how "Big Media" shapes public attitudes, the economy, culture, leisure and education, and how governments have developed close relationships with the press in a way which has not been in the public interest.
- Big Oil's Ethical Violence
BP and the Armed Suppression of Dissent in Colombia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 To challenge impunity is not just to attempt to confine abuses to the past. It serves to expose crimes committed, to preserve memory of the past within the present, and to highlight contradictions between corporate recognition of rights and an economic model that has implied the systematic violation and dispossession of workers and populations around the oilfields. It is part of a process of re-building communities and social organisations wiped out by the violence.
- The Big Secret That Makes the FBI's Anti-Encryption Campaign a Big Lie
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 McLaughlin discusses how hacking techniques and their increasing use are justified in a prevalent way by the American government.
- The Biggest Source of Plastic Trash You've Never Heard of
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How plastic waste is used on the farm for agriculture.
- The Biggest Threat to Mexican Journalists Aren't Drug Cartels Anymore
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Northern Mexico and the drug cartels have dangerous reputations; especially for journalists. This should come to a surprise to no one. This year, however, the danger seems to have shifted in both location and source. Of the six journalists that were killed in Mexico this year, all of them were killed in the south; most likely at the hands of police officers and politicians.
- Bigotry in the Guise of Secularism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The murder at Charlie Hebdo and the Paris kosher supermarket have unleashed a wave of attacks on French Muslim communities, their culture and religion.The analysis by Carmen Teeple Hopkins helps explain the background of the present dangers and tragedies.
- Bikes vs Cars
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Bikes vs Cars is a documentary about the bike and what an amazing tool for change it can be. It highlights a conflict in city planning between bikes, cars and a growing reliance on fossil fuels.
- Bill C-51: A Legal Primer
Overly broad and unnecessary anti-terrorism reforms could criminalize free speech Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Bill C-51, the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015, would expand the powers of Canada's spy agency, allowing Canadians to be arrested on mere suspicion of future criminal activity.
- Biodiversity is the best defence against corn pests
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Farmers' first line of defence against pests is the ecosystem in and around their fields. With widespread or indiscriminate use of pesticides essential biodiversity is lost - and the result is more frequent and serious infestations, and a decline in food security.
- Birdie
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Birdie, who sleeps in trees and sells fruits and vegetables on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, loves the two abandoned dogs he now lives with. In Heloisa Passos' film, Birdie reads the minds of his two best canine friends.
- The Black Belt Communists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 During the Great Depression, black sharecroppers and the Communist Party waged war against tenant farming in the South.
- The Black Infinity Complex
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We're a group of UCLA grad students, and our vision of the Black Infinity Complex is inspired by the boundlessness and sustainability of Black creativity and imagination. It's a collective of organizers coming together as a liaison to create a united front of existing structures of grassroots organizations and community institutions, and organizers like you, or scholars.
- The Black Panthers: Movie Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With its powerful archival footage and interviews with former Black Panther Party members, Stanley Nelson’s documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution reopens a chapter of black history that has long been distorted, hated and feared by the racist rulers of America.
- Blacklisted
The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Story of the illegal strategies that transnational construction companies resorted to in their attempt to keep union activists away from their places of work.
- BLM: A Movement and Its Critics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Recent studies, once again, show that being Black makes life more difficult than for those with white skin. It is more difficult to get good paying jobs, education and housing (even for those with equal or better qualifications than whites). Blacks pay more for loans than whites, even if they have higher incomes.
- Blue Betrayal
The Harper government's assault on Canada's freshwater Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canadians have long taken their water heritage for granted. This is largely due to the myth that there is an abundance of water. While it is true that compared to many other parts of the world Canada is blessed with water, it is false that there is water to waste or sell.
- Grace Lee Boggs, Legendary Activist, Dead At 100
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Boggs spent her life actively supporting causes ranging from civil rights and labour to the Black Power and feminist movements.
- Grace Lee Boggs R.I.P.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Grace Lee Boggs, founding member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (where her party name was Ria Stone), has died at the age of 100 in Detroit. She was born on June 27, 1915 and passed away October 5, 2015.
- Boiling Point: Why Do We Let Big Oil Send Workers to Their Deaths?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Refinery workers endure precarious labour conditions, yet the current system protects the companies economic interests. Recently, workers have started to mobilize.
- Bombing Hospitals: 22 People Killed by US Airstrike on Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A group of activists living in Baghdad would regularly go to city sites and string large vinyl banners between the trees outside these buildings which read: "To Bomb This Site Would Be A War Crime." We encouraged people in U.S. cities to do the same.
- Book Review: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book Review of "This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible" by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
- Boricua's Revolutionary Inspiration
Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico 1897-1921 (Book Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Kirwin R. Shaffer's Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico 1897-1921.
- Brainless in Washington
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Washington's IQ follows the Fed's interest rate -- it is negative. Washington is a black hole into which all sanity is sucked out of government deliberations. Washington's failures are everywhere visible. We can see the failures in Washington's wars and in Washington's approach to China and Russia.
- Brazil: Challenges of a Landless People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In Brazil, to define oneself as landless implies agency and a commitment to a community made up of active subjects that are working towards the construction of their own history.
- Brazil: Journalist Evany José Metzker Murdered While Investigating Drugs and Child Exploitation in Minas Gerais
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Brazil's MST Pays Tribute to Landless Workers Killed by Police in 1996
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Landless workers occupy farms in Brazil to reclaim a sense of justice. The month of April - called "Red April" pays tribute and remembrance to the Landless Workers Movement's fallen comrades of the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre.
- Brazil's right-wing protests: A warning to the working class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Right-wing protests in Brazil called for the overthrow of Workers Party. While the number of participants was likely to be inflated for political reasons, the protests underscore the intense class polarization, as well as the political dangers posed to the working class.
- Breaking the Media Blackout in Western Sahara
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Zurutuza describes how the Moroccan authorities repress journalists and media coverage of occupied Western Sahara.
- Breaking the silence -- only in the Letters’ page
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Time to break silence on Gaza assault. So writes Dr.Miriam Garfinkle in Sunday’s Star. Both the Star and the Globe did not mention the story of the Israeli Defense Force's carte blanche to basically shoot anything that moves and they did.The rules of engagement seemed to be non-existent -- 500 children massacred to begin with
- Breaking the Silence: Army Deliberately Targeted Civilians in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers, harshly slammed the Israeli army for its operational policy during last summer’s attack on Gaza, saying it led to "immense and unprecedented harm to the civilian population and infrastructures in the Gaza Strip."
- A Brief for Equality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 If it is believed that equality reflects and affirms what we most value in human social life, then the only politically coherent stance is to insist on it as a goal to aim for. This article takes a look at why equality is more desirable than inequality.
- The Brussels lobbyists
Major firms seek to influence EU laws for thire own advantage long before they reach the European Parlament Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A look at the lobbyists who target the bureaucrats who control research budgets and make decisions for the EU's technical agencies.
- Brussels 'Revolving Door' Keeps Relationship Cozy Between Big Energy and EU Decision Makers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Brussels 'revolving door' has allowed Big Energy to remain close to European climate and energy decision makers ahead of December's Paris COP21 climate talks, a new report shows.
- Bubbles Always Burst: the Education of an Economist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Spouting ostensible free market ideology, the pro-creditor mainstream rejects what the classical economic reformers actually wrote. One is left to choose between central planning by a public bureaucracy, or even more centralized planning by Wall Street’s financial bureaucracy. The middle ground of a mixed public/private economy has been all but forgotten, denounced as "socialism." Yet every successful economy in history has been a mixed economy.
- Building the Ark - small scale farming in Poland for a green future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Poland is the front line for Europe's small scale family farming, under assault from the EU regulations, corporate agribusiness, and a hostile government. A popular campaign is fighting back from its base deep in the Polish countryside, a small organic farm that's developing new green technologies to enhance the sustainability of small farms everywhere.
- Bureaucratic mass strikes: A response to Mark O'Brien
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The mass strike of 30 November 2011 (N30) was the broadest and biggest ever British public sector strike and involved the largest number of women workers in any British strike. Dave Lyddon comments.
- Burning Victims to Death: Still a Common Practice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The latest ISIS atrocity - releasing a video of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive - prompted substantial discussion yesterday about this particular form of savagery. It is thus worth noting that deliberately burning people to death is achievable - and deliberately achieved - in all sorts of other ways.
- California drought: agribusiness, fracking untouched by water rationing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 California has responded to the drought by rationing water, with $500 fines for domestic 'water wasters'. But agribusiness and water-intensive industries like fracking remain untouched by the restrictions, even though they consume over 90% of the state's water.
- A Call For A Fair Shares Agreement: Will Justice Prevail in Paris?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For most people the word justice conjures up images of superheroes and supreme courts. It seems a grand notion with little bearing on the practicalities of daily life. And when applied to the climate crisis it seems even less comprehensible. But the shocking thing about climate justice is that not only can it be calculated -- it can be achieved.
- Cambodia: local people risk everything to defend national park sold off to highest bidders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Botum Sakor national park is one of Cambodia's biodiversity hotspots. Now indigenous people are being violently evicted as the park is being sold off to developers for logging, plantations, casinos and hotels. Local communities are defending themselves and their land.
- Can Chicago Teachers Win Again?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Three years ago Chicago teachers defied the corporate-led attack on public education and went on a successful strike, widely supported by the public and parents, to support public education in all neighborhoods of the city.
- Can Mulcair work a miracle and gain unlikely victory?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The big sleeper in the campaign that could mean victory for the Conservatives depends on whether hundreds-of-thousands of people who favour the NDP or the Liberals can manage to vote. According to the Council of Canadians, the so-called Fair Elections Act makes it more difficult for at least 770,000 people to vote.
- Canada After Harper
His Ideology-fuelled Attack on Canadian Society and Values, and How We Can Resist and Create the Country We Want Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Essays documenting the breadth and depth of the Harper government's attack on institutions, policies, and programs that embody values and principles shared by most Canadians: education, health care, women's rights, science and research, the economy, labour unions, water and natural resources, and Aboriginal affairs.
- Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canada's leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users' file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents. The covert operation taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.
- Canada for the People!: A Study of the Social Gospel in Canadian History
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 United Church of Canada's relation with the social gospel and the criticisms of the Social Gospel movement
- Canada Should 'Get Tough' on Political Crimes, Say Watchdogs
Four needed crackdowns, starting with illegal surveillance and electoral crime. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new round of Conservative Party advertisements return to a familiar tough-on-crime refrain.
- Canada's Creeping Police State
Capitalist Repression and War Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Conservative Harper government’s Bill C-51, the "Anti-Terrorism Act 2015," is a sweeping attack on free speech and other civil liberties. The bill targets publications, web postings and even private conversations sympathetic to causes that the capitalist rulers deem to be "terrorism." It authorizes the CSIS secret police to go after any activity that "undermines the sovereignty, security or territorial integrity of Canada" or interferes with the country's "economic or financial stability." And you don't have to actually do anything; the bill provides for "preventive detention" of individuals who the police claim "may commit" an offense.
- Canada's Election Needs Outside Observers To Ensure Fairness: Report
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canada needs outside observers to monitor the federal election for fairness due to the rise of big money, nasty attack ads and new voting laws, says a report based on a survey of civil society groups.
- Canada's prime minister wants to make it harder for people to vote against him
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stephen Harper, who won by an uncomfortably small margin in the last election, has passed laws designed to keep voters who oppose him from the polls.
- Canada's top medical journal says Harper is undermining public health care
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The current issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal features an editorial written by Deputy Editor Dr. Matthew Stanbrook slamming the Harper Conservatives for weakening public health care in Canada. "For much of the last decade, Canadian federal health policy has been conspicuous by its absence," Stanbrook says, adding "in recent years, the federal government has neglected [its health care] responsibilities, even when courts have ordered them to do otherwise." The Conservatives are undermining and under-funding Canada's public healthcare system, spurning collaboration with the provinces and essentially removing the federal government from the health care business, Stanbrook suggests.
- Canada's Toxic Chemical Valley
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 About the effects of "Chemical Valley" in the Aamjiwnaang-Sarnia area.
- The Canadian Election and the Global Climate Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The environmental stands of all the main parties in this election amount to climate change denial.
- The Canadian Elections: Cover-Up and Steal (Again)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The opposition parties in Canada's 2015 federal election are sticking to a careful PR-driven script, refusing to even mention the fact that Stephen Harper's Conservatives broke the law and committed fraud in winning the 2006, 2008, and 2011 elections. The mainstream media and the political parties scrupulously ignore this reality.
- Canadian Lies
Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2015 A parody song aimed at Canada's Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
- The Canadian Ministry of "Truth": "Reality Is Whatever We Say It Is"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The government and corporations operate as if truth and reality are what they say it is. Guerin analyzes and provides examples of this propaganda, including Canada's Bill C-51.
- The Canadian Social Gospel: 1880-1960
What is the social gospel? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What is the social gospel? It is an attempt to apply Christianity to the collective ills of an industrializing society, and was a major force in Canadian religious, social and political life from the 1880s to the 1960s.
- Capital Crimes of Fashion
Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion (Book Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book Review of Tansy E. Hoskins' Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion.
- Capitalism as Robbery
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Review of Peter Linebaugh's 'The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance."
- Capitalism & Climate Change
The Science and Politics of Global Warming Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 An excellent primer, from a radical perspective, on what the ecological crisis is about and what is causing it.
- Capitalism is the West's Dominant Religion
Reflections on the Religion of the Market Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Welton describes capitalism as the dominant religion in the West, where Economics is the new theology of this global religion of the market and consumerism its highest good.
- Capitalism vs. Democracy in Europe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The governments of Europe are indifferent to public protest, strikes and mass demonstrations, and don't care about the opinion or the feelings of the population; they are attentive - extremely attentive - only to the opinion and the feelings of the financial markets, and their employees, the ratings agencies.
- Carving up Africa - aid donors and agribusiness plot the great seed privatization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An elite group of aid donors and agribusiness corporations plan the takeover of Africa's seeds, replacing traditional seed breeding and saving by small farmers with a corporate model of privatized, patented, genetically uniform and hybrid seeds.
- A Case of Police Violence Against Women
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The police torture of a woman at Kalamadanga village, in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal, is a grim reminder that "normalization" of state violence, particularly violence on women, has continued unabated regardless of which party is in power.
- Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It is, ultimately, astounding how facile and false political narratives come back to haunt those who insist on their veracity.
- The Catastrophic International Consequences of the Capitulation of Syriza and the Criminal Responsibility of Mr. Tsipras
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Syriza's betrayal comes at a very critical historical moment, when the racist extreme right is advancing almost everywhere in our continent, which already makes immediate and direct the threat that many of the citizens Europeans disappointed by Syriza will fall prey to this racist and neo-fascist self-proclaimed "anti-systemic" extreme right.
- A century of sugar and tears
Guadeloupe has bulit a slavery memorial centre on the site of a gigantic sugar refinery, believing it's necessary to acknowledge Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Present day Guadeloupei s coming to terms with a grim past through the Caribbean Centre of Expression and Memory of Slavery and the Slave Trade (MACTe), a new museum and memorial built symbolically on a waterfront site associated with slavery, segregation and conflict.
- The challenge of Podemos
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The emergence of so-called populist parties as a response to increasingly discredited political elites is a European-wide phenomenon. In most cases these parties have emerged on the right, if not the far-right. Not so in the Spanish state where Podemos, after barely ten months in existence, appears to be undermining the whole political set up in place since the end of the Franco dictatorship in the late 1970s.
- Challenging the 'refugee-victim' narrative
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With looming refugee and forced migration crises in the Mediterranean, Kenya, Burma, Syria, Burundi and elsewhere hitting international headlines, public attention is rightfully drawn to those people immediately affected by war, poverty, and persecution. For many, internally-displaced persons (IDPs), refugees, and asylum-seekers are above all unfortunate souls, devastated, and stripped of their humanity by seemingly never-ending civil wars, dictatorships and economic stagnation at home.
- Changes to voting system leave Canada worse off
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How did we end up with this convoluted and discriminatory method of voting when we once had perhaps the best method in the world - door-to-door enumeration and no hard-to-get voter ID requirement?
- Charlie Hebdo And The War For Civilisation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There is so much more that could be said about just how little passion the corporate media have for defending the right to offend. Anyone in doubt should try, as we have, to discuss their own record of failing to offend the powerful.
- Chevron Whistleblower Videos Show Deliberate Falsification Of Evidence In Ecuador Oil Pollution Trial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Chevron lost the lawsuit filed against the company by Indigenous villagers who say Texaco, which merged with Chevron, left hundreds of open, unlined pits full of toxic oil waste in the Amazon rainforest. Nevertheless, the company attempts to retry the case.
- Children of SA liberation icons condemn Israeli apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The children of South Africa's anti-apartheid heroes speak out against Israeli apartheid, supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel and denouncing the Jewish state's brutal colonial occupation of Palestine.
- Children of the Broken Treaty
Canada's Lost Promise and One Girls's Dream Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Angus provides chilling insight into how Canada denies First Nations children their basic human rights.
- Children Suffer as World Bank's Borrowers Upend Their Lives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Evictions, loss of family income and other hardships associated with dams, roads and other projects can be especially harmful to young people. The bank's social and environmental safeguards forbid sudden, strong-arm evictions. But as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Huffington Post and other media partners revealed in April, the bank is failing to enforce those rules, with devastating consequences for adults and children who live on or near land targeted for development.
- China: Rise and Emergent Crisis
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Au Loong Yu's 'China's Rise: Atrength and Fragility.'
- China: Workers Rising?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Lu Zhang's Inside China's Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance and Eli Friedman's Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China
- China's Cyberspying Is 'on a Scale No One Imagined' -- if You Pretend NSA Doesn't Exist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stories about cyberespionage -- like the data theft at the US Office of Personal Management believed but not officially stated to have been carried out by China -- are weird. For one thing, they include quotes about how "we need to be a bit more public" about our responses to cyberattacks -- delivered from White House officials who speak only on condition of anonymity.
- China's villages revive
A few migrants have begun to return from China's cities to its neglected countryside, and have been joined by artists and advocates of Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A look at a movement towards rural reconstruction in China, which has gained fresh impetus from an economic slowdown as well as poorer urban living conditions and pollution.
- The Chinese Working Class in the Global Capitalist Crisis
Revolutionary Mass Strike or a New Bureaucratic Containment? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 By 2012, there were upwards of 100,000 “incidents” of popular unrest per year, ranging from strikes to riots to confrontations with local authorities over rural land seizures and real estate development. 2014 saw the highest number of strikes (12,000) ever, quite outside the control of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the discredited state-sponsored union. The regime has thus far been successful in keeping these struggles dispersed and localized, aimed at local authorities rather than the central government. Environmental destruction, pollution and health hazards are also increasingly at issue.
- Chomsky and His Critics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Noam Chomsky on ISIS, his foreign policy critics, and why socialist ideas are "never far below the surface."
- Chomsky on Cuba: After Decades of U.S. Meddling & "Terrorism," Restoring Ties is Least We Could Do
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Aaron Maté did an interview with Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!. They talked about the thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations and U.S. meddling in Cuba.
- Choosing Our Future
Dr. Zofia Pakula Spring 2015 Lecture Series Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Christians at risk across the globe
Pope has warned of a 'form of genocide' as threat of persecution grows, reports Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Christians are facing growing persecution around the world, fuelled mainly by Islamic extremism and repressive governments, leading the pope to warn of "a form of genocide" and for campaigners to speak of "religioethnic cleansing".
- Chronicle of a death online: Hate campaign from Muslim fundamentalist groups from Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and West Asia against a Muslim woman writer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The case of Tamil Nadu journalist who was victim of online 'rape' and 'murder', perpetuated by Muslim fundamentalists.
- Chávez and the Communal State
On the Transition to Socialism in Venezuela Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Bellamy Foster examines Chávez's El Golpe de Timón (“Strike at the Helm”) speech where he insists on the need for changes at the top in order to promote an immediate leap forward in the creation of what is referred to as “the communal state.”
- CIA Torture Tactics Reemerge in New York Prison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over 60 inmates at New York's Clinton Correctional Facility have complained of abuse by prison guards in the wake of the June escape of convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt.
- CIA Torture Tactics Reemerge in New York Prison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over 60 inmates at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility have complained of abuse by prison guards in the wake of the June escape of convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt.
- Citizen-Journalist Fined for Telling the Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The story of an injunction against against a journalist who dared to tell the truth.
- Citizens Mobilize Against Corporate Water Grabs
A Human Right, Not a Commodity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 New Jersey became the latest state to subvert democracy by authorizing the fast-track sale or lease of water utilities without public notice, comment, or approval. The controversial decision highlights the intensifying struggle over who owns, controls, and profits from the most precious - and threatened - resource on Earth.
- Citizens worldwide mobilize against corporate water grabs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The US and other governments are pushing a failed model of water privatization, but water is a human right, not just a commodity to be traded for profit or monopolized by corporations. Citizens and communities are fighting back to reclaim their water commons.
- The 'Civic Death' of Dominicans of Haitian Descent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Imagine being born in a country and then being told you have no rights as a citizen; that you're not wanted there. That is exactly what has been happening to Dominicans of Haitian descent.
- Clapper Calls for Arming Ukrainian Forces: Who Would That Actually Empower?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Russian President Vladimir Putin has long said that the Ukrainian coup of last year, and the subsequent regime in Kiev, is driven by ultra-nationalists, fascists, and even neo-Nazi factions. The Russian TV outlet RT also frequently refers to "the active role far-right groups have played on the pro-government side in Ukraine since the violent coup of the last year."
- Class Struggle at Air France
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On Monday, about 100 employees stormed an Air France management and union official meeting that was discussing dramatic job cuts. As the negotiations had been making no progress, the staff became angry, and tussled with some company officials.
- Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom: Part Two
Marxism vs. the Myth of "White Skin Privilege" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers.
- Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom: Part One
The Roots of Black Oppression Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The purpose of this talk is to motivate a Marxist materialist program for the fight for black freedom as opposed to the idealism embodied in both black nationalism and guilty white liberalism, including the concept of “white skin privilege,” which falsely substitutes individual psychology for struggle against the racial oppression rooted in the capitalist profit system. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integration including mobilizing the working class against every manifestation of racial oppression. This approach is counterposed to liberal integration, which is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black people can be attained within the confines of this class society founded on black oppression.
- Climate 'academics for hire' conceal fossil fuel funding
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Investigative reporters working for Greenpeace UK's Energydesk have uncovered a nexus of senior academics willing to accept large sums of money from fossil fuel companies to write reports and newspaper articles published under their own names and university affiliations, without declaring the funding.
- Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations
Processes of Creative Self-Destruction Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The authors examine the intricate relationship between corporations and climate change, while also looking at how corporations shape political and social responses to climate change.
- Climate change: It's going to take a revolution
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2015 A new video by Suhail Ilyas: The growing strength of the climate movement around the world gives us great hope, but it's going to take a revolution to make the world inhabitable for future generations.
- Climate and competitiveness in the tar sands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Anytime the oil barons and baronesses are smiling for the cameras with NGOs and politicians, we should at least be interested, if not outright worried. Was the release of Alberta’s new climate change strategy just an occasion for the oil execs to ham it up for the cameras pretending all is well or do they have truly something to be smiling about?
- Climate deal lacks strategies critical to achieving promised results
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It's easy to be swept-up in the feeling of accomplishment the COP21 agreement promises, especially with the enthusiastic response of the media, politicians, and celebrities involved. Unfortunately, while it is a victory for so many countries to come together and unanimously agree that something should be done, this is not the first time such promises have been made.
- Climate Deniers are More Dangerous Than Trump and More Deadly Than ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 So Rep. Lamar Smith (D-Tx.) finally got his NOAA emails. What he really should get is a jail sentence for crimes against humanity. He, and the other climate deniers like him who hold positions of power, are arguably more dangerous than Donald Trump and more deadly than ISIS.
- Climate Insurgency
A Strategy for Survival Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Twenty-five years of human effort have failed even to slow climate change, let alone reverse it. Climate Insurgency lays out a strategy for protecting the earth s climate: a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency. This short book starts with a brief history of official climate protection efforts from above and non-governmental ones from below that explains why climate protection has failed so far. Then, it proposes a global nonviolent insurgency for climate protection to overcome that failure.
- Climate Technofix: Weaving Carbon into Gold and Other Myths of "negative emissions"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) published their most recent fifth assessment report, something surprising and deeply disturbing was lurking in the small print in chapter three on “mitigation”.
- CNN and the NYT Are Deliberately Obscuring Who Perpetrated the Afghan Hospital Attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Much of the world spent the last 48 hours expressing revulsion at the U.S. airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. It was quite clear early on that the perpetrator of the attack was the U.S., and many media outlets and other organizations around the world have been stating this without any difficulties.
- Coal plant threatens world's largest mangrove forest - and Bangladesh's future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As COP21 reaches its endgame, there are plans to build 2,440 coal-fired power plants around the worl. Their completion would send global temperatures, and sea levels, soaring. Yet Bangladesh, the world's most 'climate vulnerable' large country, has plans for a 1.3GW coal power plant on the fringes of its World Heritage coastal wetlands.
- The Collaborative Model Takes Root in Alberta's Tar Sands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Relationship between Big Oil, Enviromental Groups and Government in Alberta Tar Sands.
- Colombia - indigenous defender murdered in gold mining frenz
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An indigenous leader in Colombia's 'gold belt' has been killed by unknown gunmen as tensions grow between indigenous communities and outside gold mining interests, many of them linked to illegal armed groups and the drug trade.
- Combat Proven: The Booming Business of War in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Arms fairs in Israel showcase the latest products the profitable Israeli weapons industry manufactures - and the demos are the perfect place to show those products off.
- Communism and the Family (Part One)
The Marxist Approach to Women's Liberation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Replacing the family with collective institutions is the most radical aspect of the communist program and will bring about the deepest, most sweeping changes in daily life, not least for children.
- Communism and the Family (Part Two)
The Marxist Approach to Women's Liberation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The family is the primary institution through which bourgeois ideology in its various forms is transmitted from one generation to the next.
- The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919 - 1929
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Author documents the positive contribution of the Comintern (Communist International) in its early revolutionary years and its decline under Stalin.
- The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929: A Review
Upholding the Revolutionary Legacy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929 examines the founding, development and degeneration of the Communist Party (CP) in the United States in the broader framework of the struggle for international proletarian revolution. Available in both paperback and hardcover, this fully indexed book, with extensive footnotes and references, will be of enduring value as a reference work for avowed socialists as well as scholars of communism. It is also a fun and interesting read and belongs in the toolkits of everyone seeking a coherent revolutionary program and lessons on building an organization.
- The Communist International and U.S. Communism
1919 - 1929 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 For most commentators the Comintern's role in the development of American Communism is wholly negative. Zumoff challenges this narrative.
- Compañeras: Zapatista Women's Stories
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Story of women's involvement in the Zapatista movement, the indigenous rebellion that has inspired grassroots activists around the world for over two decades.
- The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 2
Economic Writings 2 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Published: 2016 Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical masterpiece
- The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II
Economic Writings 2 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 This volume contains a new English translation of Luxemburg’s most important book, The Accumulation of Capital (1913) as well as her response to its critics. Taken together, they constitute one of the most important Marxist studies of the globalization of capital.
- The Computers are Listening
How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Top-secret documents from the archive of Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.
- The Conflict Shoreline
Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The village of al-'Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than seventy times in the "battle over the Negev," an ongoing Israeli state campaign to uproot the Bedouins from the northern threshold of the desert. Unlike other frontiers fought over during the Israel–Palestine conflict, however, this threshold is not demarcated by fences and walls but advances and recedes in response to cultivation, colonization, displacement, urbanization, and climate change.
- Confronting the Ecological Emergency
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In April 2014, two different teams of American glaciologists, specialists in the Antarctic, reached -- by different methods, based on observation -- the same conclusion: because of global warming, a portion of the ice sheet has begun to dislocate, and this dislocation is irreversible.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2015
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Conservationist murders threaten Costa Rica's eco-friendly reputation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The murder of Jairo Mora, who was trying to protect endangered turtle eggs, was the latest in a string of crimes against environmentalists in the country. Many worry activists will stay away if poachers continue to go unpunished.
- Conserving soil: precious, finite and under threat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Human existence relies on healthy soils. But all over the world soils are being lost and degraded by inappropriate land use, reducing their capacity to produce food and store water, nutrients and carbon. Sustainable land management must be incentivised to conserve this essential resource.
- 'A Conspiracy Of Silence' - HSBC, The Guardian And The Defrauded British Public
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Journalist Nafeez Ahmed has delved deeper into the HSBC scandal, reporting the testimony of a whistleblower that reveals a 'conspiracy of silence' encompassing the media, regulators and law-enforcement agencies.
- 'A Conspiracy Of Silence' -- HSBC, The Guardian and the Defrauded British Public
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An investigator and anonymous whistleblower talk about the suspicious lack of coverage and attention to the HSBC tax evasion scandal. This article talks about the scandal itself and criticizes the British liberal media.
- Containment
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Containment is a thoughful observational essay filmed in Fukushima, weapons plants nuclear storage facilities and deep underground exploring the present and future challenges of nuclear wast storage.
- Contest: Guess the date of Harper's next 'terrorist plot'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What are the odds that a 'terrorist plot' will be 'uncovered' in the late stages of the election campaign, so that Harper can spend the final days of the campaign talking about terrorism, terrorism, and more terrorism?
- Continental Cultural Communication
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of "Africa Speaks, America Answers" written by Robin D.G. Kelley.
- Conundrum - Syriza, Democracy And The Death Of A Saudi Tyrant
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It's always a tricky moment for the corporate media when a foreign leader dies. The content and tone need to be appropriate, moulded to whether that leader fell into line with Western policies or not.
- COP21 An Opportunity For Climate Justice, If We Mobilize
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The COP21 resulted in an agreement that was 25 years in the making, beginning with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Until now the world had been unable to reach an agreement on combating climate change. Now it is up to the people to push for policies at all levels of government to make the Paris Accord effective. We have the potential to use this deal to create a turning point in humanity's struggle for climate justice and end the fossil fuel era, but only if the people mobilize to make it so.
- COP21: in spite of the show, the glass is 80% empty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The COP21 Paris Climate Conference has, as expected, led to an agreement. It will come into effect from 2020 if it is ratified by 55 of the countries which are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and these 55 countries account for at least 55% of global emissions of greenhouse gases. In the light of the positions taken in Paris, this dual condition should not raise any difficulty (although the non-ratification of Kyoto by the United States shows that surprises are always possible).
- COP21, Paris: 'Another world is possible, necessary and urgent'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The greatest danger of the Paris conference is that the global South will be bullied into to accepting a terrible deal rather than leave with none at all. That gives civil society an essential role - to support the resistance of developing country representatives inside the summit to an unjust and ineffective agreement imposed on them by the rich, powerful, high-emitting nations.
- Cops Charge Black Activist with "Lynching"
Defend Maile Hampton! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On January 18, 2015, Maile Hampton, a young black woman and member of the ANSWER Coalition, was leading chants at a Sacramento, California, protest against a pro-cop rally. An online video shows the cops violently attacking several protesters, slamming a woman against a cop car and repeatedly throwing a man to the ground. While both were being handcuffed, the crowd chanted to let them go. Five weeks later, Hampton was arrested at her home. She now faces up to four years in jail on charges of felony "lynching"! A law supposedly intended to criminalize the extra-legal murder of black people, Mexicans and others by the racist terrorists of the KKK and their ilk, is now wielded by the police against those who actively protest the modern-day legal lynchings carried out by the cops.
- Corbyn and confronting media power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Corbyn may be right not to respect a media establishment that has shown little signs of respecting him but he urgently needs a strategy with which to confront it.
- Corporate Sycophants and the TPP
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The hypocrisy of "free market" advocates is astounding. While they trumpet increased competition and the elimination of state imposed barriers as a means of spurring economic advancement, they ignore how the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other "free trade" accords increase monopolistic intellectual property provisions.
- Corporations Undermined Public Transportation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over the past eighteen months two of the world's largest automakers have been found responsible for deadly conspiracies. But, recent revelations can’t compete with the industry's previous scandals.
- Corporations Undermined Public Transportation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Engler analyzes the largest conspiracies committed by automotive manufacturing companies, specifically General Motors' role in eliminating the trolley as America's most used form of public transportation.
- The Courage of Cooperation
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book Review of Jessica Gordon Nembhard's ' A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice.'
- Cowardly Firing of Australian State-Funded TV Journalist Highlights the West's Real Religion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A TV sports commentator in Australia, Scott McIntyre, was summarily fired by his public broadcasting employer, Special Broadcasting Services (SBS), because of a series of tweets he posted about the violence committed historically by the Australian military.
- The Crisis of World Labor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Both the size and composition of the world working class have changed dramatically over the past four decades. But these massive shifts are not reflected in the strength of workers' organizations.
- The Cross and the Sword: The Making of a Christian Taliban in Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The recruitment point for volunteers in Dmytro Korchynsky's holy war is located in the basement of a building in central Kiev, on Chapaev Street, in what used to be a billiard club. Anyone can sign up, and the location isn't secret -- its address and phone number is on the Internet.
- Crossing a chasm slowly, in ten small steps? Sustainable living demands big changes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A call to re-engineer our infrastructure, re-imagine society and re-think the ways we live for disruptive, transformative change - rather than tinkering at the margins of 'normality'. Transitioning to sustainability will require profound changes in our everyday ways of living, particularly in westernised countries. It requires changes that are much more significant than simply doing the things that we currently do, but more efficiently.
- Crossing Rafah
Heading to Gaza Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Crossing the River of Fire
The Liberal Attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Naomi Klein's book "This Changes Everything" on climate change and its political enviroment.
- Cuba: A New Era
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The normalization of U.S.-Cuba political relations was possible due to the changed geopolitical situation, Obama, and the Cuban diaspora being open to dialogue.
- Deborah Cunningham, 1945-2015
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Deborah Cunningham was an ADAPT activist and Executive Director of the Memphis Center for Independent Living (MCIL). When she died on May 7, the movement lost a tireless, creative, committed activist, feminist and thinker.
- Dagong Diary, Part 1: Job Hunting
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Part 1 of a seven-part series recording a short excursion into the lives of dagongzai and dagongmei at the beginning of China’s working year.
- Dagong Diary, Part 2: Proper Hiring Begins
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The following is part 2 of a seven part series recording a short excursion into the lives of dagongzai and dagongmei at the beginning of China’s working year.
- Dark Humor: Western Media Makes Light of Political Repression in Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Political repression and violence are allegedly incompatible with Western liberal democratic values. Respect for human rights, freedom of expression, and protection of the rights of minorities are all purportedly the hallmarks of "free societies," the goals toward which all nations should be striving. And yet, such standards of freedom and democracy are only selectively applied, and only when beneficial to the Western (US-UK-EU-NATO) agenda.
- Daughter of the Lake
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Follow the powerful journey of Nelida a young Andean woman able to communicate with the spirits of the water. Nelida's fight takes her from the frontlines of resistance against gold mining in her village, to law school in Lima in efforts to save her community in the court system.
- David Graeber's Utopia of Rules: Why Deregulation Is Actually Expanding Bureaucracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review: David Graebe, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.
- Deadliest Terror in the World: The West's Latest Gift to Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Nigeria's Boko Haram are now officially the deadliest terror group in the world. That they have reached this position is a direct consequence of Cameron and Co's war on Libya - and one that was perhaps not entirely unintended.
- Death By A Thousand Cuts: Earth Enters The 'Danger Zone'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 2014 was the warmest year on record for the world; possibly the warmest in 5000 years. Even worse, this warming will soon double the pollution levels of our planet. Meanwhile, corporate media couldn't care less.
- Debunking Barrick
2015 Update Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2015 A updated annual report of the 2013 publication titled Debunking Barrick. The report outlines the abuses by the mining company Barrick Gold and the many communities around the globe that are affected by its operations.
- Decaying social order shows need for philosophy, revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2015-2016.
- December 17: Sources, Results & Prospects
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After 50 years, Washington has had to recognize that if it wants any influence in Latin America, the road to Latin America leads through Havana, not around it.
- The Deciders
The disastrous Iraq policies that led to ISIS were not President Bush's Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In May 2003, in the wake of the Iraq War and the ousting of Saddam Hussein, events took place that set the stage for the current chaos in the Middle East. Yet even most well-informed Americans are unaware of how policies implemented by mid-level bureaucrats during the Bush administration unwittingly unleashed forces that would ultimately lead to the juggernaut of the Islamic State.
- Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Deep Diversity explores how the interactions with individuals different from us are strongly influenced by things happening below the radar of awareness. Choudhury argues that "us vs. them" is an unfortunate but normal part of the human experience due to reasons of both nature and nurture.
- Deep Web
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 A documentary that explores the history and context of the world that these darkened online areas burgeoned from. Focusing on the recent court case of the alleged founder of the online market Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, it's a far more complex and multifaceted story than the media portrays. Deep Web investigates the greater implications for how we will all experience the internet in the future.
- Defend Reverend Pinkney
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An appeal hearing is scheduled for February 24, 2015 regarding the imprisonment of Reverend Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, MI. The American Civil Leaders Union has filed an "Amicus Curiae Brief" in support of Pinkney.
- Defender of the Forests
Bonnie Phillips vs. the Timber Beasts, Gang Green and the Big Foundations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Veteran forest advocate Bonnie Phillips passed away on May 4, 2015 in Olympia, Washington. This article is based on her final interview.
- Defense Contractors Cite "Benefits" of Escalating Conflicts in the Middle East
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Major defense contractors Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors at a Credit Suisse conference in West Palm Beach this week that they stand to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East.
- Deforestation, exploitation, hypocrisy: no end to Wilmar's palm oil land grabs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With the deadline for the full implementation of Wilmar's 'No peat, no deforestation, no exploitation' promise, the oil palm giant is keen to push its green image in Europe. In Nigeria however, forest and farmland continue to be destroyed.
- The Demonology School of Journalism
Putin and the press Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The major influential western print media are engaged in a prolonged, large-scale effort to demonize Russian President Putin, his politics and persona. There is an article (or several articles) every day in which he is personally stigmatized as a dictator, authoritarian, czar, 'former KGB operative' and Soviet-style ruler; anything but the repeatedly elected President of Russia.
- Deskilling and the Terrain of Social Justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A look at why it is important to form an understanding of what it means to be 'skilled', and why capitalist economies waste a vast amount of human potential.
- Destroyed by the Espionage Act
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Story of why Stephen Kim, former U.S. State Department expert, was imprisoned for an Espionage Act charge.
- Destruction of Palestinian olive trees is a monstrous crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The uprooting and cutting down of over a million olive and fruit trees in occupied Palestine since 1967 is an attack on a symbol of life, and on Palestinian culture and survival. A grave crime under international humantarian law, the arboricide is also contrary to Jewish religious teachings.
- Details Of Tax Avoidance Schemes For Wealthy HSBC Clients Revealed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A cache of secret documents has thrust HSBC into the limelight for helping international clients dodge taxes.
- Detroit celebrates Grace Lee Boggs' 100th birthday
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 About the weeklong celebration of the life of Grace Lee Boggs, radical activist, political theorist, and revolutionary.
- Detroit's Foreclosure Disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In early 2015 the Wayne County Treasurer's office announced that 62,000 Detroit properties were slated for foreclosure, with probably 38,000 occupied. This could result in the displacement of as many as 100,000 Detroiters, or about one seventh of the city's population.
- Deutsche Bank Pays $2.5 Billion Fine For Interest Rate Rigging
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay out $2.5 billion fine to settle U.K. and U.S. government investigations into allegations of fixing global interest rates, months after 6 other banks paid out $4.3 billion on similar charges. Activists say that the banks should have faced criminal charges.
- The Devil Is Here in These Hills
Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 From before the dawn of the 20th century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labour struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation's largest labour union, and the legendary "miners' angel," Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis verging on civil war that stretched from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the US Senate.
- Diary of Prison and Torture
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's 'Guantánamo Diary.'
- Did the US Accidentally Give the World's Most Powerful Cyberweapon to Terrorists?
Sony Hack: Made in America? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- A Diet of Austerity
Class, Food and Climate Change Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Deals with the reasons why the working class is blamed for climate change, and what it can actually do about it.
- The Digital Dark Ages: Movies and Books Get Deleted as Selfies Pile Up
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Historians and archivists call our times the "digital dark ages." The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years. But don't blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we've seen big 8" floppies replaced by 5.25" medium replaced by little 3.5" floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud -- and let's not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc.
- The Dignity of Chartism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Groundbreaking studies of Britain's first major working-class movement.
- The Dignity of Chartism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Dorothy Thompson's writing on Chartism showed early working-class politics as it really was, a real challenge to the ruling class of the time, says John Westmoreland.
- Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism.
- Dismantling Democracy
Stifling Debate and Dissent in Canada Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An extensive dossier of the Harper government's attacks on democracy, debate, and dissent.
- Displaced In The D. R.
A country strips 210,000 of citizenship Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Even before Juliana Deguis Pierre became famous, or infamous, any Dominican who saw her would have guessed that she was of Haitian descent. Her dark skin, wide nose, and what is, in the Dominican Republic, called pelo malo -- "bad hair" -- immediately identify her as the child of Haitians, even though she was born in the Dominican Republic and has never been to Haiti.
- Disturbing the Peace
The Use of Criminal Law to Limit the Actions of Human Rights Defenders in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The first part of this report briefly reviews the criteria for recognizing the status
of human rights defenders, the development of the legal status of human rights
defenders and the legal tool formulated to protect them and allow them to
protect and promote these rights internationally. The second part of the report
focuses on the common practice of using criminal law to harm defenders, and
examines how human rights defenders in Israel are criminalized. The report
provides examples of cases that have taken place in Israel and in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT) in recent years, in which the authorities used criminal
law against defenders in an effort to restrict their freedom and limit their ability
to take action.
- Do Indian Lives Matter? Police Violence Against Native Americans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With all our talk about police violence aimed at poor and minority communities, we have yet to talk about the group most likely to be killed by law enforcement: Native Americans.
Native American men are incarcerated at four times the rate of white men and Native American women are sent to prison at six times the rate of white women.
- Documents Reveal Canada's Secret Hacking Tactics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canada's electronic surveillance agency has secretly developed an arsenal of cyberweapons capable of stealing data and destroying adversaries' infrastructure, according to newly revealed classified documents. Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, has also covertly hacked into computers across the world to gather intelligence, breaking into networks in Europe, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, the documents show.
- Documents Shine Light on Shadowy New Zealand Surveillance Base
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The documents, revealed Saturday by the Sunday Star-Times in collaboration with The Intercept, show how closely New Zealand has worked with the NSA to maintain surveillance coverage of the region. The files also offer an unprecedented insight into the Waihopai base, exposing how it's been integrated into a global eavesdropping network.
- #DomesticExtremist trend mocks UK police surveillance of protesters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Non-conformists across the UK are taking to social media to declare themselves #DomesticExtremists in a bid to raise awareness about secretive police powers.
- Dominican Republic to be 'Socially Cleaned' in two days
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In two days about a quarter of a million people will be made stateless. They will have no homes, no passports, and no civil rights. There are several reasons for this, but the primary reason is racism. At issue is a ruling by the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic to strip away the citizenship of several generations of Dominicans. According to the decision, Dominicans born after 1929 to parents who are not of Dominican ancestry are to have their citizenship revoked. The ruling affects an estimated 250,000 Dominican people of Haitian descent, including many who have had no personal connection with Haiti for several generations.
- Don't be fooled: 'media watchdogs' are Israeli propaganda tools
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Consider yourself very lucky if you have never heard of "UK Media Watch" (formerly called "Comment is Free Watch" – CiF Watch), "BBC Watch", "HonestReporting" and "Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America" (CAMERA).
- Don't Blame the Media for the Charleston Murders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Featherstone argues that blaming the media for the Charleston Murders is an easy way to avoid doing any real thinking.
- Don't Waste Any Time In Mourning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the many accolades Pete Seeger received in the days, weeks, and months after his death, there was often something missing -- as absent in tributes from admirers who share his revolutionary politics as in those aiming to reclaim him for respectability.
- Doublethink Squared
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The U.S. continues to ally with several conflicting parties in the Middle East.
- Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA's Efforts to Overthrow Syria's Government
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 FAIR has noted before how America's well-documented clandestine activities in Syria have been routinely ignored when the corporate media discuss the Obama administration's "hands-off" approach to the four-and-a-half-year-long conflict.
- Down With U.S. Imperialism's Anti-China Trade Pact!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 If it is ratified, the TPP will be the largest trade agreement in history, encompassing at least 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and one-third of all global trade. Japan and the more minor imperialist countries Canada and Australia have been cut in on the deal -- and competing European powers cut out -- but it is the U.S. rulers who hold the whip hand. Under the banner of "free trade," the TPP aims to drive up the exploitation of labour across the board while increasing imperialist domination of dependent countries. Above all, this agreement targets China, escalating the U.S. bourgeoisie's drive to promote capitalist counterrevolution there through economic pressure and military encirclement.
- Downward spiral continues for Honduran media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The first two months of 2015 have very disturbing for journalists in Honduras. Five years after a 2009 coup détat, it is still one of the western hemisphere’s most dangerous countries for media personnel and respect for freedom of information continues to decline.
- Dr. Mike Carr passes at 73
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Dr. Mike Carr, community activist, academic and teacher, passed away amongst his Cuban family in Havana Cuba.
- The Drone Papers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military's assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama's drone wars.
- Drone Strikes and the Sanitization of Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Van Dongen discusses the terminology that the drone campaign employs, in which the CIA and the Obama administration gloss over death and destruction of drones in Pakistan, Afganistan and Yemen.
- Drug War Winners and Losers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Dawn Paley's book "Drug War Capitalism."
- Drug War Winners and Losers
Drug War Capitalism (Book Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 State officials are portrayed as wholly separate from criminal groups. To the contrary, Paley shows that the worlds of state officials, large business interests and drug lords are in fact thoroughly integrated. Far from being inimical to business investment and the modern state, illicit drug economies and drug-related violence are simply a part of capitalism-as-usual.
- Earning a Profit from Global Warming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As evidence mounts that a warming world is hurtling toward the point of no return, the plan of the world's governments is to make adjustments to the ability of corporations to profit from polluting. Short-term profits continue to be elevated above the long-term health of the environment.
- Ecuador Fights against Elitism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It is great news for majority of Ecuadorian citizens -- but a terrible nightmare for the 'elites'.
Lately, in Ecuador, right-wing 'elites' are continuously protesting against the administration, accusing it of corruption and other ills.
- Ecuador: Mass marches defend democracy amid coup plot
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 President Rafael Correa called a rally on July 2, 2015 in defence of democracy and the pro-poor Citizens' Revolution his government leads after plans by the right-wing opposition for a violent coup were exposed.
- Ecuador's New Indigenous Uprising
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ecuador's Indigenous movements have launched an uprising to challenge the government's opposition to bilingual education and its support for an extractive-based economy.
- Eduardo Galeano, ¡Presente!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 La Botz reflects on Eduardo Galeano's works and ideas.
- Edward Snowden's Warning to Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Whistleblower Edward Snowden talks about Bill C-51 and the weak oversight of Canada's intelligence agencies.
- El Salvador Feminists Fight for Justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The 1997 Salvadoran law banning abortion under all circumstances is one of the most punitive in the world.
- Elections Canada bungled its investigation of Michael Sona and the 2011 robocall scandal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Because the 'robocalls' fraud of Canada's 2011 federal election was insufficiently investigated by state authorities and underreported by the corporate media, Canadians have yet to understand its scale, focus, and impact.
- Emails Reveal Dairy Lobbyist Crafted 'Ag-Gag' Legislation Outlawing Pictures of Farms
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Across the country, legislatures are responding to whistleblowers and activists who have exposed inhumane and at times unsanitary practices at farms by passing laws that criminalize the taking of photos or videos at agricultural facilities. Farming interests have publicly backed the campaign to outlaw recording: in fact, dairy industry lobbyists actually crafted the legislation that was later introduced by lawmakers.
- The End of Academic Freedom in America: the Case of Steven Salaita
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the years I spent at Columbia University, there was always some professor or another coming under attack from the Israel lobby. But no matter the intensity of the witch-hunt, I was always proud to see my employer stand up for the free speech rights of the faculty.
- The end of hasbara? NYT readers question US support for apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The New York Times published a remarkable discussion yesterday. Alongside an article about Israel cancelling a plan to segregate buses going to the West Bank so as to keep Palestinians off settlers' buses, it published readers' comments, and in both the editors' selection and the readers' selection, the comments were running against Israel.
- Energy Revolution Is Possible... And It Would Only Take 782 Rich People To Pay For It
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fewer than 800 of the world's wealthiest people could power half the world with 100 percent renewable energy within 15 years, report says.
- Engineering consent for fracking: Chris Smith and the 'astroturf' consultancy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Edelman, the global PR group, has a history of 'consent engineering' for the fossil fuel industry in North America.
- Entertaining facts: what the news media do with expert information about environmental risks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 This research aims to clarify why there is such a difference between expert understandings of the environmental risk of global warming and climate change, and social world understandings.
- Environmental racism in the US - black communities fight for justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Landfill sites, giant hog farms, incinerators and other 'bad neighbor' industries in the US tend to be situated in African American communities. The Environmental Protection Agency is legally obliged to prevent 'environmental racism', but from California to Michigan, low-income communities of color have been waiting years for it to take a stand. Now, backed by Earthjustice, they are forcing the issue - in the courts.
- Ernst & Young Pays $10 Million To Settle Lehman Brothers Audit Failure Lawsuit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four auditing firms, has agreed to pay a $10 million to New York state to settle a lawsuit for overlooking accounting gimmicks by Lehman Brothers, the defunct Wall Street bank. The scheme allowed Lehman to hide billions of dollars in bad deals.
- Escalation is when Palestinians lose self-restraint
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Who is to blame for the escalation?
- Eslanda Robeson's Journey
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A book review of Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, by Barbara Ransby.
- Ethiopia: stealing the Omo Valley, destroying its ancient Peoples
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A land grab is under way in Ethiopia, as the government pursues the wholesale seizure of indigenous lands to turn them over to dams and plantations for sugar, palm oil, cotton and biofuels run by foreign corporations.
- EU-Canada CETA trade deal is a back door for US to sue EU - even if TTIP fails
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There's been a big fuss about the 'ISDS' clauses in the TTIP trade deal that would allow US corporations to sue the EU and its member states for 'lost profits', writes Maude Barlow. But ISDS is already in CETA, the already negotiated EU-Canada trade deal - and nothing would be easier than for US companies to use it as their 'back door'. We must make sure CETA is rejected at its final hurdle.
- EU diplomats reveal devastating impact of Ethiopia dam project on remote tribes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A controversial World Bank-funded scheme to dam a major Ethiopian river and import up to 500,000 people to work in what is planned to be one of the world's largest sugar plantations has led to tens of thousands of Africa's most remote and vulnerable people being insensitively resettled. According to reports by two teams of British, American and EU diplomats who visited the resettlement areas in the Lower Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia last year, the lives of 20,000 Mursi, Bodi and other semi-nomadic tribespeople are being "fundamentally and irreversibly" changed by the mega-project.
- Euro Banks vs. Greek Labor
Varoufakis is Proposing Austerity on the Banking Class Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City about the current economic situation of Greece.
- Europe's Moment of Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Greek Premier Alexis Tsipras' acceptance of an "austerity package" on July 13, which contained measures rejected by the Greek people in a referendum barely a week before, represents not just an abject surrender by the Syriza government, or a sign of contempt on the part of German finance capital for the Greek electorate; it marks a decisive turning point for Europe (and indeed for the rest of the world), and the end of the road for a whole way of thinking on the Left, especially the European Left.
- EuroZone Profiteers: How German and French Banks Helped Bankrupt Greece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there, says Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and a Nobel Prize winner in economics. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks.
- Even Wars Have Rules: a Fact Sheet on the Bombing of Kunduz Hospital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Doctors Without Borders is calling for an independent fact-finding investigation to ascertain the truth about the events that led to the killing of our colleagues and patients by US.airstrikes on one of our hospitals in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
- Everyone is the Mother of Victory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Everyone is the mother of victory; No one is the father of defeat. Do we claim COP21 as a success, and risk watching it being used by fossil fuel failures to carry on burning humanity, and so become complicit in defeat?
- Evicted and Abandoned: The World Bank's Broken Promise to the Poor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The World Bank pledges to "do no harm." But over the past decade it has regularly failed to protect the world's most vulnerable people.
- Evolving Geopolitical Economic Framework: US vs. China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a game changer in what had been since World War II and Bretton Woods American global financial dominance in facilitating US unilateral market penetration via the preponderant voice in IMF and World Bank operations and policy making, and, equally significant, integrating expanding economic power with an interventionist military underpinning.
- Execution of Paris Communards Foreshadowed Mass Murders of 20th Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The short-lived Paris Commune of 1871 lasted only a little more than two months before being ruthlessly crushed. A new book by Yale Professor John Merriman, "Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune," provides a remarkably detailed account of an armed uprising that rejected oligarchical government.
- Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Whistleblowers are always accused of helping America's enemies (top Nixon aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the deaths of Americans with his leak); it's just the tactical playbook that's automatically used. So it's of course unsurprising that ever since Edward Snowden's whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to report on secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been accused by "officials" and their various media allies of Helping The Terrorists.
- The Extraordinary Trial of Arthur Topham
Part I Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Five security guards, members of the RCMP, two in bulletproof vests, all entrants pass through metal detectors, undergo a wand search, check all electronics including cell phones and have their bags meticulously scrutinized. Why all the security? The crown was presenting its criminal case against Arthur Topham, for the crime of "hate."
- The Extraordinary Trial of Arthur Topham
Part II Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On November 12th, 2015 the jury found Arthur Topham guilty of "inciting hate." This leads to a few questions.
- The Extreme Centre
A Warning Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Since 1989, UK politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the 'market', a competition now fringed by unstable populist movements. Tariq Ali looks at the people and the events that have informed the consistent victories for the Extreme Centre.
- Facebook Shut Me Down
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Peled describes how Facebook shut him down after he exposed an Israeli plant.
- Facts Back Russia on Turkish Attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Turkey claims its November 24, 2015 shoot-down of a Russian warplane along the Syrian border was justified -- and the Obama administration is publicly siding with its NATO ally -- but a review of the evidence supports Russian accusations of an "ambush." The evidence from the Turkish authorities themselves thus leaves little room for doubt that the decision to shoot down the Russian jet was made before the Russian jets even began their flight.
- The Failed Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The failure of Syriza in Greece, and the timidness of other left-social-democratic parties and formations tells us that we must learn the dangers of political shortcut and focus on building radical movements outside of government.
- Failing the Trump Test: Cops for Fascism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Donald Trump just picked up his latest big endorsement: from the New England Policeman’s Benevolent Association, “the fastest-growing law enforcement organization in the northeastern United States” (according to the NEPBA’s website). Addressing the group in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last Thursday, Trump told his audience that their support represented the most important honor he could possibly receive.
- The Failure of Nonviolence
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The Failure of Nonviolence examines most of the major social upheavals following the Cold War to reveal the limits of nonviolence and uncover what a diverse, unruly, non-pacified movement can accomplish. Critical of how a diversity of tactics has functioned so far, this book discusses how movements for social change can win ground and open the spaces necessary to plant the seeds of a new world.
- The Fallujah Option for East Ukraine
The Real Reason Washington Feels Threatened by Moscow Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Washington needs a war in Ukraine to achieve its strategic objectives.
- Fantasy technology won't stop climate change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Climate negotiators are promising 'negative emissions' using a risky and unproven technology called BECSS. It's the wrong way to go.
- Farmer Cooperatives, Not Monsanto, Supply El Salvador With Seeds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the face of overwhelming competition skewed by the rules of free trade, farmers in El Salvador have managed to beat the agricultural giants like Monsanto and Dupont to supply local corn seed to thousands of family farmers. Local seed has consistently outperformed the transnational product, and farmers helped develop El Salvador’s own domestic seed supply–all while outsmarting the heavy hand of free trade.
- Farmers join to save the seeds that feed us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Farmers and growers in south-west England have united to reclaim the lost skill of seed saving. They are determined to grow, develop, share and disseminate open-pollinated seeds, and oppose EU laws granting commercial plant breeders a legal monopoly on the seeds that sustain our lives.
- Australian Mining Companies Digging A Deadly Footprint in Africa
Fatal Extraction: Australian Mining's Damaging Push Into Africa Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A pattern of links between mining activities and deaths, disfigurement, environmental destruction and displacement suggests a troubling track record for Australian companies seeking wealth from Africa's minerals.
- Fatal Extraction
Australian Mining's Damaging Push Into Africa Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Australian-listed mining companies are linked to hundreds of deaths and alleged injustices which wouldn’t be tolerated in better-regulated nations. The stories are from people across Africa, and are rarely heard outside their communities.
- FBI harassing fossil fuel activists in the Pacific northwest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A grassroots movement of eco-activists is achieving unprecedented success in challenging fossil fuel developments in the Cascadia region of the US's Pacific northwest, writes Alexander Reid Ross. And that has attracted the wrong kind of attention - from local police, FBI and right-wing legislators determined to protect the corporate right to exploit and pollute.
- FDA Nominee Helped Medical Industry Find and Pay Faculty for "Regulatory Consulting"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Dr. Robert Califf, whose nomination by President Obama to lead the Food and Drug Administration has come under scrutiny over his extensive ties to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, previously directed a business that specializes in helping health care companies hire faculty members and other academic researchers to influence regulatory decisions.
- Feminism, Marxism: Marriage or Divorce?
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A book review of Dangerous Liaisons: The marriages and divorces of Marxism and Feminism
By Cinzia Arruzza.
- Feminism Unfinished
A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 History of American women's movements. Starting from the 1920s, authors review a century of these social movements.
- Ferguson and After: Where Is This Movement Going?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The movement that has erupted after non-indictments of the cop killers of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and of Eric Garner in New York City, one further fed by relentless continued police killings of black and brown youth on a weekly basis around the country, is without doubt the deepest social movement to emerge in the United States in more than forty years.
- A Fetid Wind of Racism Hovers Over Europe
Je Suis Charlie Chaplin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After Charlie Hebdo's assassinations, is it obligatory to identify oneself with the victims' actions? Must people be Charlie because the victims were the incarnation of the 'liberty of expression'?
- The Fiery Cage and the Lynching Tree, Brutality's Never Far Away
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 They burned him alive in an iron cage, and as he screamed and writhed in the agony of hell they made a sport of his death. After listening to one newscast after another rightly condemn the barbaric killing of that Jordanian air force pilot at the bloody hands of ISIS, I couldn’t sleep.
- The fight again tar sands is about more than the environment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Indigenous rights defender Eriel Deranger explains how the struggle against tar sands mining is about protecting her people's rights and culture.
- Fight to Defend Trans Fats Funded With Dark Money
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A conservative Washington think tank that opposed a federal ban of trans fats has also actively campaigned against climate science and environmental regulation, and is funded by secret donors.
- Fightback in Korea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In a climate of increasing repression, the Park Geun-hye government in South Korea is launching the latest in its series of attacks on working people. A retrograde labour reform plan is being set in motion that promises to drive down wages and undermine job security. There is broad and determined resistance to the plan, and workers and farmers are taking the battle to the streets.
- Fighting On All Fronts
Popular resistance in the Second World War Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Gluckstein explores the impact of mass popular movements during World War Two.
- Find, Fix, Finish
For the Pentagon, creating an architecture of assassination meant navigating a turf war with the CIA Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Obama was urged by Michael Hayden, the CIA director, and his counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, to adopt small footprint counterterrorism operations and drone strikes. In one briefing, Hayden told Obama that covert action was the only way to confront al Qaeda and other terrorist groups plotting attacks against the U.S.
- Fire Ants Are Being Laced with Homosexual Chemtrails to Bite Christians And Convert Them To Homosexuality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fire ants are being laced with homosexual chemtrails and then dumped in neighborhoods with higher per capita rates of Christianity. The homosexual chemtrail concoction contains a high concentration of gay endorphins. Sources confirm that several exclusive gay clubs collected the spent sweats of late-night homosexuality, then sent them to a laboratory where in-vitro techniques were used to create this potent new form of biological homosexual chemtrail.
- Fire as U.S. Policy
Burning Truth Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Firing Blind
Flawed Intelligence and the Limits of Drone Technology Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Classified Pentagon documents reveal that the U.S. military has faced "critical shortfalls" in the technology and intelligence it uses to find and kill suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia.
- The First Green Wave
Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 O'Connor focuses on the first wave of activism -- the result of postwar ecology -- that originated in the late 1960s.
- First Look Media Publishes Warrant 'Canary,' Releases Software for Managing Canaries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Today The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, published a warrant "canary" -- a statement that attempts to assure readers that the company has not been compelled to comply with a secret government order like a National Security Letter. In addition to this, First Look is publishing AutoCanary: simple, free, open-source software to easily create and manage warrant canaries.
- Fishers and Plunderers
Theft, Slavery and Violence at Sea Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Fishers and Plunderers focuses on the exploitation of fish and fishers alike in a global industry that gives little consideration to either conservation or human rights. In a business characterized by overprovisioned vessels and shortages of fish, young men are routinely trafficked from poor areas onto fishing boats to work under conditions of virtual slavery. Poverty and debt push many towards piracy and drugs -- although the criminality linked to the industry extends far beyond any individual worker, vessel, or fleet. Fishers and Plunderers provides strong evidence of industry-wide crimes and injustices and argues for regulations that protect the rights of fishers across the board.
- 500 rabbis urge Israel to stop demolition of Palestinian homes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over 500 rabbis from Israel, Britain, the US and Canada have called on the Israeli prime minister to stop demolishing Palestinian homes.
- Five tests for action in Syria that fail the challenge of beating Isis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 'We are alarmed that the government appears to be ready to embark on a campaign of airstrikes in Syria ... that does not seem to be part of a thought-through military, political and social strategy for the region,' write professors from the University of Oxford and Soas, University of London.
- Five wins for feminism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Every activist has at some point been told that activism is pointless today, that it achieves nothing and hasn’t since the 1970s. Others say that there's no point to feminist activism in particular because we already have gender equality. A quick look at the issues feminists are struggling for, and the wins we've had recently, show that neither claim is true, nor are they likely to be for some time.
- Flight and Freedom
Stories of Escape to Canada Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Authors present a collection of thirty interviews with refugees, their descendants, or their loved ones to document their journeys of flight. The stories span two centuries of refugee experiences in Canada.
- Florida Man, Accused of Terrorism Based on Book Collection, Set Free
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Robertson had been incarcerated since 2011 on charges of tax fraud and illegal gun possession. After his arrest and subsequent conviction, prosecutors sought to add a 'terrorism enhancement' to his sentence.
- Florida Sheriff Tells Drivers to Run over Street Protesters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sheriff of Florida's Palm Beach County tells residents to use their vehicles as weapons against protesters who may be blocking their path.
- The Fog of Intelligence
Or How to Be Eternally "Caught Off Guard" in the Greater Middle East Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The phrase "the fog of war" stands in for the inability of commanders to truly grasp what's happening in the chaos that is any battlefield. Perhaps it's time to introduce a companion phrase: the fog of intelligence.
- A Folklorist of Black America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Beuxw Conforth's book, "African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics:The Larry Gellert Story".
- Food industry must get behind 'right to know' on GMO
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The citizens 'right to know' campaign about GMOs has put the food industry on the defensive, big time. But that only creates the impression they have something to hide. if GMOs are as great as they claim, they should be only too glad. It's time they switched sides and got with the people they feed.
- Foodies and farmworkers: Allies or enemies?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fred Magdoff reviews Labor and the Locavore. Can the 'buy local food' movement support both sustainable farming and justice for farmworkers?
- For every 1,000 people killed by police, one officer is convicted of a crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Out of thousands of people killed by police in the United States since 2005, only 11 officers have been convicted of any crimes.
- For true liberation, Black Lives Matter is not enough
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A movement that held true to a goal of liberation would challenge the fundamental assumptions of social, economic, and political organization under capitalism.
- For Workers' Climate Action
Climate Change and Working-Class Struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new collection of articles and reviews on the fight against dangerous climate change, capitalism and workers' organisation and struggle. Urges the left to reach out to climate activists to make the case that being "anti-capitalist" is important but not enough.
- Forced to Love the Grind
Passion is the new workplace requirement - and one that should be resisted Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In this world, legendary figures are the ones who remain in the office for one hundred hours straight, working through their children's musical recitals and 104-degree fevers. The idea is that workers become superhuman through the refusal of self-care. This phenomenon isn't merely depressing; it's outright dangerous.
- Forgotten February In The United States Of Aggression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Since it appears so many folks need reminding that "USA" has always stood for "United States of Aggression," here are a forgotten few from February’s Files.
- The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stromberg provides a historical overview of how jaywalking was pushed to become a crime by automotive companies in order to normalize the reign of automobiles over pedestrians in the streets.
- The Forgotten Massacres
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fifty years ago, in 1965, hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists were slaughtered -- all with the support of the US. For decades, this version of the mass killings of 1965–66 has been reinforced by state propaganda and parroted by Western experts who saw the "spontaneous" eruption in murderous violence as confirmation of pre-existing racist ideas about fanatical and irrational "orientals."
- Former Drone Operators Say They Were "Horrified" By Cruelty of Assassination Program
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 U.S. drone operators are inflicting heavy civilian casualties and have developed an institutional culture callous to the death of children and other innocents, four former operators said at a press briefing in New York.
- 40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and Poor People
It's Not Just About Crime! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Quigley provides a list of reasons why the majority of prisoners in US jails are Black and poor people.
- Fossil Fuel Industry Benefits from $20 Billion in Subsidies in the U.S.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new joint investigative report by Oil Change International and the Overseas Development Institute reveals that, in the United States alone, the fossil fuel industry has benefited from over $20 billion per year in government subsidies between 2008-2015.
- Fossil Fuel Industry's Global Climate Science Communications Plan in Action: Polluting the Classroom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Fossil Fuel Industry promotes a plan in U.S. schools to address global climate change. Their plan includes denial, doubt and promoting the merits of fossil fuel.
- Foucault and Neoliberalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Michel Foucault has a reputation, especially in the academic world, as a radical. This collection of essays explores another, less acknowledged, side of Foucault's thinking: his embrace of some key elements of neoliberalism.
- Four years later, still a graveyard of Chinese youth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In 2014, on the eve of China's national day celebrations, scenes recalling those of four years ago appeared in Chinese headlines. Foxconn became known to the world four years ago when thirteen of its young workers jumped to their deaths in quick succession.
- Fourteen organizations of the Greek Left call for mobilizations around the country against the new memorandum
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The full text of the call signed by the leading figures of the 14 organizations of the Greek radical Left.
- The Fourth Branch
How the CIA infiltrated student politics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Article about the CIA's influence and control over the National Student Association, a relationship that was kept secret for years.
- Fracking Firm Encourages Industry to Imitate Taco Bell's Twitter Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Oil and gas companies are steadily increasing their footprint on social media, hiring specialized public relations firms and developing "visual shorthand" infographics that can be shared easily on Facebook and Twitter.
- Fractured Land
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 In Fractured Land, we follow Caleb Behn, a young Dene lawyer who may become one of this generation's great leaders, if he can discover how to reconcile the fractures within himself, his community and the world around him, blending modern tools of the law with ancient wisdom.
- Fractured Land
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 A Canadian feature documentary film profiling the Dene activist Caleb Behn as he goes through law school and builds a movement around greater awareness of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on First Nations lands.
- The Frameup of Purvi Patel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Purvi Patel is accused of "feticide and neglect of a dependent" after suffering a miscarrage in Mishawaka, Indiana.
- Frank Fried (1927-2015)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Frank Fried, a revolutionary U.S. socialist, passed away on January 13, 2015.
- Free Public Transit
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 This video focuses on accessibility when it comes to public transit in Tallinn, Estonia and how transit issues intersect with social justice issues.
- Free Speech - Earth Liberation Front Press Office April 5, 2001: Communications Equipment Seized by FBI Released 14 Years Later
Returned Objects: A Multimedia Art Installation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Gallery Note: This installation was displayed in Buffalo's ¡Buen Vivir! Gallery from the 15th to the 26th of July 2015. It received, due to the subject matter and the absurdity of the FBI holding these objects for 14 years, good print media coverage in Buffalo, NY. The opening of the show was packed, and former Earth Liberation Front Press Officer, Leslie James Pickering – now co-owner of Burning Books in Buffalo – and Civil Rights attorney Michael Kuzma, both spoke.
- Free Speech in an Age of Identity Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Transcript of Malik's TB Davie Memorial lecture on academic freedom at the University of Cape Town.
- Freedom of speech, assembly, protest? All are nixed by new police powers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 UK police now have free rein to create 'dispersal zones' in public places, writes Josie Appleton. This allows them to exclude people for anything from street drinking to looking suspicious, being homeless, protesting, or merely 'congregating'. This represents a serious breach of our Common Law and Magna Carta rights.
- 'Freedom of the Seas' Means American Global Hegemony
The US should stay out of the South China Sea dispute Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough to keep us from our sacred duty to protect the world from itself. From the South China Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, America stands guard over Freedom. This tweet from Foreign Policy magazine, the organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, states our mission bluntly: "The Obama administration will finally send a destroyer to uphold freedom of navigation in the South China Sea."
- Freedom Summer, 1964: An Overview
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, better known as "Freedom Summer," brought in volunteers to help with attempts to register Black voters who had long been prevented by chicanery and terror from doing so. At the same time, in view of the miserable conditions in the state's segregated public schools, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) planned to create "freedom schools" in which volunteers (mostly the whites from the North) would, that summer, teach Black young people in subjects ranging from basic education to Black history and leadership skills.
- Freedom takes over from law and order
A squatted barracks is the HQ of Slovenia's underground scene, discovers. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Across the river from the old-town of central Ljubljana - a delicate maze of cobbled streets, medieval fortifications and colourful churches that characterise the many cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire - lie the dozen or so dilapidated buildings that make up what has become known as Slovenia's second capital. On first glance, it is hard to believe it's actually occupied. There are no signs directing visitors to its gates: the rubbish-strewn streets are eerily empty in the daylight, the graffiti covering the walls unread. But after dark, it becomes the focal point of the country's alternative culture scene.
- From an IN Correspondent Overseas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Insurgent Notes corresponent questions what has happened to the class struggle in the United States.
- From Ferguson to Baltimore
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Combined with racial profiling, combined with the practice of predatory profiling and predatory policing, police departments are using parking and traffic tickets as a revenue base to increase their budget. All these bring us to a place where police violence is rampant. The more contacts you have with the police, the more possibilities you have of being subject to a violent interaction.
- From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As is ever clearer and ever more important to note, race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do.
- From Libraries to Climate Change
Why Cindy Milstein Believes Anarchism is More Relevant Than Ever Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Anarchism as a word to capture a set of ethics and political philosophy is more interesting to me, Milstein says.
- From Paris to Boston, Terrorists Were Already Known to Authorities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, it never takes long for politicians to begin calling for more surveillance powers. Officials in the United Kingdom and the United States have been among those arguing that more surveillance of Internet communications is necessary to prevent further atrocities.
- From Slavery to Debt-Bondage: Big Tobacco's Addiction to Cheap Labor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Cigarette manufacturers and leaf buyers perpetuate a global system of inequity that bolsters corporate profits at the expense of those who labor at the bottom of the tobacco supply chain. It is long past time for that system to end, and be replaced by a more fair tobacco trade that respects the workers who harvest this toxic crop.
- From the right-wing to the revolutionary left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Tom Wetzel answers the question 'How were you radicalized?'.
- From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Miners inspired Marxist-Humanism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The dialectic of the 1949-50 Miners' General Strike, as it transformed from a Lewis-authorized strike that already had lasted some six months into a challenge to John L. Lewis himself, laid the ground for new ways of thinking.
- Frontier Films
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Frontier films Inc. was a non-profit organization formed in March 1938 out of the Worker's Film and Photo League and Nykino, meant to continue the tradition of producing films for social change in a documentary format.
- Future dustbowl? Fracking ravages Great Plains land and water
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The fracking boom has caused massive vegetation loss over North America's rangelands, as 3 million hectares have been occupied by oil and gas infrastructure and 34 billion cubic metres of water have been pumped from semi-arid ecosystems.
- Gaza in Ruins
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Gaza is a ruin, populated by nearly two million people. The July-August 2014 bombardment of this tiny enclave by Israel resulted in over 2,500 dead Palestinians and an infrastructure -- already weak -- utterly destroyed. A garrotted sliver of land that sits on the Mediterranean Sea, Gaza cannot import goods to survive, let alone to reconstruct the damage. Oxfam says that it would take over a hundred years to bring Gaza back to the conditions in June 2014 because of the ongoing Israeli siege. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an agency tasked with the provision of relief to the Palestinian refugees, complained that "people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia." Pledges for relief are not delivered, and even if they would be handed over to the United Nations (UN), the Israeli embargo makes it impossible for goods to enter Gaza. Gaza, like the rest of Palestine, is condemned to purgatory.
- Gen. John Campbell, Commander in Afghanistan and Serial Liar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After weeks of lies, the Obama administration and the Pentagon, unable to find any way to explain their murderous hour-long AC-130 gunship assault on and destruction of a Doctors Without Borders-run hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, have turned to a new lie: they bombed the wrong building.
- The German Left and the Weimar Republic
A Selection of Documents Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The German Left and the Weimar Republic illuminates the history of the political left by presenting a wide range of documents on various aspects of socialist and communist activity in Germany. Separate chapters deal with the policy of Social Democracy in and out of government, the attempts of the Communist Party to overthrow the Weimar Republic, and then later to support it. Later chapters move away from the political scene to deal with the attitudes of the parties to key social issues, in particular questions of gender and sexuality.
- Ghana's women farmers resist the G7 plan to grab Africa's seeds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sharing and saving seed is a crucial part of traditional farming all over Africa. Governments, backed by multinational seed companies, are imposing oppressive seed laws that attack the continent's main food producers and open the way to industrial agribusiness.
- Gideon Levy Interview
Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2015 An interview with Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. 28 minutes.
- Give Us the Ballot
The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time.
- The Gladys We Never Knew
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 According to the Vital Statistics Act document entitled ''RETURN OF DEATH OF AN INDIAN,'' Gladys Chapman was 12 years, 10 months, and 12 days old on April 29, 1931, when she died in Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops. Occupation of the deceased was listed as ''Schoolgirl.'' On her death certificate, Dr. M.G. Archibald reported ''acute dilation of heart'' as the cause of death, with tuberculosis as the secondary cause. The duration of death was “several days.”
- Global Lessons of A Catastrophe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It is doubtful that Syria as a country will survive in anything like its pre-war form, that the millions of its citizens who have fled will have a place to return, or even whether seven million internally displaced Syrians will be able to remain.
- Global Warming's Unacknowledged Threat - The Pentagon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Pentagon has admitted to burning 350,000 barrels of oil a day (only 35 countries in the world consume more) but that doesn't include oil burned by contractors and weapons suppliers. It does, however, include providing fuel for more than 28,000 armored vehicles, thousands of helicopters, hundreds of jet fighters and bombers and vast fleets of Navy vessels.
- Global water crisis causing failed harvests, hunger, war and terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The world is already experiencing water scarcity driven by over-use, poor land management and climate change. If we fail to respond to the warnings before us, major food and power shortages will soon afflict large parts of the globe.
- GM cotton really is helping to drive Indian farmers to suicide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new study finds that Indian farmers in rain-fed areas are being driven to suicide from the increased cost of growing Bt GMO cotton varieties that confer no benefits to them. The extra expenses arise from buying new seeds each year, along with increased chemical inputs, while suffering inadequate access to agronomic information.
- The GMO Dark Act Cannot Survive the Light
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An ardent attempt is afoot on Capitol Hill to prevent states from requiring the labeling of genetically engineered foods – made especially urgent by the fact that Vermont’s labeling bill is set to take effect July 1st.
- GMO Propaganda and the Sociology of Science
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In August of 2014, the website Gawker revealed documents that demonstrated the lengths to which the global chemical giant Monsanto would go in order to control the narrative about their products – in particular, their genetically modified crops. While we all like to believe that our scientific/rational brains see through the transparent marketing, public relations rhetoric exists because it greatly sedates critical thought.
- Godavari: and the police still await an attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rural Indians were both the foot soldiers of freedom and the leaders of some of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings ever seen. Countless thousands of them sacrificed their lives to rid India of British rule. And many who lived through great suffering to see a free India were mostly forgotten soon after. From the 1990s onwards, p. Sainath recorded the lives of several of the last living freedom fighters.
- Golden Silences in the Propaganda System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Propaganda shapes the flow of information in many different ways, including, obviously, the choice of the news fit to print, its placement, and the selection of authorities to make those facts credible. But equally important, and implicit in news choices, especially where there are political interests at stake and possible varying interpretations of the news, is omitting facts and ignoring sources that call the chosen (often official) perspective into question.
- Golden Veneer: How McDonald's Empty CSR Promises Failed Workers at Taylor Farms
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The report documents systematic and serious violations of workers' fundamental rights protected under international labor standards and McDonald's own Supplier Code of Conduct to freely associate and bargain collectively at Taylor Farms. Further, it finds that McDonald's approach not only failed to prevent or remediate grave violations of workers' rights, it helped undermine workers' free exercise of their rights.
- Google Deceptively Tracks Students' Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 EFF Launches 'Spying on Students' Campaign to Raise Awareness About Privacy Risks of School Technology Tools
- GOP Creates Perverse Online Voter Registration, Making It Harder for People to Vote
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The bill will ultimately reduce voting by senior citizens, people with disabilities and minorities.
- Gordon Campbell on the Vanuatu cyclone and media 'disaster porn'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Campbell discusses the Vanuatu cyclone and how it has become a 'disaster porn,'a process that occurs when media exploits someone else's misery so that it look attractive as a form of entertainment.
- Governments Giving Fossil Fuel Companies $10 Million a Minute: IMF
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- The Great Canadian Tax Dodge
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 It is estimated that between 100 and 170 billion dollars leaves Canada every year, untaxed. Much of it is siphoned off to Canadian-made offshore tax havens. "The Great Canadian Tax Dodge" documents the birth of the Canadian Tax Fairness movement and examines the issue of tax avoidance, exposing the sophisticated corporate strategies and tax loopholes commonly used to legally avoid tax.
- The Great Republican Land Heist
Cliven Bundy and the politicians who are plundering the West Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Cliven Bundy and other politicans have seized public land and ravaged the area as they exploit it for their economic purposes.
- The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
- Greece: A no vote against blackmail
Now is not the time for academic debates. It is time for struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Our response to the blackmail of the lenders is that the struggle against austerity will not be governed by concerns about the euro system or by the consent of the rulers of Europe. the response should include stopping debt repayments to the lenders, with the goal of cancelling a majority of the debt; carrying out measures to improve the life of workers and poor; and financing all of this with heavy taxes on corporations and the rich, renationalizing large public enterprises and putting the banks under social control.
- Greece again Can Save the West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The 'Greek crisis' is not about debt. Debt is the propaganda that the Empire is using to subdue sovereignty throughout the Western world.
- Greece, Austerity & Europe's Future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Easily lost in these political gyrations is the immense suffering of the Greek people. Unemployment continues to be 25% for the general population and 60% for younger people. One result has been that 300,000 Greeks, or 3% of the total population, has emigrated in the past few years.
- Greece and the Future of European Democracy
Disfunction in the Eurozone Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Tariq Ali, author of "The Extreme Center: A Warning". Discussion addresses the current economic situation in Greece and the European Union's role in it.
- Greece: postmodernism in power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Yanis Varoufakis, the Finance Minister in Greece’s Syriza government, shows where postmodernist attacks on Marx lead politically. This self-declared "erratic Marxist" states forthrightly that the task of today's Left is to save capitalism from itself, which requires "forging alliances with reactionary forces."
- Greece and Tsipras' policy: Provoking a split with the working class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An interview with Panagiotis Lafazanis.
- Greece: Was, and Is There, an Alternative?
The Left confronts Greece's financial crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Addresses three major aspects of the Greek crisis of 2015: the debate over strategy and program within and around Syriza and how that was reflected in the months since the January election; the prospects for a recovery and revitalization of the Greek left in the coming period; and some promising initial reactions to the Greek events in the European left.
- Greece's Golden Dawn: Fascists at the Gate
The party is deeply rooted in the political culture of Greece. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 While Golden Dawn -- with its Holocaust denial, its swastikas and its Hitler salutes—looks like it might inhabit the fringe, in fact the organization has roots deep in the heart of Greece's political culture.
- Greece's solidarity movement: 'it's a whole new model - and it's working'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Citizen-run health clinics, food centres, kitchens and legal aid hubs have sprung up to fill the gaps left by austerity – and now look set to play a bigger role under a Syriza government.
- The Greek Debt Crisis and Crashing Markets
A New Mode of Warfare Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Greece has indeed become an example. But it is an example of the horror that the eurozone's monetarists seek to impose on one economy after another, using debt as a lever to force privatization selloffs at distress prices. In short, finance has shown itself to be the new mode of warfare. Resisting debt leverage andfinancial conquest is as legal as is resisting military invasion.
- Greek lesson: let's show some initiative on the Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Kevin Ovenden provides some suggestions on initiatives that the European Left can take to deliver practical solidarity to the people of Greece.
- Green Parties, Green Future: lessons from history for Green politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How can Green parties acquire real political power? A new book by Per Gahrton, founder of the Swedish Green Party, is much more than a useful reference text on the history of Green Parties around the world. It's also a valuable manual in realpolitik that resonates here and now.
- Greenpeace 'peer review' climate sting's first scalp?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A leading member of the climate change-skeptic Global Warming Policy Foundation has resigned from his post in the wake of a Greenpeace investigation that exposed its phoney 'peer review' process. But he insists: 'nothing going on here!'
- A Grim Very Tale: The Kehoe Paradigm
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the 1920s two employees of GM working in the research lab discovered that the addition of tetraethyllead - TEL - to gasoline would reduce engine 'knock'. It would take sixty years to stop industry from adding TEL to gasoline. During that time the lead contamination in the environment - globally - was raised by hundreds of times. Billions of tons of lead was dispersed into the environment.
- Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Outrageous Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Civil asset forfeiture violates civil and property rights, not to mention fundamental notions of justice. Now, finally, it's under increasing fire.
- Gun Industry Executives Say Mass Shootings Are Good for Business
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Behind closed doors, speaking with investors and Wall Street analysts, the gun industry views mass shootings as an opportunity to make lots of money.
- Gunman as Hero, Children as Targets, Iraq as Backdrop
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 American Sniper, directed by Clinton Eastwood about Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle,
is not only the latest blockbuster but also a war propaganda.
- Gunning for destruction in Gaza: 'You want to see people in pieces'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 36,000 artillery shells, tank shells, mortars, anti-tank missiles and munitions, alongside an ubiquitous use of armored bulldozers, razed streets and districts to the ground during last summer's Gaza war. According to a newly published Breaking the Silence report, this is exactly what the Israeli army wanted.
- Hailed as a Model for Successful Intervention, Libya Proves to be the Exact Opposite
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Advocates of the U.S. intervention in Lybia regard the event as a proof of success. Greenwald discusses why things are working in the opposite way.
- The Hand That Feeds
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 A documentary portraying 12 undocumented immigrants who face an uphill battle and the threat of deportation when they take on the popular restaurant in New York City where they work.
- Hands Up, Fast Food!
The Fight for $15 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fast-food workers and supporters gathered late Tuesday evening to shut down the Phillips 66 convenience store in St. Louis. They chanted "hands up don't shoot" and did a die-in in remembrance of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.
- Hang Onto Your Wallets: Negative Interest, the War on Cash and the $10 Trillion Bail-in
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 If you’re an ordinary saver with your money in the bank, you may soon be paying the bank to hold your funds rather than the reverse.
- Harper, Serial Abuser of Power: The Evidence Compiled
The Tyee's full, updated list of 70 Harper government assaults on democracy and the law. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stephen Harper and his Conservatives have racked up dozens of serious abuses of power since forming government in 2006. From scams to smears, monkey-wrenching opponents to intimidating public servants like an Orwellian gorilla, some offences are criminal, others just offend human decency. Here are 70 instances of abuse of power by the Stephen Harper government.
- Harperman
Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2015 Harperman is a song lampooning Canada's Conservative Prime Minister Stepehn Harper, written and performed by Ottawa scientist and folk singer Tony Turner. Singing the song got him suspended from his job as a habitat planning scientist with Environment Canada.
- Harper's Relationship With the Jewish Defense League Is Disturbing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With Canada's federal election less than two weeks away, Levitan addresses a highly topical matter: the Conservatives' close relations with the controversial Jewish Defense League (JDL).
- Harper's Rule Breaking Rush to Crush Unions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Is there anything more undemocratic than Canada's most tainted organization -- the Conservative-controlled Senate -- breaking its rules and then overturning its own Conservative Speaker's ruling, all to hurriedly impose anti-union legislation before the federal election? That's what happened last week with Bill C-377, an odious private members' bill shepherded from beginning to end by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's own office, passed by Parliament's Conservative majority and sent to the Senate for approval.
- Harper's Worst Offense against Refugees May Be His Climate Record
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Middle East drought between 2006 and 2011 was without precedent since modern record keeping, killing over 80 per cent of livestock and driving up local food prices. Already poor populations had to contend with higher temperatures that dried soil and failed rains during the normally wet season due to weaker winds from the Mediterranean. A key long-term driver of this unfolding humanitarian catastrophe is climate change. And on that front, Canada’s record of contributing to this crisis is far more significant than our wretched record so far in resettling Syrian refugees.
- Having the Hard Conversations
Jane McAlevey on Fight for 15, labour's crisis of strategy, and the difference between organizing and mobilizing Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An interview with labour organizer Jane McAlevey on labour's crisis of strategy and the difference between organizing and mobilizing. McAlevey discusses what ails the labour movement, problem with the terms "public" and "private" sector, and why we need to stop ignoring the rank-and-file.
- Headscarves and Hymens
Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A condemnation of the repressive political, cultural, and religious forces that reduce millions of women to second-class citizens.
- Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
Book Review Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 One afternoon earlier this year, I stepped into the carriage of a Cairo metro train. I was on the way home from interviewing female students - all of them devout, veiled Muslims - who had been snatched off the street and sexually assaulted by police for protesting against the military regime. It was hard for them to speak openly about the attacks for fear of shaming their families and destroying their own chances of marriage.
- Health Care and Immigration Policies that Kill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Cuts to Canada's Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP), severely curtail access to health-care services for refugee claimants and refugees. Many beneficiaries and practitioners were already critical of the original IFHP because it provided inconsistent access to health care and many services were not covered. The situation only worsened after the cuts.
- Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists
The Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party -- the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US -- from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early seventies, its extension into major industry throughout early part of that decade, the devastating schism in the aftermath of the death of Mao Tse-tung, and its ultimate decline as the 1970s turned into the 1980s.
- Hebron Activist Who Died of Tear Gas Showed Israel's Crimes to the World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Hebron resident and anti-occupation activist Hashem al-Azzeh died Wednesday after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli forces.
- Here's how much corporations paid US senators to fast-track the TPP bill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Documenting the corruption of the U.S. political system.
- The Hijacking of the Marianne by "The Pirates of the Mediterranean"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the early hours of the morning (local time) of June 29th, three Israeli Navy ships intercepted and hijacked a Swedish flagged ship, the Marianne av Göteborg on route to Gaza in the State of Palestine.
- Hilary Benn's speech The media's war footing on Corbyn and Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Britain's media is on a double-war footing. The first war is against Jeremy Corbyn, and is countering the threat that Corbyn's more popular policies may gain even wider support. The second war is for Britain's ongoing right to bomb somewhere whenever elites want.
- Hillary Clinton and Corporate Feminism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Feminist enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is reflective of a profound crisis of U.S. liberal feminism, which has long embraced or accepted corporate capitalism, racism, empire, and even heterosexism and transphobia.
- A History of the Barricade
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 On the historical evolution of the French barricade, from the Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune.
- Hitler Wasn't Inevitable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials is cause to reflect on the forces that failed to halt Nazism’s rise.
- Honduras Bleeding
The Coup and Its Aftermath Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 June 28 marked the six year anniversary of the military coup in Honduras -- the day that a democratically elected left wing government was ousted by a US-backed, US-trained cabal of generals and right wing politicians and landowners.
- Honduras: Garifuna communities resist eviction and theft of land
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Pristine beaches, clear Caribbean waters, coral reefs, fertile land ... such is the homeland of the Garifuna people, writes Jeff Abbott. It's so lovely that outsiders are desperate to seize ever more of their territory to develop for mass tourism, oil palm plantations, illicit drug production ... and the land grabs have the full support of Honduras military government, backed to the hilt by Uncle Sam.
- Honoring the Socialist Mary Marcy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Withe the centenary of World War I underway, it does us well to recall the remarkable socialist militant, Mary Marcy (1877-1922).
- Honourable Friends? Parliament and the Fight for Change
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 From the NHS to corporate tax evasion, from climate change to immigration, Honourable Friends? tells the story of 5 years in Westminster and offers bold and practical suggestions for a fairer British political system.
- Horizons for a New Left
The Next New Left: A History of the Future Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Alan Sears' The Next New Left: A History of the Future.
- Horrid Carcass of Indonesia - 50 Years After the Coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Indonesia has matured into perhaps the most corrupt country on Earth, and possibly into the most indoctrinated and compassionless place anywhere under the sun.
- Horror Beyond Description: Noam Chomsky on the Latest Phase of the War on Terror
An interview with Noam Chomsky Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Does the "war on terror" make sense? Is it an effective policy? And how different is the current phase of the "war on terror" from the two previous phases that occurred under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush's administrations, respectively? Moreover, who really benefits from the "war on terror"? And what's the link between the US military-industrial complex and war making?
- Household Worker Organizing, Its Lessons for Labor Today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Domestic work is representative of a paradigmatic shift in labour, as the conditions of labour for other workers seem to converge with and more closely resemble those of private household workers.
- Household Workers Unite
The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Published: 2016 Telling the stories of African American domestic workers, this book resurrects a little-known history of domestic worker activism in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new perspectives on race, labour, feminism, and organizing.
- How California police are tracking your biometric data in the field
Agencies are using mobile fingerprint scanners, tattoo and facial recognition software Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 EFF and MuckRock got together to reveal how state and local law enforcement agencies are using mobile biometric technology in the field by filing public records requests around the country. Thousands of pages of documents were obtained from more than 30 agencies.
- How Class Kills
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A recent study showing rising mortality rates among middle-aged whites drives home the lethality of class inequality.
- How Cops Use 'Psychopaths and Liars' and Often Become Them to Achieve Their Goals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Does using criminals or actually becoming them, justify the path to security? American law enforcement tends to think so.
- How Corporations and Law Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit distributed an intelligence bulletin to all field offices warning that environmental extremism would likely become an increasing threat to the energy industry. The eight-page document argued that, even though the industry had encountered only low-level vandalism and trespassing, recent "criminal incidents" suggested that environmental extremism was on the rise.
- How do you stop a pipeline when one family owns both the oil and the media?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Pipeline opponent’s op-ed rejected by Irving-owned newspaper in New Brunswick.
- How Dogs Forge a Bond with Rio's Homeless That Is Life-Saving for Both
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Homelessness in Rio is, in many ways, virtually identical to how it manifests in other large cities: it entails unimaginable material and emotional deprivation, hopelessness, societal invisibility, and utter isolation. But one aspect of Rio's homeless population stands out: A huge number of them have dogs that were previously living as desperate, unwanted strays on the street.
- How Europe cancelled Germany's debt in 1953
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The 1953 London Debt Accords show that European leaders know how to resolve a debt crisis in the interests of justice and recovery. Article discusses four key lessons for Greece's debt crisis today.
- How "Hate Crimes Against Police" Expose the Fatal Flaw Within Hate Crime Statutes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Hate crime legislation lent legitimacy to a 40-year carceral program that has wrought immense damage on communities of colour. In an ironic twist, the police - who've been the main enforcers of this program - now want to invoke these laws for their protection.
- How Israel Covers Up Its Ugly Racial Holy War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As the incitement to violence by Israeli leaders ramped up, so did racist attacks by Israeli citizens.
- How Law Enforcement Can Use Google Timeline To Track Your Every Move
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The recent expansion of Google's Timeline feature can provide investigators unprecedented access to users' location history data, allowing them in many cases to track a person's every move over the course of years. The expansion of Google's Timeline feature, launched in July 2015, allows investigators to request detailed information about where someone has been -- down to the longitude and latitude -- over the course of years.
- How many more
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 New report shows killings of environmental activists are increasing, with indigenous communities hardest hit. Global Witness shines a spotlight on Honduras - the most dangerous country to be an environmental defender.
- How Much Does Climate Change Change?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything.
- How Much Does Climate Change Change?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
- How Photography Can Destroy Reality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It may be that some of the great philosophical work of our time is taking place, hidden and unheralded, in the field of image forensics. Where but under the scrutiny of digital experts who draw a line separating false representations of the world from truthful ones are contemporary questions of perception and reality brought so keenly to bear? Who but these detectives of the real pursue as explicitly-- as intricately-- our crime wave of the fake, the contrived, the uncanny, the exponential image?
- How Propaganda Works
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Published: 2016 Jason Stanley argues that more attention needs to be paid to propaganda. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy -- particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality -- and how it has damaged democracies of the past.
- How the CIA made Google
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet - Part 1 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain "information superiority.'
- How the New Flexible Economy is Making Workers Lives Hell
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Whatever it's called – just-in-time scheduling, on-call staffing, on-demand work, independent contracting, or the "share economy" -- the result is the same: No predictability, no economic security.
- How the 'SlutWalk' Has Transformed the Rape Culture Conversation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It is amidst this wider rape culture, and the ways feminists are fighting back, that SlutWalk not only emerged, but exploded as a global grassroots movement. What is significant about SlutWalk is not the premise; after all, women have been protesting against sexual violence for decades. What is striking about SlutWalk was its ability, despite its feminist roots, to capture the mainstream media's attention.
- How the World Bank Broke Its Promise to Protect the Poor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The World Bank has broken its promise. Over the past decade, the bank has regularly failed to enforce its rules, with devastating consequences for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet, an investigation has found.
- How to Change Everything
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2015 Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything is a vital book whose limitations should spark discussion about where we go from here.
- How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The story of how the British National Health Service (NHS) has been gradually converted into a market-based healthcare system over the past 25 years. This process is accelerating under the Coalition government and the very existence of a National Health Service is in danger.
- How to Fight Western Propaganda
Time for a Creative Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The western propaganda apparatus is enormously efficient and effective. It is also brilliant in how it ensures that its inventions get channeled, distributed, and accepted in all corners of the world. The system through which disinformation spreads, is incredibly complex.
What are we, who oppose the regime, supposed to do?
- How to Leak to The Intercept
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Leaking can serve the public interest, fueling revelatory and important journalism. Here are instructions for how to leak safely.
- How to Organize
15 Key Points Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I would like to share with you this list of points on organizing. I'm by no means an expert organizer, but I have gained some experience in the past decade. This list is not definitive or faultless. If you think I got it wrong, or if you have more points to add, let me know.
- How to Promote a Just Transition and Break out of the jobs vs. environment trap
A Superfund for Workers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A strategy has been emerging to protect workers and communities whose livelihoods may be threatened by climate protection policies. Protecting those who lose their jobs due to necessary environmental policies has often been referred to as a "just transition."
- How Verizon and Turn Defeat Browser Privacy Protections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Verizon advertising partner Turn is using Verizon Wireless's UIDH tracking header to resurrect deleted tracking cookies and share them, forming a vast web of non-consensual online tracking. The tehcnology makes it impossible for customers to control their online privacy.
- How We Changed Toronto
The inside story of twelve creative, tumultuous years in civic life, 1969-1980 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 By the mid-1960s Toronto was well on its way to becoming Canada's largest and most powerful city. One real estate firm aptly labelled it Boomtown. Expressways, subways, shopping centres, high-rise apartments, and skyscraping downtown office towers were transforming the city. City officials were cheerleaders for unrestricted growth.
- How will we get to an ecological civilization?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Capitalism's infrastructure, which is designed to dominate nature, cannot simply be taken over and used for an ecological transformation. Only a complete, root-and-branch change will do the job.
- How Zionism's brutality reaches from Gaza's beaches to US academia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Read one way, Steven Salaita's new book is about lies and children. (Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom by Steven Salaita, Haymarket Books). There are the persistent lies about Israel's continued attacks on Palestinians, and in particular its lies about how it kills children.
- Huge Pipeline Company Kinder Morgan Hired Off-Duty Cops to 'Deter Protests' in Pennsylvania
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Kinder Morgan, the self-proclaimed "largest energy infrastructure company in North America," paid $50,000 for off-duty police officers from a Pennsylvania department to patrol a controversial gas pipeline construction site. The hiring came after a request from the corporation for uniformed officers that could "deter protests and prevent delays."
- Human Rights Protections Weaken as Tunisia Fights Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Tunisian government is cracking down on civil and political rights as it fights a rise in Islamist insurgency, in the aftermath of the deadliest terror attack in the country's history.
- Human Rights Watch investigator among those attacked by Israeli forces
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 "We didn't see any soldiers near us. That's why we felt safe. No one was throwing rocks or anything. Soldiers just started shooting."
- Humanity in the Capitalist Cul-de-sac
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As a result of 200 years of capitalism, humanity is deep in a very dangerous cul-de-sac which could result in barbarism on an unprecedented scale.
- I am not that Woman in a burqa
A Palestinian novelist remembers the liberated, educated women of her life, and how their freedom has been, and is being, curtailed. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh discusses growing up as a girl and woman in Arab culture, and how Arab women are represented in Western culture.
- I fit the description....
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On my way to get a burrito before work, I was detained by the police. I noticed the police car in the public lot behind Centre Street. As I was walking away from my car, the cruiser followed me. I walked down Centre Street and was about to cross over to the burrito place and the officer got out of the car. "Hey my man," he said. He unsnapped the holster of his gun.
- I know Isis fighters. Western bombs falling on Raqqa will fill them with joy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Militants in Syria dream of a big showdown with the US and Europe. There are other ways to defeat them.
- I was "part of a terror organization," says Israeli pilot turned activist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Yonatan Shapira, former Israeli air force pilot and current supporter of the Palestinian-led call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
- 'I Would Have Refused Such An Order' - Former RAF Pilot Gives His View of US Bombing Of MSF Hospital In Kunduz
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In our previous media alert, 'Sick Sophistry', we examined media coverage of the deliberate US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 3, 2015. In particular, we exposed the BBC's Pentagon-friendly reporting of the hospital as having been 'mistakenly' bombed.
- Ian Angus: COP21, the climate crisis, and ecosocialism
An interview with Ian Angus Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An interview with Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus. Angus says 'The environmental question is the most important problem that we face in the 21st century: If we don’t recognize its centrality, our politics will be irrelevant.'
- The ICC is now an instrument of imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Rome Statute is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC was to be an international tribunal and intergovernmental organisation that would prosecute all individuals for international crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- An Idiot's Guide to Why They Hate Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Nobody who is reasonably knowledgeable and honest about the long and ongoing history of U.S.- and Western-imperial policy in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and Africa has any business claiming to find the origins of anti-American and anti-Western terrorism in the Muslim world mysterious.
- If Paris Killers Had Western Media on Their Side
Flip the Script Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Imagine if the Charlie Hebdo killings had been reported on in a slightly different manner, say in the manner that drone strike killings are reported.
- If the 'product' is wrong, a rebrand won't help Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Cook discusses Israel's attempt to rebrand itself. Specifically, he addresses "hasbara", translated as "public diplomacy", a campaign that calls for Israelis to justify and defend any policy regarding occupied territories.
- If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck, Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Ravensbruck is a camp relatively unknown because it doesn't fit the Holocaust narrative. The hundreds of survivors' stories in this account bear witness to the terrifying heterogeneity of Nazi crimes.
- The Imaginary Cuban Troops in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fair-and-balanced Fox News reported on Wednesday that "Cuban military operatives reportedly have been spotted in Syria, where sources believe they are advising President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers and may be preparing to man Russian-made tanks to aid Damascus in fighting rebel forces backed by the U.S." Fox's claim of an imaginary enemy alliance relies on two sources: the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies and an anonymous U.S. official.
- Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An excerpt from John Smith's book "Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century", in which he examines the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization.
- In an endless war on terror, we are all doomed to become Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Jeff Halper's new book sheds light on the arms industry, arguing that Israel is now the go-to nation for armies and police forces around the world.
- In China's Inner Mongolia, mining spells misery for traditional herders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 China's relentless drive for minerals is wreaking havoc on pastoral lifestyles.
- In Dresden, PEGIDA meets opposition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 PEGIDA's quick growth derives largely from the many fears, especially in eastern Germany, about the scarcity of decent, steady jobs, about constant rent hikes and dwindling hopes about having enough to live on when they retire. Echoing past fascists, today's "pied pipers" try to deflect such fears and resentment against refugees.
- In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Numerous writers thus demanded: to show "solidarity" with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. "The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack," announced Slate's editor Jacob Weisberg, "is to escalate blasphemous satire."
- In the Matter of the International Community v Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In its first full week of a "new" get tough policy, almost 500 young Palestinian demonstrators were injured, shot and maimed, and at least three teens murdered in response to what Israel sees as a rising tide of "militant" resistance against the illegally occupied and, by now, almost completely annexed West Bank.
- In the Shadow of the Storm
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ten years ago this month, on the day Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was at Camp Casey, an informal encampment outside George W. Bush's Crawford ranch, listening to a group of veterans talk about their opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By chance, it was also the day my first feature for Harper's Magazine went to press, an essay about how people react in the wake of major urban disasters.
- In Vietnam War US deliberately bombed hospitals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Incarceration and Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book reviews of Dan Berger's two works Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era and The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States.
- Increasing Legal Suppression of Freedom of Thought and Expression in So-called Free and Democratic Societies
As evidence for increasing totalitarianism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 That freedom of speech is the foundational individual right for a truly democratic system to exist or emerge. And that this freedom must be defended without compromise, and without bias against any particular view, no matter how distasteful or disturbing the particular view might be to some or most people.
- India's acid attack victims unite against the horror of their past
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Last year, 349 people in India, mostly women, had acid thrown on them in deliberate assaults. A groundbreaking cafe allows some of them a new start. Sheroes (run by an NGO in the city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal) is a rare beacon of hope where the aim is to help change perceptions of the survivors of acid attacks and to allow them to regain some confidence.
- India's Indigenous Peoples organise to protect forests, waters and commons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 India's neoliberal government is attempting the mass seizure of indigenous lands, commons and forests in order to hand them over for corporate exploitation with mines, dams and plantations. But tribal communities are rising up to resist the takeover, which is not only morally reprehensible but violates India's own laws and international human rights obligations.
- India's killer heatwave - a deadly warning of the world we face, without climate action
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As delegates prepare for the Bonn climate talks, India is being struck by extreme heat with a long-delayed monsoon season and a death toll of thousands. If this is an indicator of the warming world to come, it's giving us all the reasons we could possibly want to act decisively before it's too late.
- Indigenous Community Wins Land Rights Victory in Guatemala After 200 Years of Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Success is rare among indigenous peoples' struggles for land rights in Guatemala. But the nearly 300 Poqomchi' Maya families that make up the Primavera communities in the department of Alta Verapaz have just won a significant victory.
- An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Dunbar-Ortiz challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them.
- Indigenous peoples in Latin America fight to safeguard their knowledge
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Equal Times met up with William Park just a few months after he had completed a project of mammoth proportions: a 500-page encyclopaedia compiling, in collaboration with the community, a large portion of their medical knowledge. "The aim is to help the community to preserve and pass on their knowledge without it being pillaged by foreign businesses. If they decide to share it one day, that is their choice. It isn't up to us to decide for them," explains the specialist in sustainable agriculture.
- Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia.It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.
- Information is Everywhere and Everywhere We are Ignorant
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An international survey of young people in the US and other countries asked 56 questions about geography and current events. The organization’s survey discovered that about 87% of Americans could not place Iraq on the map. Americans could find on average only seven of the 16 countries in the quiz. Only 71% of the surveyed Americans could locate the Pacific Ocean, the world’s largest body of water.
- The Insanity of the COP: We Must Adopt a Different Vision
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize 'Collect It All' Surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As Members of Congress struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before the Patriot Act expires, they might consider the unusual advice of an intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency who warned about the danger of collecting too much data.
- Inside the European Cataclysm
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 During this second Thirty Years War, from 1914-1945, Europe experienced an extraordinary fusion of conflicts.
- Inside the Paris Climate Agreement: Hope or Hype?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It has become a predictable pattern at the annual UN climate conferences for participants to describe the outcome in widely divergent ways.
- Inside the Sensational Business of "Rescuing" Sex Workers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For years, the sex worker movement has been at odds with a conservative wing of the anti-human trafficking movement.
- Inside the Spyware Campaign Against Argentine Troublemakers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor known for doggedly investigating a 1994 Buenos Aires bombing, was targeted by invasive spy software downloaded onto his cellular phone shortly before his mysterious death. The software masqueraded as a confidential document and was intended to infect a Windows computer. An investigation by The Intercept indicates that this targeting was likely not an isolated event.
- Insurance and the orgin of big data
Between the ledger and the computer was the card index - the basis of the mass commodification of personal insurance Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A historical look at the origins of 'Big Data' and the collection of personal information by corporate America in the early 20th century.
- Insurrectional Black Power
CLR James on Race and Class Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 During the exhilarating and dangerous late 1960s and early 1970s, no world historical figure of older generations had a more militant defense of Black Power than CLR James. But it was always a vision within a context, and after all these years have passed (along with James himself who died in 1989), the context remains crucial.
- Intag's Recurrent Nightmare: Adding Up The Costs Of Ecuador's Mineral Wars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Intag is situated in Northwestern Ecuador. In the 1990s Bishimetal, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi, found evidence of a large copper deposit lying in the bowels of the biodiverse Toisan Range. In 1997 it was forced to abandon the project. In 2012 CODELCO, Ecuador’s state-owned mining company moved to revive the project as part of a government to government agreement. The nightmare returns.
- International Development: Illusions and realities
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Explores the myriad shapes of development, and argues for an organic approach driven by the people it's meant to benefit.
- The internationalist case against the European Union
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For the first time in a generation Britain will vote on its membership of the European Union. How to vote in that referendum is a difficult choice for anyone on the left. Since the 1990s the anti-EU camp has been dominated by the chauvinist and racist right, initially on the Thatcherite wing of the Tory party, but now enjoying separate and increasingly powerful representation in the shape of the UK Independence Party. But anyone who contemplates therefore voting Yes in the referendum is confronted with the reality of the EU as a neoliberal club currently busy nailing the people of Greece to the cross of austerity.
- The Internet: a Giant Job-Killing Machine?
Andrew Keen's "The Internet is Not the Answer" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Andrew Keen's The Internet Is Not the Answer is the most frightening book I have read in years (perhaps in my lifetime), as frightful as the conservative Supreme Court justices and the deniers of climate change.
- Internet Companies: Confusing Consumers for Profit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the age of information, companies are hungry for your data. They want it - even if it means resorting to trickery.
- Interview with Maryam Abdulhadi al-Khawaja
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Bahraini activist Maryam Abdulhadi al-Khawaja.
- Intolerance, Saudi-Style
With Friends Like These... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What all of those victims of the Saudi criminal justice system have in common is that their offenses related strictly to intellectual activities and not physical violence.
- Investigation Reveals 'Environmental Ruin' And Workers Rights Abuses
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Broken promises to impoverished communities, serious environmental concerns and poor health and safety records linked to Australian mining companies have all been revealed by Africa’s largest ever collaborative journalistic investigation.
- Invisible War Crimes - The Corporate Media On Yemen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Anyone struggling to understand the violent upheaval in Yemen this year might be tempted to consult the country's 'most important source of news' -- the BBC.
- Iraq: 'Islamic State' atrocities fuelled by decades of reckless arms trading
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Decades of poorly regulated arms flows into Iraq as well as lax controls on the ground have provided the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS) with a large and lethal arsenal that is being used to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity on a massive scale in Iraq and Syria, Amnesty International said in a new report today.
- Iraq: Taking stock: The arming of Islamic State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS) deploys a substantial arsenal of arms and ammunition, designed or manufactured in more than 25 countries. Their military campaign has relentlessly targeted civilians with small arms, artillery fire and improvised explosive devices. This report catalogues the array of weapons, ammunition and other military equipment observed in the possession of IS. Supplier states and the Iraqi authorities urgently need to implement far stricter controls on the transfer, storage and deployment of arms to avoid further proliferation to armed groups and abuses of human rights.
- Is Canada's government trying to kill off the wild salmon?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Matthews discusses how the Canadian government's actions and legal changes threaten the wild salmon.
- IS and climate change - an inconvenient truth for Republicans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 US Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley sparked controversy last month by saying that the conditions for the rise of the so-called Islamic State (IS, also known as Isil, Isis or Da'esh) were set by the impact on Syria of climate change, which drove farmers from their land into slums around cities and created extreme poverty.
- Is Democracy Dead In The West?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 This is the "New Democracy." It is a resurrection of the old feudal order. A few super-rich aristocrats and everyone else serfs obliged to support the ruling order. The looting that began in Greece has spread into Ukraine, and who knows who is next?
- Is intersectionality just another form of identity politics?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Feminist Fightback has for many years described itself as seeking to practice an 'intersectional' form of feminism, whereby we argue that the struggle for gender liberation must take account of, and join with, struggles against all other forms of oppression and exploitation around the axis of class, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism etc. We began to use 'intersectional' in place of 'socialist feminist' in about 2007-8 because we felt that the latter term implied an interest in gender and class but did not give due emphasis to race. We continued to be inspired by a variety of Marxist and class-struggle anarchist currents, and we did not feel these to be in contradiction to a commitment to intersectionality.
- Is it the Beginning of the End for the Alberta Oilsands?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new report from Oil Change International challenges industry's common assumption that the continued production of oilsands crude is inevitable.
- Is Marxism Eurocentric?
This reading of Marx is virtually hegemonic in some branches of academia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Many activists today first encounter Marxist ideas in and around college campuses, where certain interpretations of Karl Marx and Marxism have solidified into a sort of conventional wisdom. One of these is the idea that Marxism is "Eurocentric" -- and therefore has little to say to the mass of people in the 21st century globalized world. This reading of Marx is virtually hegemonic in some branches of academia.
- Is Peace or War at Hand?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Roberts discusses the outcomes of the meeting in Moscow between Merkel, Hollande, and Putin as a result of Washington's aggressive position toward Russia.
- Is Saudi Women's Vote a Step Forward?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The global press has been heralding the December 13, 2015, vote in Saudi Arabia as a breakthrough for women, since it's the first time in history that Saudi women have been allowed to vote. But is this vote really a significant step forward?
- Is the Islamic State Really Such a Psychological Enigma?
A Bizarre Excursion Into the Surreal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The costly debacle known as the Iraq War put the US government in a tough spot that's now exacerbated by the rise of the Islamic State in Anbar Province and western Syria.
A recent New York Times story referred to the Islamic State (also ISIS or ISIL) as a "conundrum" - "a hybrid terrorist organization and a conventional army."
- ISIS and counter-revolution: towards a Marxist analysis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The article analyzes ISIS from a Marxist perspective and explores the Iraqi context in which ISIS first set down roots. Alexander further examines the interaction between the defeat of the Syrian Revolution and the consolidation of Nouri al-Maliki's authoritarian rule in Iraq.
- ISIS Slave Market Puts Women and Girls on Same List as Cattle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I am thinking of the price list leaked out from the ISIS Sex Slave Market that included women and girls on the same list as cattle. ISIS needed to impose price controls as they were worried about a downturn in their market.
- ISIS Thrives on the Disunity of Its Enemies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The aftermath of terrorist attacks such as the massacre in Paris are a bad time to produce new policies, but they provide ideal political conditions for a government to take radical, if ill-thought-out, initiatives. Leaders are carried away by a heady sense of empowerment as a worried or frightened public demands that something be done in response to calamity and to prevent it happening again. The moment of greatest risk is not when the bombs explode or the guns fire, but when governments react to these atrocities.
- Islamic State's Goal: "Eliminating the Grayzone" of Coexistence Between Muslims and the West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In a statement published in its online magazine, Dabiq, this February, the militant group the Islamic State warned that "Muslims in the West will soon find themselves between one of two choices." Weeks earlier, a massacre had occurred at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The attack stunned French society, while bringing to the surface already latent tensions between French Muslims and their fellow citizens.
- Israel Calls a Man Its Soldiers Killed a 'Terrorist': Until They Realized He Was an Israeli Jew
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Jerusalem Post today describes the killing of a man by two IDF soldiers after, the soldiers claim, he was acting erratically and tried to grab one of their guns. When he was fatally shot by the IDF, says the paper, he was "believed to be an Arab terrorist." As it turns out, he was not an Arab Palestinian but rather an Israeli Jew. Upon learning this, the "terrorist" designation was officially and "immediately" rescinded.
- Israel Continues to Cripple Gaza with its Sea Blockade
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Jerusalem Post reports that the Swedish boat Marianne with 18 passengers has been "interdicted" by Israeli commandos 85 miles from the Gaza coast and towed to Ashdod. The three other vessels in the flotilla turned back and another big-hearted mission ended "with a whimper". Defence Minister Moshe Ya'alon called his operation to deprive desperate, poverty stricken Gazans a "success". The Marianne‘s passengers would be be deported. "There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza," he added.
- Israel divides the Jews
Reform Judaism vs Israel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Something significant recently happened in the ongoing political-ethical drama that grips Israel. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism publicly broke with Israel's political and religious leadership.
- Israel hopes 'lost tribes' can boost Jewish numbers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Facing Palestinian majority, Israeli officials seek way to loosen legal definition of 'Jew' so millions more can qualify for immigration.
- Israel Intercepts International Gaza-Bound Freedom Flotilla
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Israeli Navy has intercepted the Swedish boat "The Marianne", part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, in International waters at 05:11 AM Gaza time (GMT +3) and forced it to redirect to the nearest Israeli port of Ashdod. The coalition was on its way to Gaza to deliver aid. In a statement immediately afterward, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition accused the Israeli government of “state piracy in international waters."
- 'Israel is a terrorist state'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The violence rocking the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and now Gaza is on the verge of spilling into Israel, Palestinian leaders in Israel warned. A wave of unrest has swept Palestinian towns in Israel over recent days, with repeated clashes with Israeli police in Nazareth, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle, Taibeh, Sakhnin, Rahat, Kfar Qassem and elsewhere. Dozens of protesters have been arrested.
- Israel is a Terrorist State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The violence rocking the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and now Gaza is on the verge of spilling into Israel, Palestinian leaders in Israel warned.
- Israel will imprison soldier, 19, for publicly criticizing the occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Israeli government is imprisoning Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Shachar Berrin for criticizing its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.
- Israeli attacks on a dissident soldiers' group could backfire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Yehuda Shaul was an infantryman in the Israeli army in Hebron during the second intifada. But in recent weeks, he and his group of veterans have been vilified by right-wing organizations and mainstream politicians in a public campaign against Israeli groups critical of their country's occupation of Palestinian territories.
- Israeli Defense Force fires 43 elite reservists for protesting 'persecution' of Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Israeli military has dismissed 43 members from the elite intelligence 8200 unit. In September 2014, they wrote an open letter protesting Israeli covert activities towards Palestinians, particularly the 2014 military operation in Gaza Strip. In the letter, written in the wake of the Operation Protective Edge, the 10 officers and 33 soldiers wrote that they "refused to take part in actions against Palestinians and refuse to continue serving as tools in deepening the military control over the Occupied Territories."
- Israeli exports hit hard by Palestinian boycott, World Bank says
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Palestinian campaign to boycott Israeli goods has exacted a major cost on Israel's exports to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Even though the World Bank's report has modestly recognized so, they have failed to address any trace of occupation.
- Israeli human rights organization highlights deterioration of Palestinian health under occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Two reports from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel detail how Israeli occupation is harming the health of Palestinians.
- Israeli occupation damages Palestinian health, human rights group shows
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights has released two reports documenting the deterioration of Palestinian health under occupation. Divide and Conquer documents the deterioration of Palestinian health in the West Bank and Gaza as the direct consequence of ongoing Israeli military occupation.
- The Israeli War Crime That Goes Unmentioned
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Here set out in black and white in the Israeli media is a moral conundrum that western politicians, diplomats and international human rights organisations are resolutely failing to address -- and one I have been highlighting since 2006.
- Israeli War Crimes? Who, Us??
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The concept of "war crimes" is dubious. The biggest crime is starting the war in the first place. This is not the business of soldiers, but of political leaders. Yet they are rarely indicted.These philosophical musings came to me in the wake of the recent UN report on the last Gaza war.
- Israelis Shoot Motionless Arab Woman - Video
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the age of phone cameras, we have become increasingly used to photos and videos of Palestinians in the West Bank being shot by soldiers in unjustifiable circumstances.
- Israel’s cynical approach is feeding unrest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Once it fell to politicians and diplomats to solve international conflicts. Now, according to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responsibility lies with social media.
- Israel's new police chief emerges from shadowy world
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Palestinian minority in Israel worried by top cop's twin-track as interrogator for secret police and hardline settler.
- Israel's racist elections
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I didn’t expect any good from the elections to the Israeli Knesset. Its results are decided a priori by the definition of the voters’ register.
- Israel's road signs policy 'erases memory of place'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Israeli authorities have long banned the Palestinian Authority (PA) from putting up its own road signs that refer to Palestinian towns and villages.
- Israel’s cynical approach is feeding unrest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Once it fell to politicians and diplomats to solve international conflicts. Now, according to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responsibility lies with social media.
- Istanbul's LGBT pride march violently disbanded by police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As Americans celebrate a momentous step forward for the LGBT movement, Turkish gay pride marchers were met with rubber bullets and water cannons from the police. While uncharacteristic of the police force, these violent acts are, unfortunately, in line with the general atmosphere in Turkey. There is an ever-growing epidemic of violent homophobia and transphobia in the country.
- It Runs in the Family
On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 It Runs in the Family is a book about how parents can create lasting and meaningful bulwarks between their kids and the violence endemic in our culture. It posits discipline without spanks or slaps or threats of violence, while considering how to raise thoughtful, compassionate, fearless young people committed to social and political change-- without scaring, hectoring or scarring them with all the wrongs in the world.
- It's The Blind Partisanship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Why did the peace movement grow large around 2003-2006 and shrink around 2008-2010? Military spending, troop levels abroad, and number of wars engaged in can explain the growth but not the shrinkage. Those factors hardly changed between the high point and the low point of peace activism.
- 'It's a New Day': Why Environmentalists Need to Change Their Strategy Under Trudeau Government
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Now that Justin Trudeau and the Liberals have taken the helm, advocates have high hopes for a course correction on the environment and energy files. But after nearly a decade of working under hostile conditions, environmentalists need to make a course correction of their own if they want to effectively influence public policy, experts say.
- It's here, and it's growing: the self-assembling Coalition of the Radical Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The progressive left is drawing together diverse strands that encompass the fight for social and racial justice, the right to work, health, clean air and fresh water, and our freedom to be alive and thrive on this our one planet.
- It's Nato that's empire-building, not Putin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Two sides are required for a New Cold War — and there is no obvious need for an adversarial system in post-Soviet Europe.
- The James Brown Theory of Black Liberation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After decades of frustration with what Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay calls "white saviour" narratives, antiracist progressives appear to have settled on an ideologically more appealing alternative - what Adolph Reed calls the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation.
- Je Suis Charlie - But I Have Others
"Brothers, Our Town is Burning!" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We must work to close gaps, clasp hands and work together for a better world. We dare not forget those countless bloody deeds recorded largely in dusty archives - and their urgent lessons! I may well join in with "Je suis Charlie!" but must add: "I am Gul Rahman! I am Abu Zubaydah! I am Charles Horman and Ken Saro-Wiwa! I am Ghassan Kanafani and Victor Jara!"
- Je Suis Charlie? It's a Bit Late
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a 'racist institution' and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam. What is really racist is the idea only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.
- Jeremy Corbyn is right to reject Trident
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Jeremy Corbyn has come under attack yesterday for his refusal to countenance the use of nuclear weapons. But his stance is honourable and both legally and strategically correct - especially with his opposition to renewing the Trident nuclear missile system.
- Jewish Voice for Peace conference - what solidarity looks like
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When a Palestinian woman went to this Jewish group's annual conference, she found a growing movement of Jews and other allies.
- Jobs, Ecology, and Survival
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lars Henriksson presents some thoughts about solving the old contradiction between jobs and the environment, ilooking specifically at the auto industry.
- Joelito's Big Decision
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Story of ten-year old Joelito, who learns about the struggle for economic justice as he heads toward the door of MacMann’s Burger Restaurant for his regular Friday-night family dinner.
- John Cusack and Arundhati Roy: Things That Can and Cannot Be Said
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 A conversation With Arundhati Roy.
- John Locke Against Freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 John Locke's classical liberalism isn’t a doctrine of freedom. It's a defense of expropriation and enslavement.
- John Reed Clubs and Proletarian Art - Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The writings of Marx and Engels provide no support for the idea, frequently associated with Marxism, that the movement of the working class to emancipate itself from capitalism and build a classless society requires a proletarian or revolutionary art as an aid to its struggles.
- Kalliasseri: In search of Sumukan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The village that battled on all fronts, fighting the British, local landlords, and caste.
- Kalliasseri: Still fighting at 50
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When the God of the Hunters sheltered the communists in Kerala from the Raj.
- Keep it in the Ground
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A campaign by The Guardian newspaper to stop climate change by keeping fossil fuels in the ground, featuring a series of articles on different aspects of the issue across the world.
- Keep our front gardens green!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It's time to halt the loss of the nation's front gardens to dreary paving, writes Jenny Jones. Green gardens protect against floods, provide homes for wildlife, keep cities cool in summer, and help us all feel happier. Now, with 7 million gardens already paved over, we must protect those that remain.
- Keeping It In The Human Family
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What socialists set out to prove is that not only has "human nature" changed many times in the past but that there is no such thing as a static human nature. We are products of our environment, particularly of the economic system in which we live.
- Keys, comb and a plant: Palestinians tell of their past through cherished belongings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The first national museum for the geographically dispersed and exiled Palestinian people is taking shape, not only physically but conceptually. The goal is "to connect the Palestinians and present different narratives to the world of who we are, where we come from and what we aspire." Since the Israeli occupation authorities prevent many Palestinians from travelling to their homeland, the Palestinian Museum seeks to become the hub connecting a network of institutions in Jordan, Beirut, Gaza, Haifa and elsewhere.
- Keystone XL opponents need a jobs program
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The victorious Keystone campaign also exposed the perennial Achilles' heel of those who are fighting against climate change: We are often painted by our opponents and perceived by the public as caring more about the environment than about jobs. The neglected half of the job for environmental advocates is to ourselves become the voice for job creation. We need to develop robust programs to put unemployed pipefitters, teamsters, and others back to work. Indeed, the prerequisite for every environmental campaign should be a plausible and detailed jobs program. The sustainability movement must be a voice for workers, students, and others who want to both save the earth and promote appropriate economic development.
- The Kill Chain
The lethal bureaucracy behind Obama's drone war Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Secret military documents offer documentary evidence of the process by which the Obama administration creates and acts on its kill lists in Yemen and Somalia.
- Kill Chain: Drones and the Rise of High-Tech Assassins
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 History of drone warfare, a development in military technology that has its origins in long-buried secret programmes dating to US military interventions in Vietnam and Yugoslavia. Cockburn follows the links in a chain that stretches from the White House, through the drone command center in Nevada, to the skies of Helmand Province.
- Kill The Messengers
Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Ottawa has become a place where the nation's business is done in secret, and access to information - the lifeblood of democracy in Canada - is under attack.
- Killing the Host
How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 In Killing the Host, economist Michael Hudson exposes how finance, insurance, and real estate (the FIRE sector) have seized control of the global economy at the expense of industrial capitalism and governments.
- Klein vs. Klein
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 This Changes Everything is a book capacious enough to allow Naomi Klein two positions at once. But a real climate-justice movement will at some point have to make choices.
- Koch Political Machine Focuses on "Freedom" to Pollute and Pay Less Taxes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Billionaire conservative activist Charles Koch on Sunday likened his political efforts to the struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass, saying that "we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back."
- LA Theses
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Notes on class struggles, conflicts and unification.
- Labor Law Won't Save Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The strike is still labour's strongest weapon.
- Land concentration, land grabbing and people's struggles in Europe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The hidden scandal of how a few big private business entities have gained control of ever-greater areas of European land. How these land elites have been actively supported by a huge injection of public funds -- at a time when all other public funding is being subjected to massive cuts.
- Land Grabbing
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Farmland is becoming more and more valuable and scarcer. Every year we lose about 12 billion hectares of farmland through soil sealing. After the financial meltdown in 2008 the global financial capital discovered the business segment of global farmland. Through land grabbing the rich of the world want to secure access to the world’s most important resources. Consequently, instead of farmers, profit is put before soil. If we don’t stop the raids, we will destroy our livelihood.
- Land and seed laws under attack as Africa is groomed for corporate recolonization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Across Africa, laws are being rewritten to open farming up to an agribusiness invasion - displacing millions of small cultivators and replacing them with a new model of profit-oriented agriculture using patented seeds and varieties.
- Laos After the Bombs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos. The horrendous effects are still being felt.
- The last battle of Laxmi Panda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rural Indians were both the foot soldiers of freedom and the leaders of some of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings ever seen. Countless thousands of them sacrificed their lives to rid India of British rule. And many who lived through great suffering to see a free India were mostly forgotten soon after. From the 1990s onwards, p. Sainath recorded the lives of several of the last living freedom fighters.
- Latin America's Social Policies Have Given Women a Boost
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Although they do not specifically target women, social policies like family allowances and pensions have improved the lives of women in Latin America, the region that has made the biggest strides so far this century in terms of gender equality.
- The LAWG Library and Archives: A personal reflection by Caese Levo, LAWG's Librarian
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 From early research projects the Latin American Working Group Library evolved. The Library is a unique collection of material that reflects the areas of research undertaken by the LAWG staff and collective over the years. While always focusing on Canadian connections – especially government and corporate interests – the collection is especially strong on the countries of the Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil and Central America.
- Lead poisoning - fighting industrial pollution in Kenya is a dangerous business
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lead poisoning from industrial pollution has imposed a terrible toll on Kenyans, and single mother Phyllis Omido is no exception -- lead from a nearby metal refinery badly damaged her own son's health. But it was when she decided to fight back against the polluters that a whole new realm of threats and dangers opened up.
- The Leap Manifesto
A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We start from the premise that Canada is facing the deepest crisis in recent memory. so we need to Leap.
- Learning Activism
The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 What do activists know? Learning Activism is designed to encourage a deeper engagement with the intellectual life of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice.
- Leave most fossil fuels in the ground, or fry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For the world to meet its climate goals, a third of the world's oil, half its gas and 80% of its coal must stay underground.
- The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Norman Geras sets out to interrogate and refute the myths that have developed around Rosa Luxemburg's work.
- Leninism vs. Debs's Socialist Party
The Communist Fight Against Black Oppression Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Articles by Eugene Debs, written as polemics against racists within the Socialist Party, are eloquent in defending black people against racism, in calling for working-class unity across racial lines and in emphasizing that the Socialist Party should open its ranks to black people. In "The Negro in the Class Struggle," Debs stressed, "The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel." Debs stands out favorably against most of his contemporaries in the labor movement -- including within the SP. Debs's writing remains a powerful denunciation of white workers' racism. Debs recognized that black oppression, rather than making white workers privileged, degrades them, thus providing a refutation of the later concept of "white skin privilege."
- Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement (Part One)
Police Terror and Black Oppression Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Police reform is a hoax and a hustle. Federal investigations go nowhere and the Democrats are simply the soft cops of the capitalist system. There is no road to black liberation and the liberation of all working people short of workers revolution.
- Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement (Part Two)
Police Terror and Black Oppression Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Formal, legal inequality in the South was susceptible to reform. But getting rid of the economic and social reality that is black oppression in America -- from de facto segregation and poverty to police brutality -- is not subject to reform because it is integral to the capitalist system.
- Lest We Forget: Tar Sands and War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over the past decade, Canada has been a war profiteer and fuel tank for the US military, who have killed well over a million people since the turn of the new millennium.
- Let Them Eat Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The winds are changing for the energy giants. And so the black plumes of smoke emitted by the climate deniers in an attempt to provide cover for the coal, oil and gas industry have already been refined.
- 'Let's Bring In Our Pentagon Spokesman' - Bombing Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 If you want to get close to the 'defence' establishment, you better be close to the 'defence' establishment: ideologically, sympathetically, 'patriotically'.
- Letter from Ecuador - where defending nature and community is a crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ecuador's president attacked eco-defender Carlos Zorrilla in TV broadcasts for resisting a new copper mine in an area of pristine forest, and opposing the advance of oil exploration into the Amazon. Zorilla seeks international support for him and his battle for land.
- Letter from Nazareth
The forgotten Palestinians Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The city's Christians and Muslims continue to struggle against Israel's divide-and-rule policies
At 26 metres, Nazareth's artificial Christmas tree is the tallest in the Middle East, or so city officials boast. Its glinting red, silver and golden baubles have brought a temporary, but much-needed cheer to the city of Jesus' childhood. Despite the festive mood, friends and neighbours in what is Israel's largest Palestinian city struggle to sound hopeful about the future. Even the inflatable Father Christmases hanging from shop awnings look forlorn.
- Letter from Nazareth: The forgotten Palestinians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The city's Christians and Muslims continue to struggle against Israel's divide-and-rule policies.
- Letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau regarding Line 9
Climate Change and the Line 9B Reversal Project Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A letter from community organizations in southern Ontario and Quebec, impacted Indigenous communities, and national organizations that would like to express adamant opposition to the recent 'Leave to Open' status granted to the Enbridge Line 9B reversal project by the National Energy Board (NEB) of Canada.
- Libya's second civil war
From armed resistance to jihadist networks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With the events that led to Gaddafi's fall, a civil war between local groups and rival militias started in Libya. Four years later IS has appeared, and the country seems on the brink of collapse.
- Lies, damned lies, and energy statistics - why nuclear is so much less than it claims to be
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It's odd how often the contribution of nuclear energy is overstated by mixing up 'energy' and 'electricity', while a similar trick understates the importance of renewables like wind and solar. Even odder is how the mistake always seems to go the same way, to make nuclear look bigger than it really is, and renewables smaller. Welcome to the nuclear 'X factor'!
- Life After Death for Labor?
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A review of Stanley Aronowitz's book "The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement."
- Life After Death for Labor?
The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement (Book Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In his new book, veteran labour activist/academic Stanley Aronowitz offers a critique of what is wrong with the labour movement in the United States, as well as a 10-point manifesto for the steps "Toward a New Workers Movement."
- The Life and Death of Objective Peckham
Stripped of British citizenship and killed by an American drone Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Documentation of the final years of Bilal el-Berjawi's life, a British-Lebanese citizen suspected of being a terrorist. The story raises questions about the British government's role in the targeted assassination of its citizens, and provides an insight into covert U.S. military actions.
- The Life, Loves, Wars and Foibles of Edward Abbey
Monkeywrenching the Machine Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fifty-three years ago, long before I had heard of Edward Abbey and Abraham Polonsky, I saw a film titled "Lonely are the Brave" that was based on Polonsky's adaptation of Abbey's novel "The Brave Cowboy".
- Life sentence for fighting Africas last colonial power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Kenworthy talks about the systematic violence, abusive treatment and torture that political prisoners and activists undergo in Western Sahara.
- Life Support for Labor?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of the book "Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress" written by Steve Early.
- Life Support for Labor?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Debate Over how to save the labour movement suffers from a serious deficit of books written by organizers. Rarely do we get an entire book by someone who has been organizing for four decades, and is still actively engaged with union members, staff and leaders.
- 'Like a poison': how anti-immigrant Pegida is dividing Dresden
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A year since its launch, German protest group has evolved into slick operation whose polarising rhetoric is increasingly blamed for attacks on refugees.
- "Listen, Yankee!": Tom Hayden Captures Absurdity of Cuban Embargo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The US embargo of Cuba, like a bad hangover from the Cold War, has lingered on for far too long. After decades of bingeing on the country's particularly potent brand of anticommunism, the nation's ruling elite has found it near impossible to kick its predilection for holding Cuba to a higher standard than it does for putative US allies and, for that matter, the United States itself.
- Living in Pitiless Times: Baghdad, Beirut and Paris
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A week of horrible carnage -- bomb blasts in Beirut and Baghdad and then the cold-blooded shootings in Paris. Each of these acts of terror left dead bodies and wounded lives. There is nothing good that comes of them – only the pain of the victim and then more pain as powerful people take refuge in clichéd policies that once again turn the wheel of violence. How does one react to these incidents? Horror and outrage come first. They are instinctual.
- Living in the Crosshairs
The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Abortion is a legal, common, and safe medical procedure that one in three American women will undergo. Yet ever since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, anti-abortion forces have tried nearly every tactic to eliminate it. Legislative and judicial developments dominate the news, but a troubling and all-too-common phenomenon -- targeted vigilante action against individual abortion providers -- is missing from the national discussion, only cropping up when a dramatic story like the murder of an abortion provider pushes it to the forefront.
- The Living Seed
Part 1 of The Living Farms series Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Testimonies of farmers, seed savers, agronomists and scientists from across India and abroad form the basis for their compelling investigation of GMOs, organic farming and the future of agriculture.
- Lobbying, Capitalism And The State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lobbies pose a threat to a modern democracy and alienate the majority of the people outside the services of lobbyists who have become a fixture in politics.
- Lobbyists Mourn House Speaker John Boehner's Departure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 House Speaker John Boehner’s surprise resignation on Friday was reason to celebrate for members of his own party who often complained that he let corporate lobbyists exercise undue influence over Congress. For lobbyists, Boehner's announcement was a reason to mourn.
- Lockdown: the end of growth in the tar sands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Climate change is here and now. And if world leaders had heeded scientific warnings 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or even as recently as the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 -- it's possible we would be well on our way to securing the decarbonized future that the world desperately needs.
- The Long Game for the Long War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fourteen years in, and the Terror War is raging on, mass-producing exactly what it was supposed to eliminate: terrorism and chaos. Western intervention has racked up at least six jihadi-overrun failed states throughout the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. The scope and scale of the imposed civilizational meltdown have become so great that the West itself has been increasingly inundated by its wreckage (in the form of refugees) and stung by its shrapnel (in the form of terrorist attacks).
- The long struggle of the Palestinians in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An excerpt from the book "Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor's Tales of Life in Galilee." The essay talks about Palestinian social, economic and territorial displacement.
- The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa's Wealth
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Augustin Katumba Mwanke was a young banker in South Africa when persuaded to return home to help rebuild the Democratic republic of the Congo by the new government of Laurent Kabila. A year later he got a call from the president, a fellow Katangan, and was stunned to be appointed governor of an area the size of France, with control over some of the world's most valuable mineral seams.
- Los Angeles: Hands Up, Fight Back
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A basic and incomplete chronological overview... Protests and marches continued throughout the fall in Los Angeles, linking the Ezell Ford, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Antonio Martin murders together.
- Luxemburg, Müller and the Berlin workers' and soldiers' councils
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rose reviews and discusses two important books about the German Revolution, "Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement", and "The German Left and the Weimar Republic: A Selection of Documents".
- Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A report documenting the lynching of millions of African Americans from the Civil War until the Second World War. The work maintains that America's legacy of racial terror must be more fully addressed if racial justice is to be achieved.
- A Majority Black Police Force - It's Not Enough
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Although 61% oF Detroit's police force is Black - and headed by a Black police chief - between 1995-2000 police shot 47 people; from 2009-14 there were 18 additional shootings. Perhaps the most publicized case has been the SWAT-like raid on a home that resulted in the death of 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, killed as she lay sleeping on the couch next to her grandmother.
- Make 2015 the Year of the Bonobo!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We humans have much to learn from our kissing cousins, the peaceful, empathic, playful, sensual and highly sexual Bonobo. Rather than play out the myth of ancestral 'killer apes', better follow the 'Bonobo Way', and extend our love to all living beings and Earth herself.
- Making It Visible to Ourselves
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Cheryl Harris reflects on Ferguson and the current and persisting issues Black people are facing in the U.S.
- Mall of America Security Catfished Black Lives Matter Activists, Documents Show
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Documents indicate that security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge.
- Manhunting in the Hindu Kush
Civilian casualties and strategic failures in America's longest war Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 U.S. military forces set out to destroy the Taliban and al Qaeda forces that remained hidden in Hindu Kush. Dubbed Operation Haymaker, the campaign has been described as a potential model for the future of American warfare. Devereaux explains how this looks.
- Manoeuvres from above, movements from below: Greece under Tsipras
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Syriza left is at a crossroads. For all the belief that Syriza is a different kind of party, one that transcends the division between reform and revolution and therefore should be the home for the entire left, its left faces exactly the same problem as the reformist left in social democracy -- the trap of impotence. This article is written in the spirit of offering an alternative, around which the left as a whole can unite.
- Manufacturing Consensus - Hilary Benn's Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Everyone laughs when dictators claim 'Victory!' having secured fully 99 per cent of the vote. The deception is so naked, so obvious - nobody is fooled by this supposed 'national consensus'.
- Marc Morano's Climate Hustle Film Set For Paris Premiere With Same Old Denial Myths
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Marc Morano is never short of a superlative or two, but when it has come to promoting his long-gestating documentary Climate Hustle, the climate science denialist extraodinaire has been outdoing himself.
- March to Freedom, 1963 and Beyond
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Charles Simmons recounts his participation in the Walk to Freedom with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963.
- Markets Gone Mad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Until recently, stocks had been on a tear that pushed valuations into the stratosphere. Volatility stayed low because Bernanke's easy money and QE made investors more placid, serene and mellow. They ventured further out on the risk curve and took more chances because they were convinced that the Fed "had their back" and that there was nothing to worry about. Then things began to fall apart.
- Marx & Engels papers completely available online
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The original papers of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, World Classics, are digitized and now online accessible. The papers can be consulted from anywhere and by anyone who logs into the catalogue website of the International Institute of Social History. Access is open and free.
- Marx and the Family Revisited
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A book review: Marxism and the Oppression of Women Toward a Unitary Theory, by Lise Vogel.
- Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Essential reading for ecosocialists. Paul Burkett shows that humanity's relationship to nature is central to Marx’s critique of capitalism and vision of socialism.
- Marx rediscovered
A review of Heather A Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sheila McGregor states that Heather Brown has written an important study of Marx’s writings on women’s oppression. Brown situates her book in the current economic and political context, noting the role that women play both in the world economy and in recent tumultuous struggles such as the Occupy movement and, not least, in the revolutions in the Middle East beginning in 2011. At the same time, parts of Brown's book are contraditory and frustrating.
- Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Socialist thought is re-emerging at the forefront of the movement for global ecological and social change.
- Marxism and Women's Liberation
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Why are women more often to be found on the sticky floor of low pay than above the glass ceiling where the rich reside? Why is there an assault on the gains of the women's movement? As austerity bites and new debates about oppression rage, Judith Orr steers a path through the history and future of the fight for women's liberation.
- A Marxist critique of the theory of 'white privilege'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Published: 2020 Candace Cohn outlines the origins and problems of privilege theory. She aruges that In holding white workers co-responsible for systemic racism, the privilege model attributed a power to white workers they manifestly do not have: control over the institutions of American capitalism – schools, jobs, housing, factories, banks, police, courts, prisons, legislatures, media, elections, universities, armed services, hospitals, sports, political parties – all of which function in a racist manner. These institutions are owned and controlled by the capitalist class.
- Mass Incarceration for Profit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the face of growing public criticism and improved technologies, companies like Securus search for new ways to remain competitive while marketing themselves as providers of a quality service that keeps the public safe. Yet with the involvement of global financial houses in the prison industrial complex, the pressure mounts to produce value for shareholders. Ultimately, this systematically incentivizes mass incarceration. While we often hear about the activities of private prison providers like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, corporate interests are immersed in every aspect of criminal justice.
- The mass strike in the First World War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The mass strikes of the First World War displayed all the characteristics earlier described by Rosa Luxemburg. City and trade-wide strikes; national strikes; street fighting; demonstrations; the raising of economic demands and political demands, and of both.
- Mass Surveillance is Driven by the Private Sector
The Lesson of Hacking Team's Malware Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A report published by Privacy International as well as an article posted by Vice Motherboard clearly show that both the DEA and the United States Army have long-standing relationships with Hacking Team, an Italian company that’s notorious for selling malware to any number of unsavory characters.
- Maximum Horror
Where One Feeds on the Other Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It was a horrific event. It was condemned in most parts of the world and most poignantly by many cartoonists. Those who planned the atrocity chose their target carefully. They knew that such an act would create the maximum horror. It was quality, not quantity they were after. The response will not have surprised or displeased them.
- The Meaning of the Paris Commune
What can the Paris Commune offer to present struggles for emancipation? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Kristin Ross about her new book, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune.
- The Measure of a Revolutionary: Remembering Eugene V. Debs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Debs was an articulate, far-reaching critic of American society, staunchly anti-capitalist and opposed to both Democratic and Republican parties, which he saw as controlled by Wall Street. In his five campaigns as the Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States, Debs excoriated the economic exploitation of workers, including the then rampant abuses of child labor, with rare oratorical skill. He advocated for unions in all major industries and promoted a vision of socialism as grassroots economic democracy. In a deeply racist, patriarchal society, he was also staunchly anti-racist and pro-women's rights. When war hysteria swept the country, Debs openly defied the warmongers to oppose U.S. entry into World War I. He did so not as a pacifist, but because he saw the world war as an inter-imperialist dispute among the ruling classes of competing capitalist nations.
- Media Are Blamed as US Bombing of Afghan Hospital Is Covered Up
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After the US airstrikes that hit an MSF (Medecins Sans Frontières) hospital, many news outlets have depicted the event in a way that evades any American responsibility.
- Media Lessons from Snowden Reporting: LA Times Editors Advocate Prosecution of Sources
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The LA Times editors want Snowden imprisoned, but not the leakers whose leaks make the U.S. government look good, much of which gets laundered in that particular paper.
- Medical Privacy Under Threat in the Age of Big Data
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Medical privacy is a high-stakes game, in both human and financial terms, given the growing multibillion-dollar legal market for anonymized medical data. The threats to individuals seeking to protect their medical data can come externally, from data breaches; internally, from "rogue employees" and others with access; or through loopholes in regulations.
- Mel Hurtig's new book designed to oust prime minister Stephen Harper
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Article on author Mel Hurtig and his new book criticizing Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and his government.
- A Memoir of Life in Struggle
Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir, Volume One, Canada 1955-1965 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Ernest Tate's Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir, Volume One, Canada 1955-1965.
- Memory as paying business
Getting a battlefield, the site of tragedy or a memorial museum onto Unesco's World Heritage List is now a shrewd way to increase tourist Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A look at how memorials and sites of great tragedy are now being exploited for financial gain as tourist destinations.
- Merchants of Doubt (film)
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Inspired by the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt takes audiences on an illuminating ride into the heart of American spin, lifting the curtain on a secretive group of pundits-for-hire who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities - yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats ranging from toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals to climate change. 1 hr 36 min.
- The Messenger
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Documentary. A powerful reflection and intimate investigation that reaches from the northern point of the Boreal Forest to the base of Turkey's Mount Ararat to the urban streets of New York. As songbirds take flight and fight to survive in our changing world, The MESSENGER delivers a visually thrilling ode to the beauty and importance of these imperiled creatures.
- Method and Madness
The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 In the past five years Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014), have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. As Norman G. Finkelstein sets out in this concise, paradigm-shifting new book, an examination of Israel's motives reveals a state whose repeated recourse to savage war is far from irrational. Rather, Israel's attacks have been designed to sabotage the possibility of a compromise peace with the Palestinians, even on terms that are favorable to it.
- Mexico's Deepening Crises
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The "democratic transition" has brought little democracy and great disappointment. And the "war on drugs" has not diminished the production and export of drugs but increased violence and provided political cover for the government's escalation of repression.
- Middle East Imperial Meltdown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How U.S. drive for "stability" in the Middle East produces the opposite, and how these crises feed back into the peculiarities of U.S. domestic political culture.
- Mike Marqusee: A contender for the living
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Mike's humane socialism and his ability to express sophisticated ideas in an accessible way has enriched the left in the UK and elsewhere.
- Mike Marqusee's columns: a look back
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As we remember Mike Marqusee, Nick Dearden highlights some of Mike's most timeless writing in Red Pepper
- Militarizing the Environment
Climate Change and the Security State Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 In this extensive historical study of scientific, military, political, and economic formations across five centuries, Robert P. Marzec reveals how environmentality has been instrumental in the development of today's security society -- informing the creation of the military-industrial complex during World War II and the National Security Act that established the CIA during the Cold War.
- Mine Wars Museum Opens, Revives Lost Labour History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Mine Wars museum opens in Matewan to revive West Virginia’s labour history.
- Mining: Extracting the Future
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2015 A publication on the negative impact of the mining industry on local communities and the environment. Articles include a look at the opening of Canada's North to industry, mining exploitation in Peru and targeted assassinations in Mesoamerica, Indigenous Water Defence, and the efforts of mining companies to excerpt influence and undermine accountability.
- Missing from the Paris Agreement: the Pentagon's monstrous carbon boot print
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How much of the mainstream media coverage given to COP21 and the Paris Agreement mentioned the mysterious exemption given to the US's massive military and security machine? None, writes Joyce Nelson. Not only are these emissions entirely outside the UNFCCC process, but a 'cone of sillence' somehow prevents them from even forming part of the climate change discourse.
- Mississippi Family Faces Jail Time for Cheering at High School Graduation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When Ursula Miller attended her niece's high school graduation from Senatobia High School in northwestern Mississippi last month, she didn't expect to leave with an arrest warrant. But in a prime example of excessesive criminalization, Miller and three others were charged with disorderly conduct for cheering on their relatives during the ceremony held at Northwest Mississippi Community College.
- Mobile homes can't move on
Trailers are the cheapest available homes in the US, but thire owner - tenants are always at risk Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The challenges and vulnerabilities facing mobile home owners and tenants is examined.
- Modi in Canada
What Canadians Should Know About Harper's New Guest Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When Stephen Harper hosts Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his visit to Canada this week, they will be greeted with both adoring fans and with protests. Modi, an extremist Hindu nationalist, has a strong support base within a section of the Indian community. But his past comes back to haunt him. A human rights organization called Sikhs for Justice has appealed to the Canadian government to prosecute Modi for the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat.
- The Money Crisis: How bankers grabbed our money -- and how we can get it back
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A historical analysis exposing the flaws in the system that led to financial crisis.
- Monsanto Crops Pushing Monarch Butterfly to Verge of Extinction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Herbicide-resistant genetically modified crops have brought the iconic monarch butterfly to the brink of extinction, according to a new report by the Center for Food Safety.
- Monsanto and Its Promoters vs. Freedom of Information
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Next year, the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) will celebrate its 50th anniversary as one of the finest laws our Congress has ever passed. It is a vital investigative tool for exposing government and corporate wrongdoing.
- Monsanto monarch massacre: 970 million butterflies killed since 1990
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A shocking statistic released by the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday summed up the plight of the monarch butterfly: Since 1990, about 970 million of the butterflies – 90 percent of the total population – have vanished across the United States.
- Montreal: Campus Feminists Fail to Gag Marxists
For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The logic of feminism is class collaboration. It also means relying on the bourgeois state to "defend women." The role of the capitalist state is to defend the interests of the capitalists. It has nothing to do with ending the misery of the oppressed.
- Moral Appeals Aren't Enough
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The wonderful thing about Black Lives Matter is that they're saying you cannot use moral suasion to win this. You've got to disrupt, and make sure that things don't work in order to make the demand for change.
- Moral Clarity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Shatz discusses the underlying meaning and implications of the slogan 'Je suis Charlie', an expression that became widespread after the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo's (French satirical magazine) office.
- More than equality: reasons to be a feminist socialist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Equality? Feminist socialism has something better in mind: using power to transform hierarchies.
- Mossad contradicted Netanyahu on Iran nuclear programme
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Spy cables reveal that Mossad concluded that Iran was not producing nuclear weapons, even though Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told the UN the opposite.
- The most outrageous fraud ever perpetrated on the Canadian people
Can the Courts Liberate the Bank of Canada? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 You know the old aphorism -- "If a tree falls in the forest….?" Well, how about this one: if citizens win a significant victory in court against an autocratic government involving the fleecing of Canadians of billions of their hard-earned tax dollars and no one in the media actually covers it, did it really happen?
- The Most Terrifying Pressures Occur in Silence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ivancic narrates his prosecution by the Croatian government, which is one of the many examples of violence against Feral journalists.
- Mouths Wide Shut: Obamas War on Whistleblowers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Obama administration has been ruthless in its prosecution of whistleblowers.
- The Movement Has a History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I was born in the '70s in East Oakland. All of our parents are Panthers, or Black Power organizers, or organizers. We come out politicized.
- Muddying the waters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The by-products of aluminium extraction have been poisoning the Mediterranean for almost 20 years. But the closure of the plant that produces them would cost jobs in an underemployed region.
- The Murder of Shaimaa Al-Sabbagh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Shaimaa Al-Sabbagh, 32 years old, a mother, poet and member of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, was gunned down January, 2015 24 by black-clad snipers who were seen on video pointing rifles in her direction
- The Murder of Walter Scott
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A video capturing the murder of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man killed by a white police officer, has gone virtal.
- Murray Bookchin -- Anarchism without the Working Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Murray Bookchin was an influential and prolific writer and thinker on anarchism. While he made significant contributions, Wayne Price agrues that he made a major error in rejecting the working class as important for an anarchist revolution. This article reviews why he believed this and why, on the contrary, the working class must be a major force for a successful anarchist revolution.
- Muslims, Jews and Christians imposing an imagined past, with disastrous results
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The truth is that there are millions of people – Muslims, Jews and Christians and others – who not only still idealise a religiously imagined past, but want, in one way or another, to import that past into the present – and not only their present but everyone else's as well. Whatever one might think of the teachings of the Bible and Quran, this is a highly problematic desire. In fact, it is downright dangerous.
- My Journey from Racism
And how we can best end it Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A white individual's experience of racism growing up in America in the 1940's and 1950's.
- The Myth of Peaceful Protest
The Patronizing Intransigence of Power Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Johnson discusses how peaceful protest is depicted as the way to speak out, and any kind of disorder or defiance of authority is presented not only unacceptable, but unnecessary.
- NAFTA's Chapter 11 Makes Canada Most-Sued Country Under Free Trade Tribunals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 According to a new study, Canada is the most-sued country under the North American Free Trade Agreement and a majority of the disputes involve investors challenging the country's environmental laws.
- Naomi Klein: To fight climate change we must fight capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Naomi Klein, the author of "This Changes Everything."
- Narrative of the dispossessed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Discussion of conspiracies tends to be polarised: people see them everywhere, or nowhere.
- A Nation of Millennial Entitlements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A student twice sued Misericordia College because she failed a nursing class. Why do significant numbers of people believe they are entitled to get the credentials they want even if they don't have the qualifications required?
- NBC News Releases the Long-Awaited Trailer for its Summer Horror Film About ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 ISIS now officially poses a bigger threat to the "U.S. homeland" than the one posed by former title-holder Al Qaeda.
- The Neoconservative Threat to World Order
Washington's Perilous War for Hegemony Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Paul Craig Roberts explores the extreme dangers in Washington's imposition of vassalage on other countries and Washington's resurrection of distrust among nuclear powers, the very distrust that Reagan and Gorbachev worked to eliminate. Roberts explains how the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the only check on Washington's ability to act unilaterally.
- Neoliberal Ebola: The Agroeconomic Origins of the Ebola Outbreak
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Wallace describes the rise of Ebola, connecting its outbreak to capital-driven shifts in land and changes in the agroeconomic context.
- Neoliberalism against capitalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Neil Davidson on how the current neo-liberal project has been almost too successful as a ruling class strategy, creating a form of capitalism which endangers the long-term security of capital itself and edges society ever closer to barbarism.
- Neoliberalism and the New Lynching
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I don't think it's a coincidence that they would raise mass Black and Brown incarceration as being a counterinsurgency tactic. I think we've seen that out there on the streets, out there in Baltimore and Ferguson lately.
- Netanyahu goes nuclear ... now wait for the fallout
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has spent years trying to convince the international community and Israelis that Tehran is racing towards building a nuclear bomb, when evidence presented by his own spies show the opposite.
- Netanyahu: Have You No Shame?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Israel’s Prime Minister attributing the Holocaust to Palestinian influence over Hitler is a "Blood Libel" level lie.
- Netizen Report: Rights at Risk Under Trans-Pacific Trade Deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement may soon become reality after years of high-level trade deliberations that have been held almost entirely behind closed doors.
- The new colonialism: Greece and Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 According to Jack Rasmus, aA new form of colonialism is emerging in Europe. Not colonialism imposed by military conquest and occupation, as in the 19th century. Not even the more efficient form of economic colonialism pioneered by the U.S. in the post-1945 period, where the costs of direct administration and military occupation were replaced with compliant local elites allowed to share in the wealth extracted in exchange for being allowed to rule on behalf of the colonizers. In the 21st century, it is 'colonialism by means of financial asset transfer.' It is colony wealth extraction by colonizing country managers, assigned to directly administer the processes in the colony by which financial assets are to be transferred. This new form of colonialism by direct management plus financial wealth transfer is now emerging in Greece and Ukraine.
- New Evidence Shows Main Chevron Witness Lied In $9.5 Billion Ecuador Lawsuit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A key witness has admitted under oath that he lied on behalf of Chevron, the California oil multinational, when the company sued to overturn a $9.5 billion verdict for pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
- New Fight to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In 2011, after years of international protest, Mumia's 1981 death sentence (following his wrongful conviction for killing a Philadelphia police officer) was rescinded allowing him to enter the general prison population. Although this was a major victory for the movement to win his freedom, it brought its own set of issues.
- New headaches for tar sands pipeline proponents as oil fouls Vancouver harbour
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A bad turn of events for the local environment and for some of the oil barons targeting their entire planet in their climate-wrecking plans. That's an apt summary of the oil spill that has fouled the beaches and harbour of Vancouver BC beginning on April 8, 2015.
- The New Spymasters: Inside Espionage From the Cold War to Global Terror
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 What good timing for these books on espionage, just as ISIS - fruit of the worst "intelligence" lie of recent history, the Blair-Bush excursion into Iraq - surges on and spies for Britain and the US are said to be moving from Russia and China after revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The British GCHQ is caught illegally spying on human rights groups and the American NSA bugging heads of state, including French president Francois Hollande.
- NY Public Workers Under Attack
Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Richard Steier's Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions.
- NGOs condemn sentencing of Bahraini photographer to ten years in prison
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Award-winning photographer Sayed Ahmed al-Mousawi was sentenced on Monday, 23 November 2015, to 10 years in prison and had his nationality revoked, along with 12 others, after covering a series of demonstrations in early 2014.
- Nicaraguans Fight to Save Land and Sovereignty from Canal Development
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There has been a popular storm gathering to protest the proposed cross-Nicaragua canal.
- Nigerian farmers face destitution from 300 sq.km land grab backed by UK aid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Farmers in Nigeria's north eastern state of Taraba are being forced off lands they have farmed for generations to make way for US company Dominion Farms to establish a 300 square kilometre rice plantation.
- Nine decades of non-violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rural Indians were both the foot soldiers of freedom and the leaders of some of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings ever seen. Countless thousands of them sacrificed their lives to rid India of British rule. And many who lived through great suffering to see a free India were mostly forgotten soon after. From the 1990s onwards, p. Sainath recorded the lives of several of the last living freedom fighters.
- No Cheers For Anarchism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A successful movement requires compromise, organization, and yes, even leadership, to actually get things done, none of which appeal to anarchists.
- No Child Left Un-Mined? Student Privacy at Risk in the Age of Big Data
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Chideya discusses the implications of the compilation of big data trails containing information about children's performance in school.
- No Grades in Higher Education Now!
Is the Revolution any closer? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Author and social scientist Stuart Tannock has recently published a historical and critical overview of the practice of grading in education.
- No Safe Harbor: How NSA Spying Undermined U.S. Tech and Europeans' Privacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The spread of knowledge about the NSA's surveillance programs has shaken the trust of customers in U.S. Internet companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple: especially non-U.S. customers who have discovered how weak the legal protections over their data is under U.S. law.
- No to 'Climate Smart Agriculture', yes to agroecology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Climate Smart Agriculture sounds like a great idea. But in truth it's a PR front for international agribusiness to promote corporate agriculture, pesticides and fertilisers at COP21, with a heavy dose of greenwash. Countries must resist the siren calls - and give their support to true agroecology that sustains soil, health, life and climate.
- Non-Movements as Social Activism
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Asef Bayat's 'Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East.'
- NoNonsense Globalization
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Explains and examines globalization from all angles - and explores strategies for redesigning the global economy in the common interest.
- Nonviolent Communication
A Language of Life, 3rd Edition: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The latest edition of the communication guide that has sold more than 1,000,000 copies. An enlightening look at how peaceful communication can create compassionate connections with family, friends, and other acquaintances, this international bestseller uses stories, examples, and sample dialogues to provide solutions to communication problems both at home and in the workplace.
- Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The U.S. has been warring with the Islamic State (IS) for more than a year now. The centerpiece of that war has been an ongoing campaign of bombings and air strikes in Syria and Iraq, thousands upon thousands of them.
- Nuclear War And Corbyn - The Fury And The Farce
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The British media is outraged that La bour leader Jeremy Corbyn won't press the nuclear button under any circumstances.
- NYC Cop Backlash
Amid Protests Against Racist Police Terror Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Weeks of mass protests that erupted after the policemen who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner got off have left cops across the country seething. These hired guns of the capitalist rulers are howling over any criticism of how they do their job, which in racist capitalist America does include terrorizing and killing unarmed black people. Leading the pack in New York City are the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) and its ilk, which have seized on the December 20, 2014 killing of two Brooklyn cops to further push their agenda of bonapartism: that is, to stand above the law as judge, jury and executioner.
- NYT Editorial Slams "Disgraceful" CIA Exploitation of Paris Attacks, But Submissive Media Role Is Key
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A truly superb New York Times editorial this morning mercilessly shames the despicable effort by U.S. government officials to shamelessly exploit the Paris attacks to advance long-standing agendas.
- NYT Hypes Russian Threat to the Internet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As if Americans didn't already have enough to worry about in regards to the recently resurrected Red Menace, we can now add the fear that those devious Russians are threatening to -- horror of horrors -- bring down the Internet.
- Oakland After Ferguson
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Already #BlackLivesMatter protests in Oakland are being likened to the sustained unrest following the videotaped murder of Oscar Grant by cops. But this time something is different.
- Obama's Double-Standard On Russia: He Attacks Russia, Then Condemn's Putin For Defending Russia From His Attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Obama overthrew the legal Government, and replaced it by this illegal one. But now he criticizes Putin as if he were the aggressor instead of the defender here. And Obama demands that the Soviet dictator's forced transfer of Crimea to Ukraine be legal and that Putin's defense of Crimeans' democratic self-determination in response to that coup be considered illegal.
- Obama's role model to journalists — Dorothy Thompson — turned against Zionism and was silenced
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Dorothy Thompson, whose truly stellar career ended in false charges of antisemitism made by Zionists.
- Obamas Sordid Record on Censorship and Secrecy
Blindfolding the Republic Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Obama’s failure to attend the Charlie Hebdo march in Paris and the condemnations of this press freedom omission.
- Occupy agriculture! Polish farmers sit in for land and freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 At the heart of Poland's capital, Warsaw, farmers have founded a flourishing encampment known as the 'Green City', writes Julian Rose. It's a focus of protest against the sell-off of their land to agribusiness, the arrival of GMO crops, and the imposition of a failed 'Western' model of farming that's creating huge corporate profits while debasing food and bankrupting small farmers.
- Occupy Amazonia? Indigenous activists are taking direct action - and it's working
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The native peoples of the Amazon are employing the tactics of the Occupy movement against oil companies, gold miners and illegal loggers. Lacking the protection of the state, they fight their own battles. Recent campaign successes owe much to outside support.
- Ocean 'dead zones' are spreading - and that spells disaster for fish
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Oxygen levels in our oceans are falling, producing growing 'dead zones' where only the hardiest organisms can survive. The causes are simple: pollution with nutrient-rich wastes, and global warming. But the only solution is to stop it happening - or wait for 1,000 years.
- OceanaGold vs El Salvador: Foreshadowing 'Trade' Under the TPP?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Central American country of El Salvador could be forced to pay US$301 million to Canadian-Australian mining multinational OceanaGold as the two face off in a World Bank investor-state tribunal with proven tendency to favor corporate interests over arguments for protecting national sovereignty, the environment, and human rights.
- Oil CEO Wanted University Quake Scientists Dismissed: Dean's E-Mail
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The billionaire CEO of Continental Resources told a dean at the University of Oklahoma that he wanted earthquake researchers dismissed.
- The Okinawa missiles of October
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 John Bordne, a resident of Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, had to keep a personal history to himself for more than five decades. Only recently has the US Air Force given him permission to tell the tale, which, if borne out as true, would constitute a terrifying addition to the lengthy and already frightening list of mistakes and malfunctions that have nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.
- On Atena Farghadani and the longstanding repression of artistic expression in Iran
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It all started with a harmless political cartoon posted on Facebook. What followed was extreme retaliation to say the least; imprisonment, and physical abuse. Unfortunately, this is not an extraordinary story for artists in Iran.
- On Bernie Sanders' Campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We strongly disagree with Bernie Sanders' approach of running in the Democratic primary and his pledge to support the party nominee. However, it would be a mistake for the left not to recognize the enormous significance and potential inherent in the millions of people rallying around his campaign looking to fight against corporate America and what they perceive as the hijacking of the democratic process.
- On China's 1989 Tiananmen Upheaval
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The bourgeois media falsely portray the events in the spring of 1989 as a movement for capitalist counterrevolution under the banner of Western-style "democracy." The social explosion was triggered by protests initiated by students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, which increasingly drew in groups of workers and spread throughout the country. Far from seeking a return to capitalism, Chinese workers overwhelmingly directed their anger at the sharply rising economic inequalities, rampant corruption and inflation encouraged by Deng’s program of "building socialism with capitalist methods."
- On Imperialism and Refugees
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The call to "open the borders" and its variants are hopelessly utopian. The modern nation-state arose as a vehicle for the development of capitalism and will remain the basis for the organization of the capitalist economy until the world capitalist order is shattered through a series of workers revolutions. Policing its borders is vital to the very existence of the capitalist state power. Moreover, "open the borders" can have a reactionary content, from advancing imperialist economic penetration of dependent countries to obliterating the right to national self-determination.
- On Israel's colonial narrative
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Analysis: Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa deconstructs Israel's insidious language of power.
- On "Sweet," "Yellow Head," and "Two-Spirit"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- On the Defeat of Megan Leslie & Peter Stoffer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What happened on Monday is proof of how divorced from reality we are. Progressives, radicals, the Left, whatever you call the people who believe in and strive for deep social change - we are disconnected from the majority of people. We are insulated in our communities of like-minded activists, surrounded by people with similar beliefs and thoughts.
- On Victimless Crime Laws: And a Call to Release All Who Have Been Victimzed by Them
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In recent months, a Seminar on Prisoners' Writings has been meeting in Oakland. The idea of this seminar is to take some of the writings of people politicized by imprisonment, and make their insights available to the movements and the general public.
- '100 years to repair Gaza': Oxfam says blockade remains, aid almost non-existent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Reconstructing Gaza could take an entire century, if Israel doesn't stop the siege, leading charity Oxfam warned. And that's just the time frame for essential projects. The NGO's regional director calls the situation "deplorable."
- The one thing that won't stop terror is more war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Provoking retaliation is a key part of the jihadists' strategy, writes Alex Nunns - we need a different approach.
- Onlinecensorship.org Tracks Content Takedowns by Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Sites
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Visualizing Impact launched Onlinecensorship.org on November 19, 2015, a new platform to document the who, what, and why of content takedowns on social media sites.
- Only Edward Snowden Can Save James Bond
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Bond is doomed because early in the movie Spectre, the otherwise benevolent Q, muttering something about nanotechnology and microchips, injects him with "smart blood."
- 'Only I and my paper were prosecuted'
Journalist who exposed Turkey's hospitality for jihadists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Jihad fighters are treated in Turkey with state complicity; Journalist Dogu Eroglu of the opposition daily BirGun (One Day) was prosecuted.
- Only When We See the War Criminals In Our Midst Will the Blood Begin to Dry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves". As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.
- Ontario Teachers Face Austerity Drive
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Although conditions for teachers and students in Ontario, and Canada more broadly, remain far better than they are for their counterparts in the United States, concessionary austerity demands similar to those being more aggressively advanced in the United States have been rolled out in one guise or another across Canada too.
- Opinion: It's gettin' hot in here... so take back all your carbon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In Africa rapidly rising temperatures foreshadow increased drought, famine and disease. The most vulnerable populations -- of which millions are smallholder farmers -- need solutions, and they need them now.
- The Orwellian Re-Branding of 'Mass Surveillance' as Merely 'Bulk Collection'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled "torture" with the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand "mass surveillance" as "bulk collection" in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal).
- Orwell's Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Novels may be the best medium for describing a distopian world in which everyone is under constant surveillance.
- Ostula and Mexican Army Hold to Clashing Versions of Recent Attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In Mexico, the independent investigation agency SubVersiones has published a compilation video that chronologically shows what events that took place on July 19, 2015, in the indigenous Nahua community of Santa María de Ostula. That day ended with a child dead and four people wounded.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 7, 2015
Corporate rights treaties Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Our focus is on the corporate rights treaties that are misleadingly sold as trade agreements. In particular, the spotlight is on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated in secret, and now scheduled to be rubber-stamped by national governments on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The TPP is best understood as a major milestone in the long-term war waged by the corporate elite against any form of democracy.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 15, 2015
Workers' Health and Safety Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 The topic of the week is Workers' Health and Safety. Articles on why environmentalists should support working class struggles; whistleblowers; the appalling death rate from U.S. drone strikes; the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris; and what humanity could learn from Bonobos. The feature from the archives is Traces of Magma. The International Labor Rights Forum is the group of the week, and Silkwood is the film of the week.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 29, 2015
Land seizures and land take-overs Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 This issue of Other Voices focuses on the issue of land seizures and land take-overs. Also included: Greece's solidarity movement, and the challenges and opportunities it faces after the election of a Syrizia government. From the archives, there are interviews about the 1974 occupation of Anicinabe Park, an article about anti-dicrimination fighter Viola Desmond, and the publication, in 1929, of All Quiet on the Western Front.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 12, 2015
SYRIZA Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 This week we're featuring the 40-point program which SYRIZA, the Greek coalition of the radical left, put forward to win the Greek election. Oliver Tickell writes about the mass media's latest campaign of pro-war propaganda, this time revolving around supposed "Russian aggression" in Ukraine, while Paul Edwards looks at another form of war propaganda, Clint Eastwood's 'American Sniper'. The Topic of the Week is Water Rights. Related items include the film "Blue Gold: World Water Wars," the featured website International Rivers, and articles on water-related struggles, past and present, including articles on the Walkerton water disaster and the Cochabamba water war.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 26, 2015
Ukraine Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Ukraine is spotlighted in this issue of Other Voices, with several articles on the events of the past year, from the overthrow of the government, to the rise of the far right, the armed conflict in the east, and aggressive US/NATO moves setting the stage for a possible nuclear war between the US and Russia. Also in this issue, #DomesticExtremists ridicule police state legislation in the UK, world inequality in one simple graphic, and people's history items about mass strikes in the First World War, and the new People's Archive of Rural India.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 12, 2015
Organizing Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 The focus of this issue is organizing. How can we challenge and overcome entrenched structures of economic and political power? Our own source of power is our latent ability to join together and work toward common goals, collectively. That requires organizing. Power gives way only when it is challenged by powerful movements for change, and movements grow out of organizing. In this newsletter, we feature a number of articles, books, and other organizing resources.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 26, 2015
Sustainability, ecology, and agriculture Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 This issue features a number of items related to sustainability, ecology, and agriculture, including Vandana Shiva's article "Small is the New Big," the Council of Canadians' new report on water issues, "Blue Betrayal," the film "The Future of Food," the Independent Science News website, which focuses on the science of food and agriculture, and the memoir "Journey of an Unrepentant Socialist" by Brewster Kneen, a former farmer and long-time critic of corporate agriculture.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 9, 2015
Resisting Neoliberalism Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Resisting neoliberalism: "free markets" and "free trade" are an ideological cover for what is actually a form of state capitalism in which working people subsidize and bail out corporations and the rich. In this edition of Other Voices, and more extensively on the Connexions website, we look at both neoliberalism and the resistance to it. The version of capitalism which became dominant by the 1980s has been given the name neoliberalism. The term refers to the global economic restructuring which has taken place, and to the accompanying shifts in the structures of power under which local and national governments have seen their ability to act independently curtailed by international treaties and by institutions which owe their ultimate allegiance to corporate capital. The essence of neoliberalism has been an unending campaign of class struggle by the rich against the rest. Yet resistance continues, and indeed continues to grow.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - May 21, 2015
A Healthier Planet Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 With the start of the growing season in much of the Northern hemisphere, Other Voices digs up articles and resources related to urban agriculture and local food production. Urban agriculture - growing food in and around cities - is a response to the problems created by industrial agriculture, a chemical-dependent industry shipping food thousands of miles from where it is produced to where it will be consumed. We also mark the release of Omar Khadr, the former child soldier who was abused, tortured, and imprisoned first by the U.S. government and then by Canada. Other articles look at the advances made by women in Latin America, privilege politics, and the myths of peaceful protests.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2015
Eduardo Galeano, Latin America, the Vietnam War Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 In this issue of Other Voices, we mark the death of Eduardo Galeano by featuring two of his books, as well as an article about his life and work. Galeano once wrote that he was "obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia." In his writing, especially Open Veins of Latin America and the mesmerizing Memory of Fire trilogy, Galeano contributed enormously to bringing alive, and keeping alive, the memories of Latin America, and especially of those whom he called the "nobodies" -- the people "who do not appear in the history of the world." Next week also marks the 40th anniversary of the final victory of the Vietnamese war of resistance against the American invasion and occupation.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - May 7, 2015
Urban agriculture and local food production Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 This issue of Other Voices ranges widely, from increasing worker activism and strikes in China, to advances in battery technology that make it much easier and cheaper to store solar and wind energy for future use, to testimonies from Israeli soldiers about the war crimes they committed routinely and as a matter of policy in last summer's attack on Gaza.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 5, 2015
Residential schools Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 This issue of Other Voices focuses on residential schools. As documented by the just-released report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, residential schools were set up to forcibly 'assimilate' Native children by taking them away from their parents and communities, and depriving them of their language, culture, history, and emotional supports. Based as they were on a system of arbitrary power and cruelty, it is not surprising that they also fostered physical and sexual abuse of the children forced into the schools. We spotlight the report and the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as films, books, and survivor stories. Also in this issue: the Orwellian language and tactics being used to sell 'anti-terrorist' legislation, mind-boggling subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and, on the other side of the ledger, stories of courage and resistance.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 18, 2015
Corruption Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Corruption - or at least some types of corruption - are much in the news, with the ongoing scandals in the Canadian Senate and the recent U.S. targeting of the Swiss-based football federation FIFA for alleged bribery. In this issue, we look at these and other forms of corruption. Diana Johnstone writes about the double standards displayed by U.S. institutions, which happily target enemies and rivals, while ignoring the much greater corruption that underlies the power structures in Washington. We feature an article detailing how much money U.S. Senators received from corporations prior to their vote on the TPP negotiations, as well as materials on criminal conduct by some of the world's biggest banks, and an article on the work of investigative journalists in exposing corruption.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 3, 2015
Greece and thd debt crisis Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Our spotlight this issue is on the debt crisis facing Greece. To understand the crisis, one has to look beyond the mainstream media to alternative sources of information. We've done that, with articles that set out to analyze the nature of the debt burden that has been imposed on the citizens of so many countries, not just Greece. Also: celebrating Grace Lee Bogg’s 100th birthday.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - August 21, 2015
Canadian federal election, mining and the environment Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Featuring the Canadian federal election, mining and the environment, failure of Syriza in Greece, refugees, veterans of India's struggle for independence.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 10, 2015
Labour Day issue Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Labour Day issue, with articles examining the relentless pressure put on workers to work ever longer hours, at the cost of their health and family life; anti-worker legislation, Zapatista popular education, and the Greek crisis.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 24, 2015
Voter Suppression Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Featuring information and articles related to the October 19, 2015 Canadian election. The topic of the week is Voter Suppression, with articles about voter suppression in Canada and the United States.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 8, 2015
Elections Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Elections are the topic of the week, with items related to the October 19 Canadian federal election, and also to broader issues of parliamentary democracy, voting and whether voting can bring about change, and the neo-liberal attack on democracy. Articles look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the financial takeovers of Ukraine and Greece, and debt bondage. Also: a discussion of James Hansen's fossil fuel exit strategy, and a critique of Alinsky-style organizing.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 24, 2015
Whistleblowers and national security Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 This issue sheds light whistleblowers and the murky world of national security. Governments may often pay lip service to the importance of protecting whistleblowers, but in reality they are almost always persecuted. Repercussions can range from being fired to being imprisoned.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 21, 2015
Climate Change and Social Change Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 This issue of Other Voices spotlights climate change, the escalating crisis that the upcoming Paris climate conference is supposed to address. But climate change is not a single problem: it is a product of an economic system whose driving force is the need to grow and accumulate. Nor does it affect everyone equally: those with wealth and power can buy themselves what they need to continue living comfortably for years to come - everything from air conditioning to food to police and soldiers to protect their secure bubbles - while those who are poor and powerless find their lives increasingly impossible. A serious effort to address climate change therefore means social change and economic change.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 5, 2015
Ecosocialism, environment, and urban gardening Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 This issue of Other Voices covers a wide range of issues, from the climate crisis and the ecosocialist response, to terrorism and the struggle against religious fundamentalism, as well as items on urban gardening, the destruction of olive trees, and how the police are able to use Google's timeline feature to track you every move, now and years into the past.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 19, 2015
Utopia Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015 Utopian visions, be they practical or not, free our imaginations, if only for a little while, from the daily grind of struggle and worry, and allow us to dream about the kind of world we would hope to live in. Such dreams can inspire us and guide us, even if they are not always quite practical. This issue of Other Voices peers into the world of utopian visions, practical or otherwise.
- Our Movement Is Global
an interview with Alice Ragland Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Against the Current interviewed Alice Ragland, who has been central to organizing Black youth in Cleveland against the police murder of Tamir Rice, the 12-year old shot to death two seconds after the police arrived at the park where Rice was playing with a toy gun.
- Out of the Closet and Into Print: Gay Liberation Across the Anglo-American World
PhD Thesis, Queen's University, 2015 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Outsourcing the Kill Chain: Eleven Drone Contractors Revealed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Reporters have named eleven companies that have won millions of dollars in contracts to plug a shortage in personnel needed to analyze the thousands of hours of streaming video gathered daily from the remotely piloted aircraft that hover over war zones around the world.
- Over-grazing and desertification in the Syrian steppe are the root causes of war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Civil war in Syria is the result of the desertification of the ecologically fragile Syrian steppe, which began in 1958 when the former Bedouin commons were opened up to unrestricted grazing. That led to a wider ecological, hydrological and agricultural collapse.
- Overwhelmed NSA Surprised to Discover Its Own Surveillance "Goldmine" on Venezuela's Oil Executives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A top-secret National Security Agency document, dated 2011, describes how, by "sheer luck," an analyst was able to access the communications of top officials of Venezuela's state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela.
- Pakistani Journalists Left in Limbo Amid Vicious Media War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Pakistani journalists working for BOL Network, a Pakistani media outlet co-owned by journalists, protest against the license cancellation of this organization. Protesters complain against violations of their rights.
- Palestine overwhelmed by Illegal American Immigrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Israel illegally annexed part of the Palestinian West Bank to its district of Jerusalem and then settled it with squatters, not only Israeli but also American.
- Palestinian Memory and Hope
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A group of activists are working to create a Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope in Washington, D.C. The project aims to tell the Palestinian refugee story, one that has been silenced or ignored for too long.
- Panimara's foot soldiers of freedom - 2
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rural Indians were both the foot soldiers of freedom and the leaders of some of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings ever seen. Countless thousands of them sacrificed their lives to rid India of British rule. And many who lived through great suffering to see a free India were mostly forgotten soon after. From the 1990s onwards, p. Sainath recorded the lives of several of the last living freedom fighters.
- Panimara's foot soldiers of freedom - 1
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rural Indians were both the foot soldiers of freedom and the leaders of some of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings ever seen. Countless thousands of them sacrificed their lives to rid India of British rule. And many who lived through great suffering to see a free India were mostly forgotten soon after. From the 1990s onwards, p. Sainath recorded the lives of several of the last living freedom fighters.
- Paradoxes of Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Is there a viable presence for genuine independent politics, whether it’s a political party formation or broader coalition? What's needed is a force embracing the rising social insurgencies around race and national oppression, mass incarceration, immigrant rights, Fight for Fifteen, confronting the environmental disaster and endless imperialist wars - along with labor's traditional economic issues - capable of attracting thousands or tens of thousands of activists out of the corporate two-party trap.
- Parasites in the Body Economic: the Disasters of Neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Michael Hudson discusses his new book, "Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy."
- Paris Climate Agreement Threatened by Trade Deals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Pope Francis' visit to the U.S. has galvanized discussion about climate change and raised hopes for the upcoming December COP21 Paris climate change talks. Those talks are intended to lead to a multilateral agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with serious pledges from the many participating countries.
- Paris Climate Deal: How Could They Do This to Us?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On Sunday morning, 13 December 2015, the 2015 Paris Climate Summit (COP21) finally wound to close as the last decisions were agreed. At almost 1 a.m. observers representing youth, women, labour unions, research centers, indigenous peoples, and business were asked their opinion. Most media had already left COP21. Cleaners were dismantling the massive structures that had been erected to house thousands of conference participants for two weeks plus two overrun days. The Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change had finished their work, late as usual and with an usual outcome.
- Paris terror attacks - who profits?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The attacks in Paris are placed in a geo-political context of France, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Syria.
- Paris terrorists operated "in plain sight"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Reports over the past several days have revealed that most of the Islamists who engaged in the suicide attacks in Paris were known to the French and Belgian security services well before November 13. But no intelligence or police agency took action against them to prevent the murderous rampage.
- The Parliament Streetcar (Deceased)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A history of the Parliament streetcar route in Toronto, including the eventual closure of the route.
- The Passing of Bhaskar Save
What The 'Green Revolution' Did for India Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Bhaskar Save died on 24 October 2015 at age 93. Emphasising self-reliance at the farm/village level, Save was regarded as the 'Gandhi of natural farming'.
- The Passing of Ronnie Gilbert
A Great Woman Has Died Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ronnie Gilbert, an original member of the legendary folk group, the Weavers, has died .
- Passphrases That You Can Memorize - But That Even the NSA Can't Guess
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A passphrase is like a password, but longer and more secure. In essence, it's an encryption key that you memorize. Once you start caring more deeply about your privacy and improving your computer security habits, one of the first roadblocks you'll run into is having to create a passphrase. You can't secure much without one.
- The past belongs to everyone: British Library calls on public to help piece together history
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As the British Library thrusts itself into the digital age, more than a million images from its archives are available online. And it wants the public's help to expand what is known about them.
- Patriotic Betrayal
The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A multilayered, mystifying exposé of how the CIA infiltrated and ultimately directed the U.S. National Student Association in thwarting international communist goals from 1950 to 1967.
- Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA'S Secret Campaign to enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The revelations that the National Security Agency secretly gathered information on millions of us at home while the Central Intelligence Agency systematically tortured prisoners overseas have made it tempting to assume that such arrogant excesses are somehow novel. But Karen Paget's Patriotic Betrayal brings to life a similar scandal from half a century ago. It's a scandal that has great relevance today.
- Peasant Sovereignty?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Spain-based international agrarian organization, Grain, reported that small farmers not only "feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland," but they are also the most productive farmers on Earth.
- Pentagon Hypes 'Surging Sales' for US Missile Makers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The massive US military industrial complex is struggling to keep up, according to officials, with ever-escalating attacks on various targets across the planet, and growing demands from its various customers looking to build up their assorted missile arsenals for assorted wars.
- Pentagon rewrites 'Law of War' declaring 'belligerent' journalists as legitimate targets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Pentagon has released a book of instructions on the "law of war," detailing acceptable ways of killing the enemy. The manual also states that journalists can be labeled "unprivileged belligerents," an obscure term that replaced "enemy combatant."
- People Power
The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Saul Alinsky, according to Time Magazine in 1970, was a "prophet of power to the people," someone who "has possibly antagonized more people . . . than any other living American." People Power introduces the major organizers who adopted and modified Alinsky's vision across the United States.
- The Perpetual Punitive Machine Backfires
Not Very Smart Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Our nation has a penchant for creating unnecessary complexity and obstacles for its people in areas such as the tax, health insurance and student debt miasmas. The prison industry adds to this with what it euphemistically calls "collateral consequences."
- Pesticides, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Acceptable Death
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In 1900, cancer killed three people in America out of every hundred. Today, it's 33 out of every 100 -- more than one-in-four Americans die from cancer. These figures come from Dr. Joseph Weissman, a professor of medicine at UCLA. Weissman reckons that a fair slice of this explosion in cancer mortality can be laid at the door of petro-chemicals, particularly those used by the food industry.
- Pete Seeger, Musical Revolutionary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On Seeger's banjo was printed the motto: "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender." With these words, Seeger plainly stated that he intended to use music as a means to facilitate social change. He believed that music held the potential to help people understand their troubles and to take action to change repressive circumstances.
- Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System for Leaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 David Petraeus, the former Army general and CIA director, admitted today that he gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it. But he only has to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor that will not involve a jail sentence thanks to a deal with federal prosecutors.
- The Petulant Entitlement Syndrome of Journalists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Jonathan Chait’s denunciation of the "PC language police" provoked intense reaction: much criticism from liberals and praise from conservatives.
- The phantom election
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The author criticises the elections took place on 1 November 2015 in Turkey.The ruling party AKP took away two millon votes from the fascist party MHP, one million from HDP the predominantly Kurdish party. half a million from SP a fundamentalist Islamist party, the predecessor of the AK, another million from new strata that came to vote at a higher rate this time. The author questions and attempts to explain the discrepancy between the opinion polls and the electoral results.
- Philadelphia: The PPD's Strategic Response to the Movement Against Police Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A rebellion first began in early August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police murder of black teenager Mike Brown. Militant solidarity protests spread across the country, and have since intensified following the non-indictment of the cops who killed Brown (also, Eric Garner in NYC). This wave of protests against the police represents the largest, most radical movement in this country since the 1960s.
- Pig Iron Bob
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 On the 75th anniversary of the Dalfram Dispute in Australia, reenactments capture the waterside dispute where 180 men prevented pig iron being loaded onto ships bound for the Japanese war machine.
- Pioneers of Women's Liberation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Hal Draper's book "Women and Class: Toward a Socialist Feminism."
- Pioneers of Women's Liberation
Women and Class: Toward a Socialist Feminism (Book Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Hal Draper (1914-1990) was both a master polemicist and an erudite scholar of Marxism and of socialist history, often combining these talents in withering critiques of alternative analyses. These qualities are fully manifested in Women and Class: Towards a Socialist Feminism, now released by the Center for Socialist History, a collection of essays some of which were written in connection with his multivolume Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution.
- Pipeline Company Paid Pennsylvania Police Department to 'Deter Protests'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Between June and October 2013, Kinder Morgan, the largest energy infrastructure company in North America, paid a local Pennsylvania police department more than $50,000 to patrol a controversial pipeline upgrade. The company requested that the officers, though officially off-duty, be in uniform and marked cars. Kinder Morgan's aim, according to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, was to use law enforcement to "deter protests" in order to avoid "costly delays."
- Planned Parenthood under siege
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Women, especially poor women, have already been severely impacted by an avalanche of laws that effectively strip them of being able to obtain what is a legal medical procedure. The Republican vow to defund Planned Parenthood would mean $500 million cut from two programs aimed at helping poor people: 75% from Medicaid; and the rest from Title X—the federal family planning program that serves poor Americans.
- Playing Hard Ball With Soft Power
FBI Versus FIFA Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The United States claims the right to impose its laws on other countries and on organizations and individuals in those countries. It claims the sole right to decide what is right and wrong, what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. The U.S. mostly ignores the rampant corruption in and around its own government and corporate sector, while going after rivals and enemies in other countries.
- Playing Right Into ISIS's Hands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Now that we're all supposedly involved in the world battle against the worst enemy since Hitler - not climate change, of course, but Isis - it's time to understand just how the forces of law, order and security, who are supposed to protect us, can do more to recruit European Muslims to the Islamist cause than all the Isis videos combined.
- Plutocracy
Political Repression In The U.S.A. Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Income inequality has become a key hot button issue in the modern day political spectrum. While these economic and class divides seem more pronounced than ever before, the impressive new documentary Plutocracy: Political Repression in the USA reveals that the core of these struggles pre-date the beginnings of the industrialized labor force. The long and painful journey towards achieving worker rights and fair wages has been marked by violence, discrimination, and inhumane exploitation.
- Poisoned Fruits of Austerity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The most dramatic advance of the far right is that of the National Front in France. It is not unusual that such forces prosper, with some working-class support, in the absence of well-articulated progressive alternatives.
- Poisoning the Democratic Well
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Opponents of so-called free trade deals have always struggled with the question of why these international treaties don't generate more alarm and vocal opposition from Canadians. These treaties, after all, trump all other Canadian authority to make laws -- provincial legislatures, Parliament, the courts and even the Constitution.
- Poisoning the Well
Special Report: Toxic Firefighting Foam Has Contaminated U.S. Drinking Water With PFCS Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lori Cervera had always been an active person. She liked camping, playing outdoors with her kids, and practically lived in her running shoes. She didn’t have much patience for illness. So when she developed a dull ache on her right side in May 2014, Cervera took a few Tylenol and did her best to ignore it. But after a few days in which the pain grew sharper and more intense, she went to the hospital, where a CT scan revealed a mass. To her complete surprise, Cervera, a mother of four and grandmother of two who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with stage 2 kidney cancer. That July she underwent surgery to remove both the tumor and almost half her right kidney.
- The Police and the 1918-19 German Revolution
A Correction to Our Militant Labour Pamphlet Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After the SPD took the helm of the government, Emil Eichhorn, a member of the left wing of the USPD, became the Berlin chief of police, acting on the false view that this arm of the bourgeois state could be transformed into a revolutionary instrument. On 4 January 1919, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior dismissed Eichhorn in a deliberate provocation.
- Police and the American Mind
From "Broken Windows" to the "Thin Blue Line" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Making sense of the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, by understanding two concepts. Firstly, the police believing themselves to be the thin blue line between civilization and chaos. Secondly, the "broken windows" theory of policing.
- Police Behavior and Neoliberalism
Explaining Bill de Blasio's Inaction Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 One of the more important questions spinning out of the recent confrontation between NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Police Force has been why, in the face of public disobedience by the force, has there been no attempt by the mayor's office to prepare ground for significant changes in police policies.
- The Police and Court System: Neoliberal America's Tax Collectors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The criminal justice system has increasingly become the preferred way to fund city governments in the modern neoliberal nightmare that is the United States. The police target the poor for petty infractions that produce fines. When predictably these fines cannot be paid additional fines are piled on top and the person is thrown in prison.
- The Police and Court System: Neoliberal America's Tax Collectors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Last week Biloxi, Mississippi became the latest city to be sued by the ACLU for running a "modern-day debtors’ prison."
- Police Ripped Off More Stuff Than Burglars Did Last Year
Civil asset forfeiture is big business for cops Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Law enforcement use of asset forfeiture laws to seize property -- often without a criminal conviction or even an arrest -- has gone through the roof in recent years, and now the cops are giving the criminals a run for their money, and winning.
- Police Shootings, Helicopter Crashes and Bystanders With Cameras: Weighing the Rights of Accidental Journalists'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Accidental Journalist are everyday people who stumble across something news-worthy. Most commonly, these accidental journalists report on those who abuse their power.
- Police Taser and Beat Innocent Disabled Vet, Hold Quadriplegic Wife at Gunpoint, Demand She Stand
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Mr. and Mrs. Hayes filed a lawsuit against the Delaware state police for raiding their home. Officers were looking for their nephews, who faced a charge for possession of the drug paraphernalia.
- Police Torture and the Real Militarization of Society
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What rights can we still say we have, if we find ourselves trapped in a military structure? A person has the right to remain silent if arrested, but one does not have the right to remain silent if approached by the police on the street with the demand that one respond. That would constitute being "uncooperative." Neither does one have the right to protect one's property from the police.
- Police Unions Sustain Police Violence Epidemic
Since when did we decide that police officers should be above the law? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Two of the biggest police unions in the country are now on record in opposition to free speech. They are on record against constitutionally protected free speech that opposes the epidemic of police violence across America (more than 900 killed by police so far in 2015).
- Police Violence Against Native People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In April 1974, three white high school students from Farmington, New Mexico murdered three Navajo men, Benjamin Benally, John Harvey, and David Ignacio. The brutal murders were nothing new in Farmington, where white high school students had been known to sever the fingers of inebriated Navajo men and display them proudly in their lockers at school.
- Police Violence in the Spotlight
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Our investigation concluded that there is reasonable cause to believe that CDP [Cleveland Division of Police] engages in a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
- The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor Poeple, Not 'Serve and Protect'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On the history and origins of policing in the US.
- Political activist Ken Stone takes CSIS to task for alleged harassment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What is it like to be targeted by Canada's spy agency? Veteran anti-war and environmental activist Ken Stone knows firsthand and is willing to talk about it.
- Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT's 1967 Attack on MLK's Anti-War Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 John Oliver's Monday night interview of Edward Snowden -- which in 24 hours has been viewed by 3 million people on YouTube alone -- renewed all the standard attacks in Democratic circles accusing Snowden of being a traitor in cahoots with the Kremlin.
- The Politics of the California Drought
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As if in compensation for a historic drought, California is being deluged by expressions of grim satisfaction that it is finally getting its comeuppance for environmental sins. Judgement was especially swift after California Gov. Jerry Brown imposed a 25 percent reduction in water usage for urban areas. The media asked if this is "The End of California?", as well as declaring "So Long, California," and "Dust Bowl 2.0."
- The Politics of Everybody
Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Holly explores the concepts of 'man', 'woman', and 'other' in the present political context. The book also attempts to reconcile queer theory and Marxist analysis.
- The Politics of Mass Incarceration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An interview with activist and author James Kilgore about his book, "The Politics of Mass Incarceration."
- The Politics of Prisons and Prisoners
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 They are getting ready to activate another super-max prison. Like Pelican Bay, Marion, and Florence, this prison will be dedicated to holding people in solitary confinement. They say it is for "the worst of the worst" , but we know it refers to political prisoners.
- The Politics of Repair
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The politics of repair are often invisible, hidden by the idea that repair is no more than the mundane practice of putting what is broken or worn-out back in good working order.
- Poor Housing
A Silent Crisis Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Across Canada, there is a severe shortage of decent quality housing that is affordable to those with low incomes, and much of the housing that is available is inadequate, even appalling. The poor condition of housing for those below the poverty line adds to the weight of the complex poverty they already endure.
- Pope Francis' Call to 'Hear Both the Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor' Resonates in the Philippines
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After Pope Francis' well publicized statement on the ecological crisis, his visit to Hurricane-stricken Philippines was met with applause and amazement. It's not everyday that a Pope breaks conservative conventions so publically.
- Popular Protest in Palestine
The History and Uncertain Future of Unarmed Resistance Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Popular Protest in Palestine provides an overview and analysis of the role and significance of unarmed civil (popular) resistance in the Palestinian national movement. The main focus is on the contemporary popular resistance movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), but it is prefaced by a historical review of the thread of unarmed civil resistance that has run throughout the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
- Popular Security Software Came Under Relentless NSA and GCHQ Attacks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
- Postmedia, Paul Godfrey and the demise of journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A criticism of the right-wing political bias expressed by outlets of the Postmedia group under direction of CEO Paul Godfrey.
- The Power of a Dollar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Microcredit is nothing more than a socially validated way for financial elites to exploit the poor.
- A Practical Guide to Tackling Factory Hazards
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of a "Workers' Guide to Health and Safety", a comprehensive work of ten years, which organizers can use to empower workers and "encourage" bosses to do the right thing.
- The Praxis Affair
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A cautionary story of what might happen if we return to the bad old days of the RCMP Security Service, which was caught disrupting and using dirty tricks against a wide range of unsuspecting groups before it was eventually disbanded.
- The Praxis Affair
There's a reason we put limits on spying within Canada Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 This is a cautionary story of what might happen if we return to the bad old days of the RCMP Security Service, which was caught disrupting and using dirty tricks against a wide range of unsuspecting groups before it was eventually disbanded, its spying responsibilities handed to a newly formed Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
- Prelude to Paris: Four Tragic Tactics by President Obama and Four Climate Justice Proposals He Must Support
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In December 2015 the world's governments meet in Paris for a truly historic event -- the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference. (UNFCCC). The objective of the conference is to protect Mother Earth from the assault of its most ungrateful inhabitants. The challenge is whether Homo sapiens, especially those of the ruling classes of the United States and Europe, can be civilized by the rest of the world before it is too late for all of us.
- La Prenda
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Documentary. Every day, a child is abducted in Guatemala, a country with a rate of impunity of 98%. Female victims and survivors hope to stem the tide of forced emigration from Guatemala, a country where too many women are still seen as "prendas." Also Known As: The Pawn.
- The problem of Greece is not only a tragedy. It is a lie.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 According to John Pilger, the leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind - but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as “liberal” or even “left”, Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, schooled in postmodernism.
- Professors for Israel try to Shut Down Lancet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Some 400 medical professors are blackmailing Reed Elsevier, publishers of The Lancet, by threatening to boycott its publications unless the company sacks editor Richard Horton - or as they duplicitously phrase it, "enforce appropriate ethical standards of editorship".
- Profiled
From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users' Online Identities Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s (Government Communications Headquarters) existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
- Profiting from Gaza Children's Agony
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The shocking decision by the government-owned New Zealand Super Fund (NZSF) to NOT divest from Israel Chemicals Ltd (ICL), manufacturer of white phosphorus, blatantly violates the NZSF Responsibilities and Standards for Human Rights.
- "Progressive" Obama: He's Melting, He's Melting
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Beneath progressive pretentions, Barack Obama the national political phenomenon has never been anything other than a tool of the US corporate and financial ruling class.
- The Prophet Alarmed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Tariq Ali's book "The Extreme Centre: A Warning."
- The Prophet Alarmed
The Extreme Center: A Warning (Book Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Review of Tariq Ali's The Extreme Center: A Warning. In The Extreme Center, Ali gives more than just a pungent and entertaining smack-down of corruption in British politics.
- Proposed Torture Ban Includes New Transparency and Oversight Mechanisms
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The US senate has approved the ban for government torture. Along with this move, they have also implemented transparency and oversight policies into government agencies like the NSA and FBI.
- Public Transit Struggles in London and Toronto: P3s, Transit Workers and Alternatives
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Using the fight against transit privatization practices in London, England, Rosenfeld presents a model for reform in Toronto that prioritizes rider concerns such as reduced fares and increased accessibility.
- Puerto Rico Is an Artificial Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 CounterSpin interview with Ed Morales on Puerto Rican debt crisis.
- Puerto Rico's default is fine, as long as Wall Street is repaid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On August 1, 2015, Puerto Rico defaulted on part of its enormous $72 billion debt, paying back only $628,000 on a relatively small $58 million loan that was due at the start of the month. The default, which marks the most serious credit event in US public bond markets since the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013, has led many to draw obvious comparisons to Greece – and understandably so.
- The Puritanical Glee Over the Ashley Madison Hack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 High school students have long read The Scarlet Letter, the 1850 novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne set in a Puritanical Massachusetts town in the mid-17th century. As The Atlantic noted in 1886, "the punishment of the scarlet letter is a historical fact." To see just how current is the mentality driving the scarlet letter, observe the reaction to the Ashley Madison hack.
- Pushing Back Civil Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An examination of the roll back of civil rights in the context of police violence against African Americans.
- Putin's Question and the Ambassador's Answer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A fascinating, if brief, verbal exchange recently took place between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1987 – 1991), Jack Matlock.
- Q&A: On the Untouchable 'Lords of Secrecy'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Horton, a lawyer, journalist and human rights advocate, makes the case in his book, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America's Stealth Foreign Policy, that because the public is allowed to know so little, it has effectively been cut out of national security decisionmaking.
- Queer Activism in the Labor Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Smith's review of a book published on the history of LGBT activisim within the labour movement.
- Queer Activism in the Labor Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the 1970s, Teresa Rankin kept her sexual orientation private while organizing textile workers at J.P. Stevens in North Carolina. When the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) offered her an organizing position in a small town in Virginia, Rankin, turned down the opportunity fearing isolation due to her sexual orientation.
- A quick note on neoliberalism and state capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The key to understanding neo-liberalism, in my opinion, is power, not ideology.
- Racism in Australia: from 1788 to stopping the boats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When the First Fleet sailed into Port Jackson on January 26, 1788, it carried more than the physical paraphernalia for European settlement. Along with tools, agricultural implements, chains, handcuffs, the cat-o'-nine-tails and gunpowder, the colonists brought with them an entrenched world-view.
- Racist Terror, Then and Now
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 African-Americans have been murdered by white mobs, vigilantes, and "law enforcement" from the time of slavery to, quite possibly, this morning. The fundamental reason for the killing of African-Americans by whites has been fear by many whites of all classes that the existing rules of racial hierarchy, that is, white supremacy, are endangered.
- Racist Terror, Then and Now: Many Ways to Die
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 African Americans have been murdered by white mobs, vigilantes, and "law enforcement" from the time of slavery to, quite possibly, this morning.
- The Racket
A rogue reporter vs the masters of the universe Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 While working at the Financial Times, investigative journalist Matt Kennard uncovered a scam - a deception and rip-off of immense proportions. The world as we know it is run by a squad of cigar-smoking men with big guns, big cash and a reach much too close to home.
- 'Radical Academia: Beyond the Audit Culture Treadmill'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It was not just in economics that the radicals retreated; it happened in all the social sciences and humanities. And not just because of political timidity; they had been outflanked. Knowledge production had changed in ways that disadvantaged radicals.
- Radical Islam, Nihilist Rage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Muslims are not the only religious group involved in perpetrating horrors. From Christian militias in the Central African Republic reportedly eating their foes to Buddhist monks organizing anti-Muslim pogroms in Myanmar, there is cruelty aplenty in the world. Nor are religious believers alone in committing grotesque acts. We need to ask why political rage against the West takes such nihilistic forms today. And why has radical Islam become its principal vehicle?
- The Radical Life of Rosa Luxemburg
A graphic novelization of the revolutionary life and legacy of "Red Rosa" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An excerpt from Red Rosa, a graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg.
- Radicalising the rank and file
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A discussion with U.S. labour historian Kim Moody focusing on the labour movement and rebuilding workplace organisation.
- The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When news first broke of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its official statement suggested.
- Ranchers, the Real Eco Terrorists?
Malice Toward Wildlife Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Analysis on acts of "eco-terrorism" on public lands and towards wildlife.
- Rasmea Odeh's Long Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A report of Palestinian community leader Rasmea Odeh's arrest and ongoing immigration problems.
- Rasmea Odeh's Sentence/Appeal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rasmea Odeh, A Palestinian activist and Chicago community leader, faces 18 months in federal prison and deportation, following her March 12, 2015 sentencing in Detroit for "unlawful procurement of naturalization."
- The RCMP versus the 'anti-petroleum movement'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canada's political police serve the oil industry, citing lobbyists and rightist demagogues to slander environmental activists as potential terrorists.
- Read Capital: The First Sentence, Or, Capital starts with Wealth, not with the Commodity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 John Holloway claims that Marx, in Capital, does not start with the commodify.
- Reading Paine from the Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A biography of the revolutionary Thomas Paine.
- The real reason American public transportation is such a disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stromberg dissects socials attitude regarding public transit in the United States, where infrastructure in most cities was designed with automobile dependency in mind, thereby causing transit to be been viewed and designed, as a form of social welfare rather than a public utility.
- The Realpolitik of President Jimmy Carter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Rebel Youth
1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015
- A Recipe for Killing a School System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The level of corruption and willingness to subject children to unproven educational methods is shocking, all the more so given that Detroit has more children living in poverty than any of the country's 50 largest U.S. cities.
- Reckoning with Apocalypse
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Jacqueline Foertsch's book, "Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America" on issues of race within the anti-war movement.
- Reclaim the Power! Climate protestors rout security with UK-wide fossil fuel strikes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The fossil fuel industry and its political backers have been left reeling by an unprecedented series of direct action strikes against targets across the country to protest at continuing investment in and official support for fossil fuels, inaction over fuel poverty and the systematic neglect of renewable energy despite the global climate emergency.
- Reclaiming Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 While honouring the legacy of Marx and American communists, a new generation in the United States is organizing under the 'socialism' banner.
- Reclaiming Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The article reflects on the history and apperance of socialist movements from early 20th-century Russia, to today in the United States. It argues that the term "socialist" in a modern conception is dependent on a legacy of communist movements.
- Reconstructing Marx's Critique of Political Economy from His London Notebooks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review: Lucia Pradella, Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings (London: Routledge, 2015), 218 pages, $160, hardback.
- Red Love Across the Pacific
Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 This book examines the Red Love vogue that swept across the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a worldwide interest in socialism and follows its trails throughout the twentieth century.
- Red Rosa
A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A giant of the political left, Rosa Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the canon of revolutionary socialist thought. Red Rosa gives Luxemburg her due as a radical and human being. In this beautifully drawn work of graphic biography, writer and artist Kate Evans has opened up her subject’s intellectual world to a new audience, grounding Luxemburg’s ideas in the realities of an inspirational and deeply affecting life.
- Reflections After Ferguson
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I am a white man with a Black son. I did not have or get him young and fill his head with illusions of diversity and colorblindness, the way some white parents do. I met him when he was a young teen, living in the housing projects, well on his way to having a reality-based world view built around the urban litany of poverty, gangs, drugs, murder, jail, dysfunctional schools and police abuse - and very much not about diversity and colorblindness.
- Reflections on a whistleblower: Two years after Snowden
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Two years after Snowden, the international state of surveillance and the ranks of whistleblowers both continue to grow.
- Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings 'Terrorism' Again Shows It's a Meaningless Propaganda Term
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In February 2010, a man named Joseph Stack deliberately flew his small airplane into the side of a building that housed a regional IRS office in Austin, Texas, just as 200 agency employees were starting their workday. Along with himself, Stack killed an IRS manager and injured 13 others. The attack had all of the elements of iconic terrorism, but it was explicitly declared inapplicable by media outlets and government officials alike.
- Release of the Full TPP Text After Five Years of Secrecy Confirms Threats to Users' Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Trade offices involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have finally released all 30 chapters of the trade deal today, a month after announcing the conclusion of the deal in Atlanta. Some of the more dangerous threats to the public's rights to free expression, access to knowledge, and privacy online are contained in the copyright provisions in the Intellectual Property (IP) chapter. Now that the entire agreement is published, we can see how other chapters of the agreement contain further harmful rules that undermine our rights online and over our digital devices and content.
- Remembering Rosalyn Baxandall
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall was a pioneering figure of socialist feminism in the United States.
- Remembering the Earth Day Wall Street Action
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In 1989 the Greens held their national gathering in Eugene, Oregon. That was before they had entered national electoral politics, when they still focused on grassroots organizing, and what we now call 'movement from below.'
- Renewable Energy
Cleaner, Fairer Ways To Power The Planet Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Few people doubt the threat of climate change and the urgent need to conquer fossil fuel addiction. But can renewable sources of energy ever be sufficient to provide modern societies with a decent quality of life? This book is clear. They can. And it outlines the strategies to break the barriers to a 100% renewable world.
- Renewable Energy isn't a Shortcut to Reversing Global Warming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Denmark has distinguished itself as the country moving the fastest toward the eventual replacement of fossil fuels. Its goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 is laudable, but the assumption that this path will reverse global warming while otherwise continuing business as usual, is unrealistic.
- Repair cafés are about fixing things - including communities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Repair cafés are a new global phenomenon that brings the two together, giving satisfaction to both, sharing skills, keeping stuff out of landfill, fighting 'designed obsolescence', and building communities sustained by mutual help.
- Report From Chicago
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When the failure to indict Darren Wilson was announced about 200 Chicagoans marched from police headquarters at 35th and Michigan to Lakeshore Drive, and we confounded the cops by moving from southbound lanes to northbound.
- Report from the Pvt. Manning Contingent at SF Pride, June 2015
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sunday, June 28th started out cloudy, as one might expect in San Francisco, but the sun eventually came out, making it a good day for the Gay Pride event -- and a good day to honor Whistleblower Chelsea Manning. There was to be a parade, and one of the units would be the Pvt. Manning Contingent.
- Report: Hundreds of Civilians Killed by U.S.-Led Bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new report from a group of journalists and researchers says that hundreds of civilians have died during airstrikes by the U.S. and other nations fighting the Islamic State, a marked contrast to the Pentagon’s official admission of just two civilian deaths.
- Requiem For The American Dream
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 In his final long-form documentary interview - filmed over four years - Chomsky unpacks the principles that have brought us to the crossroads of historically unprecedented inequality. Tracing a half-century of policies designed to favor the most wealthy at the expense of the majority, Chomsky lays bare the costly debris left in its wake: the evisceration of the American worker, disappearance of the living wage, collapse of the dream of home ownership, skyrocketing higher education costs placing betterment beyond reach or shackling students to suffocating debt, and a loss of solidarity that has left us divided against ourselves.
- Research Shows Internet Shutdowns and State Violence Go Hand in Hand in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When an oppressive regime blocks Internet access during social unrest, violence usually follows. This is a pattern that has become famous with the Arab Spring but is the violence that follows a response to the repression of free speech? Or is the repression of free speech a means to another end? New research suggests the latter. Using Syria as a case study, it seems that governments blackout the Internet as a means for security forces to gain some tactical advantage when they violently engage protesters.
- Researchers Find 'Astonishing' Malware Linked to NSA Spying
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Security researchers have uncovered highly sophisticated malware that is linked to a secret National Security Agency hacking operation.
- Respect, not restraints, for workers in Thailand's seafood industry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A report on a year-long investigation into forced labour in the global seafood supply chain in Thailand.
- A Response on Trotsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Paul Le Blanc's reponse to Alan Wald's book review of his work on Leon Trostsky.
- Restoring a safe climate: Impossible dream or dangerous distraction?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Green house gases are at a level where drastic and far-reaching measures need
to be implemented; however authors caution against invoking emergency measures
that involve geo-engineering.
- Restrict antibiotics to medical use, or they will soon become ineffective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Antibiotics have saved hundreds of millions of lives since they came into use in the 1930s, but their power is running dry thanks to their massive use in factory farming, horticulture, aquaculture and industry.
- Return: A Palestinian Memoir
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Having grown up in Britain following her family's exile from Palestine, doctor, author and academic Ghada Karmi leaves her adoptive home in a quest to return to her homeland. She starts work with the Palestinian Authority and gets a firsthand understanding of its bizarre bureaucracy under Israel's occupation.
- Revealed: How DOJ Gagged Google over Surveillance of WikiLeaks Volunteer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Obama administration fought a legal battle against Google to secretly obtain the email records of a security researcher and journalist associated with WikiLeaks.
- Reversing Enbridge & Big Oil's Pipeline Plans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The National Academy of Sciences is skewering the industry's 'oil is oil' talking point -- making it clear that diluted bitumen is a different beast altogether and needs to be treated as such. The agonizingly slow and costly Kalamazoo River spill cleanup in Michigan made many of these points clear. Yet, the tar sands industry has continued to insist that diluted bitumen creates no deeper environmental threat as they push for unsustainable growth. While Keystone XL is off the table, there are numerous other projects being considered that extend the unique pipeline problems of dilbit into communities across North America.
- Review Essay: Reaching for Revolution
Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Howard Brick's and Christopher Phelpss Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War.
- Revolution and counter-revolution in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A large part of the Western left and radical media have written off the struggle against the totalitarian Assad regime in Syria as irretrievably lost. Effectively, for them, the counterrevolution has triumphed. And alongside them, there are also those who never supported the revolutionary uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in the first place.
- The Revolutionary Act of Telling the Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Pilger discusses the challenges that we encounter as Western governments and media actively seek to supress any political consciousness and independent thought.
- Revolutionary Greece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The small town of Distomo is just 150 kilometers from Athens, positioned in the heart of Greece, literally squeezed between two great world heritage sites: Delphi, the cradle of the European democracy, and a stunning Byzantine monastery of Hossios Luckas. But Distomo is much more than some picturesque village surrounded by mountains and history.
- Revolutionary roots of women's suffrage: Finland 1906 - an International Women's Day tribute
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Eric Blanc traces the revolutionary roots of the suffrage victory of Finnish women. He focuses on the autonomous activities of the League of Working Women.
- The Right-Wing Doesn't Want to Talk About Christian Atrocities, So Let's Talk About Christian Atrocities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 History is full of atrocities committed by Christians for Christ, against not just other religions but against Christians themselves.
- Rise and Fall of "Proletarian Art," Part II
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A historical overview and analysis of working class art during the twentieth century, including Mike Gold, Philip Reisman, and Raphael Soyer. [Part 2 of 2]
- The Rise of British Imperialism: Capitalism and Slavery (Part Two)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A presentation on the developments that made Britain the first modern imperialist power.
- The Rise of the Illegitimate Authority of Transnational Corporations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Transnational corporations are demanding the right to what they call "competitiveness": lower taxes, control over lawmaking, and the right to sue governments for affecting profits. In her new book, Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are Seizing Power, Susan George shines a light on the secret corporate coalitions that are influencing critical government decisions and posing a direct threat to democracy.
- Rising Up Against Police Violence, From the Black Panthers to #BlackLivesMatter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I turned away more than once while watching Stanley Nelson's documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. I averted my eyes from the screen when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's nefarious mug first appeared. I turned away once more when the charismatic and admirable Fred Hampton was first shown, knowing that eventually he would be murdered by Chicago police and federal agents.
- Romania faces $2.56bn claim for failed gold mine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources is seeking over $2.5 billion damages from Romania after it rejected a vast gold mine at Rosia Montana.
- Romania's 'occupy forests' movement demands clampdown on corporate crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A growing protest movement is demanding strong controls on international investors and logging companies buying up Romania's forests. In its sights is Austria-based Schweighofer, which stands accused of criminal malpractice and accepting illegal timber shipments. The popular outrage stirred up by corporate misdeeds is now stimulating a wider democratic revival.
- Rosa Luxemburg - From Street Organizer to Street Name
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Overview of the life of Rosa Luxemburg.
- Rural India - a living journal, a breathing archive
The everyday lives of everyday people Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Project on rural India consisting of an archive which depicts its diverse and complex countryside.
- Russian aggression and the BBC's drums of nuclear war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The drums of war are beating on the BBC and other mass media, writes Oliver Tickell -- naked propaganda about fictitious 'Russian aggression' intended to soften us up for a war that could wipe out life on Earth. We must refuse to fall for the endlessly repeated lies, and tell our politicians that our highest priority of all is peace.
- Russian Oligarch Wanted to Turn My Joke Into Reality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 One of my core political beliefs is that there would still be a Soviet Union if they'd been smart enough to have two communist parties that agreed on everything except abortion.
Obviously that's a joke about the U.S., where we have two capitalist parties that largely agree on everything.
- Russia's Fantasy "Stray Missiles," America's Real Ones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Even to those who do not watch closely it has to be apparent that Washington's vast disinformation machine is finally out of control, seriously awry, or desperate.
- Ruthless Power and Deleterious Politics
From DDT to Roundup Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The mix of power and politics in the proliferation of pesticides from DDT to Roundup.
- SA xenophobic attacks: A view from below
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The attacks on African migrants in South Africa are connected to oppression of poor black people in general. To prevent the poor from organizing and standing up to their real enemies, the state is tacitly encouraging violence against foreigners.
- Salvadorans Warn Canadians about World Bank's Kangaroo Court
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In anticipation of an imminent ruling from the World Bank's little known investor-state arbitration tribunal that could force El Salvador to pay Canadian mining firm OceanaGold US$301 million, a Salvadoran delegation is in Canada to discuss how this arbitration process threatens democratic decision making, public health and the environment here and beyond.
- Samples of Israeli Horrific Brutality and War Criminality in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Israeli group Breaking the Silence issued a report this morning containing testimony from Israeli soldiers about the savagery and criminality committed by the Israeli military during the attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014.
- Saudi Arabia's Yemen Strategy: Divide and Destroy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 While eleven weeks of airstrikes and a punitive naval blockade have laid waste to much of Yemen, most people remain resolute and what is a distinctly Yemeni sense of humour is intact. This is despite the fact that more than 2000 people have been killed, over half of whom are civilians, and billions of dollars of infrastructure have been destroyed since the Saudi led "Operation Decisive Storm" began on March 25, 2015.
- Saudi Royal Family: Protecting VIPs, While Letting Ordinary Pilgrims Die
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the wake of a stampede in Mecca which killed close to 1,000 Haj pilgrims, it is being reported that the columns of pilgrims ran into each other because Saudi police had closed off key roads in the vicinity so as to accommodate VIPs who are whisked through without having to mingle with the masses.
- Saving the Whale, Again
The catastrophic incompetence of Citigroup Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Cockburn discusses the financial recklessness of Citigroup bank and the repercussions.
- Scenes From a Wonderful Parade Against the TPP
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A quarter of a million people protested against the "Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership", TTIP, and its equally spurned Canadian sister, CETA.
- The School Of The Americas Is Still Exporting Death Squads
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Although rebranded as WHINSEC, the School of the Americas uses the same brutal tactics to destabilize governments in Latin America.
- SEC Admits It’s Not Monitoring Stock Buybacks to Prevent Market Manipulation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Secret 'BADASS' Intelligence Program Spied on Smartphones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 British and Canadian spy agencies accumulated sensitive data on smartphone users, by piggybacking on ubiquitous software from advertising and analytics companies, according to a document obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.The document outlines a secret program run by the intelligence agencies called BADASS.
- The Secret Behind Donald Trump's Popularity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What if I told you about a nativist rally in which a charismatic white man drew a massive crowd of avid followers, using hate speech to whip them into a racist frenzy before pledging to cleanse America of a foreign threat -- all while 1,300 local policemen stood guard outside the building?
- The Secret History of Jaywalking: The Disturbing Reason It Was Outlawed - And Why We Should Lift the Ban
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Mangla narrates the origins of jaywalking and the reason why it was made illegal.
- Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US "Created" ISIS As A "Tool" To Overthrow Syria's President Assad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- A Secret War in 135 Countries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Turse discusses the U.S. global engagement strategy of covert operations conducted on every continent but Antarctica.
- Seed freedom!
A last chance to thwart the great African seed grab Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Nineteen African nations meet this week (July 2015) in Arusha, Tanzania, to finalise a 'plant protection' protocol that would open up the continent's seeds to corporate interests, taking away farmers' rights to grow, improve, sell and exchange their traditional seeds, while allowing commercial breeders to make free use of the biodiversity in traditional seeds to sell them back to farmers in 'improved' form.
- The seed saving rebellion is growing - and banging at the Commission's door
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A year ago today, Europe-wide protests defeated an EU regulation that would have outlawed many seed saving activities. Now growers are taking matters into their own hands, saving and developing open-pollinated seeds - and campaigning for a seed regulation that supports them, not the monopolist seed corporations.
- Segregation is here, just look at Israel's legal system
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Although segregated buses provide a clear and obvious picture of discrimination, applying different laws to individuals living side by side may prove to have far greater legal, ethical and strategic consequences for Israel.
- Selling Modernity: How Global Greenwashing is Destroying Tribal People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Aurora Pacific Economic Zone and Freeport (APECO) in Casiguran, the Philippines, is a 12,923 hectare area currently being developed into a self-sufficient commercial hub and special economic zone.If completed, APECO will strip 3,000 small farms and indigenous Agta households of their land.
- Selling Sexual Services: A Socialist Feminist Perspective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The current debate about sex work among feminists generates more heat than light. Accusations of bad faith fly back and forth across the two sides, research findings are mobilized to undercut the other side even when the research itself is limited by its methods and scope, different sex worker voices are authorized by each side as either genuine or manipulated, depending on whose position those voices seem to support.
- Semantic Warfare: Words as Guided Missiles
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over half a century ago, the South Korean government banned the word "labour" from the Korean language. This is the back story.
- Seven Points Not on the Arab Media Agenda – What Is There to Celebrate?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As media experts plan to establish an 'Arab Media Day', Baroud criticizes in seven points the censorship and repression of Arab journalism and media.
- 70,000 Kalashnikovs: Cameron's "Moderate" Rebels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Not since Hitler ordered General Walther Wenck to send his non-existent 12th Army to rescue him from the Red Army in Berlin has a European leader believed in military fantasies as PR Dave Cameron did last week. Telling the House of Commons about the 70,000 "moderate" fighters deployed in Syria was not just lying in the sense that Tony Blair lied - because Blair persuaded himself to believe in his own dishonesty - but something approaching burlesque. It was whimsy - ridiculous, comic, grotesque, ludicrous. It came close to a unique form of tragic pantomime.
- Sex Workers in Nicaragua Break the Silence and Gain Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After living in the shadows, thousands of Nicaraguan sex workers have broken their silence, won support from state institutions and gained new respect for their rights.
- Shades of Grey -- A Left Chapter look at strategy, tactics and endorsements in the 2015 election
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With just under two weeks to go until election day, anti-capitalist leftists are in something of a quandary.
- Shadow of a Giant
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 This documentary focuses on the toxix legacy of arsenic, the final byproduct of the Giant gold mine, which used to feed Yellowknife's economy.
- Shadow Sovereigns
How global corporations are seizing more and more power over our lives Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Global corporations now demand control over decisions affecting labour laws, finance, public health, food and agriculture, safety regulations, taxes and international trade and investment. They even claim the right to private tribunals where they can sue governments for passing laws that could harm their present or future profits.
- Shadows of Algeria: the Lost Context of the Paris Attacks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It wasn't just one of the attackers who vanished after the Paris massacre. Three nations whose history, action - and inaction - help to explain the slaughter by Isis have largely escaped attention in the near-hysterical response to the crimes against humanity in Paris: Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
- Shaping 20th Century America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stating that "The world must be made safe for democracy,” president Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany on April 2, 1917. The United States formally entered World War I four days later.
- Shaping 20th Century America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Part of an ongoing series on the centennial of World War I.
- Shatila: Remembering the Massacre
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Shatila is probably the most well-known of all the Palestinian refugee camps. In September of 1982, a local Christian militia, known as the Phalange, aided by its Israeli allies, entered Shatila and bordering Sabra, engaging in an orgy of torturing and killing that lasted several days.
- Shell-Shocked
On the Ground Under Israel's Gaza Assault Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Operation Protective Edge, launched in early July 2014, was the third major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in six years. It was also the most deadly. By the conclusion of hostilities some seven weeks later, 2,200 of Gaza's population had been killed, and more than 10,000 injured. In these pages, journalist Mohammed Omer, a resident of Gaza who lived through the terror of those days with his wife and then three-month-old son, provides a first-hand account of life on-the-ground during Israel’s assault.
- Sherpur: big sacrifice, short memory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rural Indians were both the foot soldiers of freedom and the leaders of some of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings ever seen. Countless thousands of them sacrificed their lives to rid India of British rule. And many who lived through great suffering to see a free India were mostly forgotten soon after. From the 1990s onwards, p. Sainath recorded the lives of several of the last living freedom fighters.
- Shock, outrage as Saudi Arabia sentences Palestinian poet to death
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 PEN International, English PEN and PEN American Center strongly condemn the Saudi Arabian authorities' decision to sentence Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh to death for apostasy, and call for his immediate release.
- Shock, outrage as Saudi Arabia sentences Palestinian poet to death
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 PEN International, English PEN and PEN American Center strongly condemn the Saudi Arabian authorities' decision to sentence Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh to death for apostasy.
- Shooting Down Man the Hunter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sooner or later in conversations about who we are, who we have been, and who we can be, someone will tell a story about Man the Hunter. It's a story not just about Man but about Woman and Child too.There are countless variants. In every version, women are baggage that breeds.
- 'Shooting to Kill:' Operation Get Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As David Cameron talks tough on shooting terrorists on Britain's streets, bombing Syria, shooting off nuclear weapons at unnamed enemies, over half of the Labour Party's MPs in the House of Commons gaze in admiration, open mouthed, wondering why their leader couldn't be more like that.
- A Short History of U.S. Bombing of Civilian Facilities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The U.S. has repeatedly attacked civilian facilities in the past. This is a sampling of such incidents since the 1991 Gulf War.
- Shot and gassed: Thousands of protected birds killed annually
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Reveal has obtained never-before-released data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service showing more than 300 species of migratory birds -- from red-tailed hawks to American kestrels, turkey vultures to mallard ducks -- have been killed legally across the United States since 2011 to protect a wide range of business activities and public facilities under what’s called the "depredation permit" program.
- Sick Sophistry: BBC News On Afghan Hospital "Mistakenly" Bombed by United States
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 One of the defining features of the corporate media is that Western crimes are ignored or downplayed. The US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on the night of October 3, 2015, is an archetypal example.
- Silence on police carding of White working-class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 a majority of the people who are carded are Whites. The cops in the city of Hamilton and other municipalities have pointed to this fact to make the incorrect claim that carding is not racist. Why haven’t we universally raised class profiling to a similar level as racial profiling?
- The Silencing Act and Mumia Abu-Jamal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Revictimization Relief Act, which my lawyers at the Pennsylvania ACLU have appropriately dubbed the "Silencing Act," allows victims of personal injury crimes (and family members or prosecutors acting on their behalf) to petition a judge to stop criminal offenders from speaking or acting if their speech or action "perpetuates the continuing effect of" that crime, including by causing "mental anguish."
- Single-Payer Health Care and the Case Against Clicktivism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What’s the next step in the campaign for single-payer universal health care in the United States? Single Payer Now's Don Bechler says we have to hit the streets.
- Six Banks Pay $5.6 Billion in Fines for Foreign Exchange Manipulation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Six major international banks – Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Union Bank of Switerland (UBS) – have agreed to pay $5.6 billion in fines for rigging global foreign exchange markets.
- Six Facts from Sudden Justice, A New History of the Drone War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sudden Justice: America's Secret Drone Wars, a new book by London-based investigative journalist Chris Woods, traces the intertwined technological, legal and political history of drones as they evolved on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the covert U.S. targeted killing campaign.
- The Six Most Disastrous Interventions of the 21st Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On October 2, 2015, President Barack Obama, alluding to Russia's decision to launch air strikes in Syria, told reporters at the White House that for Russia to view the forces targeted "from the perspective they're all terrorists [is] a recipe for disaster, and it's one that I reject."
- Six Questions About Your Class Location that EverydayFeminism.com Isn't Asking You to Think About
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2015 Solidarity doesn’t exist, like a material object, the way tables and chairs do. Solidarity is the confidence we can sometimes have that others, sharing with us a common enemy and a core of overlapping aspirations, will have our back when we find ourselves under attack, or when we need their support to win a crucial struggle. We don't stumble upon solidarity when poring over statistics; we won't find it by comparing our pay stubs with that of the worker down the street. We forge it in common struggle
- Slavery and the American Revolution
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Gerald Horne's The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
- Slavery, Genocide, Abuse: The Dark Side of Asia's 'Tiger Economies'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 From declining worker protections to violent labour trafficking and ethnic cleansing, the dark underbelly of Southeast Asia's "tiger economies" is on full display this year.
- Slick Water
Fracking and One Insider's Stand Against the World's Mot Powerful Industry Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A story of abuses by the fossil fuel industry and governments, telling the story of fracking rhough the lens of a legal battle to expose the truth. Nikiforuk raises stark questions about the role of Big Oil in government, society's obsession with mining low-grade oil and gas formations, and the future of democracy.
- Snowden and Ellsberg hail leak of drone documents from new whistleblower
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 American whistleblowers hailed the release of a collection of classified documents about US drone warfare as a blow on behalf of transparency and human rights. The documents anchored a multi-part report by the Intercept on the Defense Department assassination program in Yemen and Somalia.
- The "Snowden is Ready to Come Home!" Story: a Case Study in Typical Media Deceit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it's nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works.
- Snowden's NSA Leaks Catalogued In First Searchable Database Of The Surveillance Documents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canadian journalists and researchers have teamed up to create the world's first fully-searchable index of the classified documents revealing NSA surveillance leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
- Social Democracy or Revolutionary Democracy: Syriza and Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lebowitz discusses the construction of Syriza, its Thessaloniki Programme, and the potential for revolutionary democracy in Greece.
- Social justice is the only solution to global warming
The Climate is Ripe for Social Change Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 South African activist says only an alliance between unions and social justice movements can stop capital from destroying planetary life.
- Social Movements and the Left
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of 'Social Movements and Leftist Government in Latin America: Confrontation or Cooptation,' edited by Gary Prevost, Carlos Oliva Campos, Harry E. Vanden.
- Socialism ... Seriously
A Brief Guide to Human Liberation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015
- Socialism Taken Seriously
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt's book "Taking Socialism Seriously".
- Socialist Register 2015
Volume 51, Transforming Classes Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2015
- The Sociopath as Hero
Clint Eastwood's War Prayer Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 American movie audiences have long loved violent heroes. Edwards discusses the box office hit of the moment, 'American Sniper', and the implications of the Hollywood War Porn industry.
- Soft Power and the Case of Iraq
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, pundits have touted the desirability of pursuing "soft power" as a supplement to military action in Iraq and other parts of the Muslim world.
- Solar heat - transforming rural enterprises around the tropics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Solar energy is not just about electricity. It's also about heat - and three innovative projects highlighted by the Ashden Awards are showing how solar heat can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of food processing and farming, while helping agricultural businesses increase profits.
- Some Israeli Leaders Do Sometimes Tell The Truth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Still today, 48 years on, there are relatively few people who know the whole truth about how Israel set the stage for war in June 1967 to grab more Arab land. The single most decisive event that made war inevitable happened on Thursday 1 June, four days before Israel launched its attacks. What was it?
- Some popular fallacies about Islamism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Al-Qaeda and its most recent clone, the so-called "Islamic State" group, did not come about as a result of the invasion of Iraq or the civil war in Syria. It was born out of the unholy alliance between America and the Wahhabi zealots of Saudi Arabia to defeat communism and bring down the Soviet Union.
- Some Reflections on the Recent New York City Struggles
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Moving from specific events toward a larger understanding of the recent national wave of struggles, several questions remain: are the recent mobilizations in NYC part of the movement signified by #blacklivesmatter and its vague tactical imperative (#shutitdown)?
- Somebody Needs to Tell The NY Times: Israel Has The Bomb
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The NY Times has talked about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's coming speech at which he will raise the alarm about Iran producing a bomb. Nevertheless, Israel has had the bomb since 1967 and it is counted as the world's 6th nuclear state.
- Something to Offer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Eugene V. Debs was one of the country's most prominent socialists when the socialist movement was a major force in American politics. Unlike many in his party, Eugene V. Debs believed the struggle for black equality was critical to realizing the promise of socialism.
- Sonakhan: When Veer Narayan died twice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In Chhattisgarh, Veer Narayan Singh sought no charity, but gave his life fighting for justice
- South Africa's short memory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The migrants so recently attacked in South Africa almost all came from neighbouring countries that paid a high price in death and ruin for supporting anti-apartheid struggles.
- South Korean Activists' Extraordinary Struggle to Save Jeju Island
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 South Korea's Jeju Island is a popular tourist destination full of spas, resorts, golf courses, sandy beaches, waterfalls and hiking trails. But if you really want to get rejuvenated, skip the tourist hotspots and go directly to the village of Gangjeong to support the extraordinary community that has been opposing the building of a naval base since 2007.
- Southern Insurgency
The Coming of the Global Working Class Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015
- Southern Insurgency The Coming of the Global Working Class (Book Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A review of Immanuel Ness's book Southern Insurgency The Coming of the Global Working Class.
- "Sovereign" Deportations: The Dominican Republic deportations cannot occur without US blessing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 People born to undocumented Haitian parents in the Dominican Republic have left under threat of violence. "Voluntary" deportations have had a strong US influence given the political and economic power that the North American country exerts on the island.
- Spain: Madrid and Barcelona show -- the greater the unity on the left, the bigger the win
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Once the results of Spain’s May 24, 2015, local and regional elections became known the main lesson for the anti-austerity and anti-capitalist left was simply and starkly obvious: the more united and more involving of ordinary people its election campaigns were, the greater its gains and the greater the losses for the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) -- its main rival for the popular and working-class vote -- and for the ruling conservative People's Party (PP).
- Spain on Edge
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An interview with Podemos spokesperson Pablo Iglesias.
- Spanish Peacekeeper Is the Latest Example of Israel Killing United Nations Personnel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On January 28th a barrage of Israeli artillery fire struck near the South Lebanese village of Ghajar, killing United Nations peacekeeper Francisco Javier Soria. Soria, 36, was a Spanish citizen deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping mission tasked with maintaining the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in the occupied Golan Heights.
- Special Focus: Israeli Occupying Forces Assault Journalists in the OPT
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As Israeli violations escalate against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), journalists and media professionals have also been the subjects of Israeli attacks.
- Spies Hacked Computers Thanks to Sweeping Secret Warrants, Aggressively Stretching U.K. Law
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 British spies have received government permission to intensively study software programs for ways to infiltrate and take control of computers. The GCHQ spy agency was vulnerable to legal action for the hacking efforts, known as "reverse engineering," since such activity could have violated copyright law. But GCHQ sought and obtained a legally questionable warrant from the Foreign Secretary in an attempt to immunize itself from legal liability.
- The Spy Who Fired Me
The human costs of workplace monitoring Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Kaplan discusses the growing practice of employers monitoring the internet use of their employees.
- Stalinists and Artists in the U.S. "Red Decade"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 New York University's recent art show, "The Left Front: Radical Art in the 'Red Decade,' 1929-1940," was a bittersweet experience. In the present period, with successful workers struggles few and far between, the pro-working-class images -- photos, movies of mass May Day parades in New York City, pictures of Great Depression misery, protests, strikes, the fight against Jim Crow segregation -- were, of course, moving. But there was something wrong with this picture. It wasn’t the individual artworks themselves, but the sentimental, prettifying view of and narrow focus on the U.S. Communist Party (CP).
- State of Emergency in Crimea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Late on November 21, 2015, right-wing extremists in Ukraine severed the four electricity lines which transmit electricity from Ukraine to Crimea. The terrorist attacks, using explosives, cut domestic electricity service to much of Crimea's population of 2.3 million.
- Stemming the tide together: Soil, not oil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We are living in a rapidly changing world. The changes that we are witnessing have not come about by accident; they have been carefully orchestrated and the price has been dire. Today, a handful of corporations and entities control the global supply of food, water and other resources. They operate without any sense of responsibility and the space for people to seek redress is becoming continually more constricted.
- Stephen Harper's Covert Evangelicalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How an apocalyptic strain of Christianity guides Stephen Harper's policies and campaigning.
- Still Surviving: Reconciliation Through Everyday Rebellion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Residential school survivors rebuild through small acts of hope and resistance.
- The Sting: How the FBI Created a Terrorist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Informant-led sting operations are central to the FBI’s counterterrorism program. Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations.
- Stop & search app will 'hold police to account'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Individuals who are stopped and searched by police will now be able to record and report their experience using a new app designed to hold officers to account.
- The strange death of the antiwar movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After over 14 years of unending US wars of aggression waged in the name of fighting terrorism, humanitarian intervention and promoting "democracy," the threat posed to mankind by the eruption of American militarism has never been so acute.
- The strategic defeat of Recep Tayyib Erdogan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The author examines the causes of historic electoral defeat of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party AKP. The author emphasises the two recent events: The Gezi rebellion in Istanbul and the Kobane defence in Western Kurdistan. The author asks and attempts to answer "the reason why was that this defeat had taken so long to be registered in action even permitting Erdogan to climb to the presidency of the republic in August 2014."
- Striking Fear in Paris
Waving in the First Row Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 By committing two attacks, the three Islamic radicals managed to spread panic throughout France.
- Strong voter registration campaign could mean the end for Harper
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The primary objective of Stephen Harper's absurdly-named Fair Elections Act is to prevent hundreds-of-thousands of Canadians from voting for the NDP, Liberals, Greens, etc. But efforts to help people to register to vote are not as strong as they could be. There needs to be close co-operation among groups to make sure that as many people as possible - particularly people in some 70 ridings where the Conservatives are vulnerable - have the identification they need to vote.
- Stronger Locks, Better Security
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What if, in response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, or cybersecurity attacks on companies and government agencies, the FBI had come to the American people and said: In order to keep you safe, we need you to remove all the locks on your doors and windows and replace them with weaker ones. It's because, if you were a terrorist and we needed to get to your house, your locks might slow us down or block us entirely. So Americans, remove your locks! And American companies: stop making good locks!
- The struggle of Venezuela against 'a common enemy'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 John Pilger discusses the reasons that the United States continues to work continuously to overthrow Venezuela's left-learning government. The U.S. government makes absurd claims that Venezuela poses a grave 'threat' to the United States, but the truth is the opposite: the U.S. government poses a grave threat to Venezuela and its people.
- Struggles in Logistics in Italy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A sketch based on conversations in October 2015 with militants in and around the small Italian union SI Cobas (Sindicato Interprofessionale/Comites di Base), which has carried out and won militant strikes over the past few years with mainly immigrant logistics and warehouse workers.
- Study Reveals Corporate Media's Refusal to Acknowledge Civilian Victims of US Wars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Mainstream media outlets are systematically disregarding the hazardous health impacts of widespread U.S. military burn pits on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby playing a direct role in "legitimating the environmental injustices of war," a harrowing new scholarly report concludes.
- Stuxnet-Like Digital Attack on Iran Nuclear Talks May Have Come from Israel, Security Researchers Say
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Moscow-based technical security company Kaspersky Lab last week revealed evidence of a new cyber attack on both its own network and those of several European hotels that hosted nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) last year.
- Subsidizing Contractor Misconduct: Alma's Story
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Story of Alma Aranda, employee at the customer call center operated by Verizon Communications, where she works an eight-hour shift fielding questions about billing statements or complaints about Internet service from the company.
- Sudden Justice: America's Secret Drone Wars
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Traces the growing use of armed drones. Woods examines the multiple legal and ethical issues that surround the drone wars.
- The Sunday Times' Snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst - and Filled with Falsehoods
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it's hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically accept those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they've learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major U.S. and British media outlets "report," especially in the national security area.
- Supremacy, oppression, and power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It is the structures of domination and power, that create racism, sexism, etc., in order to justify the existence of unequal wealth, power and the oppression that goes with them. Racism didn't create slavery and the slave trade; racism was created to justify slavery. US/NATO aggression against the Middle East and the Islamic-majority countries aren't a result of Islamophobia; Islamophobia was born out of the need to justify imperialist aggression.
- Swiss Leaks: Murky Cash Sheltered by Bank Secrecy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) offered services to clients who had been unfavourably named by the United Nations, in court documents and in the media as connected to arms trafficking, blood diamonds and bribery. HSBC served those close to discredited regimes such as that of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, former Tunisian president Ben Ali and current Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad. The bank repeatedly reassured clients that it would not disclose details of accounts to national authorities, even if evidence suggested that the accounts were undeclared to tax authorities in the client’s home country.
- SYC Defends Marxism at Finkelstein Talk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- The Syrianisation of Turkey
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On 10 October 2015 hundreds of thousands people marching in the streets of Ankara in solidarity with Kurdish people and to stop the civil war were struck with two bombs, which exploded and killed a hundred people and hundreds wounded. In this article the author questions Erdogan's policies over Syria such as finding an excuse to send the Turkish military into Syria, setting up home-grown Islamist militia forces to keep Erdogan in power, to help warring Sunni militia groups in Syria always bear a risk of Syrianisation of Turkey.
- Syriza and the crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Garganas Panos about the election victory of Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece.
- The Syriza Dilemma
What would constructive pressure on the Syriza government look like? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The radical Syriza government was elected in January 2015 based on its promise to try to bargain a better deal than the severe neoliberal austerity imposed through the memoranda signed by previous governments. At the same time, it promised to remain in the eurozone monetary system, in which Greece’s financial system is embedded, as well as within the framework of the European Union, into which its economy has been integrated.
- Syriza and Sanders: "Just Say 'No'" to Neo-liberalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Hopes for Syriza's negotiations with the banking troika in the EU simmered and even boiled over among elements of the left, especially after the vaunted "No" referendum vote suggested that the Greeks would not succumb to another wave of austerity measures but would instead stand firm, even if this meant potentially leaving the EU. We have seen these hopes dashed by the subsequent "negotiations," in which Tsipras seemed to have negotiated backwards, arriving at an agreement that was worse than the one rejected by the Greek voters in the referendum vote.
- SYRIZA's 40-point program
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Here is the official program of the Greek coalition of the radical left, SYRIZA, which won the elections of January 2015.
- A System That Makes You Breakable
Between the World and Me Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.
- A tale of two farming conferences: the future is 'real' and organic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lord Krebs, self-appointed spokesman for industrial agriculture, used the Oxford Farming Conference to attack organic systems for causing more climate change - a claim as demonstrably false as it is ludicrous, writes Peter Melchett. But across the city, the upstart 'real farming' conference was showing the way to a cleaner, greener and healthier future.
- Talks in the city of light generate more heat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rather than relying on far-off negative-emissions technologies, Paris needed to deliver a low-carbon road map for today.
- Tar sands campaigners are Canada's new 'terrorists'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canada's Harper government has targeted as a new crime being a member of an 'anti-Canadian petroleum movement', and equating such a stance with terrorism.
- Target Africa
The U.S. military's expanding footprint in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The U.S. military has engaged in a largely covert effort to extend across Africa with a network of low-profile camps. These facilities allow U.S. forces to surveil and operate on large areas of the continent and to strike targets with drones and manned aircraft.
- A Tate Gallery for the New Left
Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstracts in the Revolutionary Activism of the 1950s and 1960s Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2015 A review essay on Ernie Tate's two-volume memoir on Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s.
- Tea Party Oddsmaker Has Best Campaign Finance Reform Idea Yet (Really)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Liberals always say we need to get money out of politics. But there are three big problems with that: (1) the Supreme Court has made it near-impossible without amending the Constitution; (2) no matter what barriers you erect, money will always find ways to influence politics; and (3) maybe most importantly, politics costs money.
- Tea Party's fake protestors for Big Sugar against Florida Everglades
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Tea Party of Miami put up a convincing demo last week to oppose a 'land grab' that would see 46,000 acres of sugar farm land restored for Everglades conservation. Just one problem - the 'protestors' were actors each being paid $75 for the two-hour shift.
- Teachers in the Crosshairs
The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession.
- Ten demonstrations that changed the world
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It's worth remembering that mass marches have been crucial to all the most important struggles.
- Ten Reasons to Oppose the Saudi Monarchy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 During the discussion on the Iran nuclear deal, it has been strange to hear US politicians fiercely condemn Iranian human rights abuses while remaining silent about worse abuses by US ally Saudi Arabia. Not only is the Saudi regime repressive at home and abroad, but US weapons and US support for the regime make Americans complicit. So let's look at the regime the US government counts as its close friend.
- 10 Ways Monopoly Airlines Use 'Calculated Misery' to Make Flying an Increasingly Overpriced Nightmare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the three months of last quarter, America's commercial airlines collectively made $5.5 billion, up 53 percent over the same period a year before and the highest tally since the pre-Recessionary days of 2007. And yet, customers have never been more unhappy.
The airline industry profits by having you pay extra to be treated like a human being.
- The Terror We Give Is the Terror We Get
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit. The line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is technological, not moral. We are those we fight.
- Terrorist Attacks in Paris: Can Tragedy Bring Change?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Paris has now suffered the sort of attacks that are familiar to Beirut or to Russia. The big question is: what next? Will this fear cause people to wake up to reality and think clearly?
- Terrorizing School Children in the American Police State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Americans live in an age, to rephrase, W.E.B. Dubois, in which violence has become the problem of the twenty-first century. As brutalism comes to shape every public encounter, democratic values and the ethical imagination wither under the weight of neoliberal capitalism and post-racial racism.
- The Theology of Consensus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Consensus decision-making has dominated social movements for forty years. Let’s try something different. Outside of small-group settings, consensus process is unwieldy, off-putting, tiresome, and ineffective. Many inclusive, accountable alternative methods are available for making decisions democratically. If we want to change the world, let's pick ones that work.
- There is no Alternative Unless We Build One: Reinventing Socialist Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Social democratic parties surrendered the countervailing power they had acquired during the long post-war boom to the imperatives of international competitiveness. New parties of the left that originally positioned themselves somewhere between social democracy and communism lost their points of reference and have proven, thus far at least, unable to invent a socialism for a world after Soviet communism and social democratic welfare-states.
- There is No Such Thing as International Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 To declare war on "international terrorism" is nonsense. Politicians who do so are either fools or cynics, and probably both.
- These Salvadoran Women Went to Prison for Suffering Miscarriages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For many expectant mothers in El Salvador, a largely Catholic Central American country of around 6 million, pregnancy losses -- unexpected, frightening, and tragic -- have been declared intentional and criminal. Some of these mothers are doing hard time.
- They Know Everything About You
How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Government and corporate surveillance; defence of privacy and democracy.
- They Sow the Cyclone - We Reap the Blowback
How Uncle Sam Seeded Global Jihad & Cultivates It to This Day Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It may be surprising to hear, but it is a plain historical fact that modern international jihad originated as an instrument of US foreign policy. The "great menace of our era" was built up by the CIA to wage a proxy war against the Soviets.
- They Will Have to Kill Us First
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 They Will Have To Kill Us First: Malian music in exile is a feature-length documentary following musicians in Mali in the wake of a jihadist takeover and subsequent banning of music. Music, one of the most important forms of communication in Mali, disappeared overnight in 2012 when Islamic extremists groups rose up to capture an area the size of the UK and France combined. But rather than lay down their instruments, Mali’s musicians fought back.
- Think California's drought is bad? Try Palestine's
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 While Israelis water their lawns, irrigate crops and swim in Olympic-sized pools, Palestinian communities a few kilometers away face drought and water scarcity issues. Their roughly equal proximity to water resources theoretically allows for equal consumption.
- Think the Left Won the Culture War? Think Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 With the recent AshleyMadison leak and Gawker.com's notorious naming and shaming of an obscure, married publishing executive, deBoer questions who really won in this culture war.
- Thirty Million Gallons Under the Sea
Following the trail of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 One morning in March of last year, I set out from Gulfport, Mississippi, on a three-week mission aboard the U.S. Navy research vessel Atlantis.
- This Benevolent Experiment
Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in the United States and Canada Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A multi-layered comparative analysis of indigenous boarding schools in the US and Canada.
- This Changes Everything
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 Directed by Avi Lewis, and inspired by Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything, the film presents portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond. Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Klein suggests that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.
- This dome in the Pacific houses tons of radioactive waste - and it's leaking
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands is a hulking legacy of years of US nuclear testing. Now locals and scientists are warning that rising sea levels caused by climate change could cause 111,000 cubic yards of debris to spill into the ocean.
- This Is What War Does
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Modern war is mass killing of civilians, always and everywhere, a practice which evolved in World War II and has done nothing but progress in that direction since. Even when they aren’t the actual targets, as in America’s nightmarish assassination-by-drone project, large numbers of dead or mangled civilians are the unavoidable consequence.
- Thousands Join Legal Fight Against UK Surveillance — And You Can, Too
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Thousands of people are signing up to join an unprecedented legal campaign against the United Kingdom’s leading electronic surveillance agency.
- Three U.S. Lies About Israel and Palestine
The Last Guest at the Table of Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For decades United States' spokespeople, from presidents to members of Congress, have, with a straight face, told the most far-fetched lies about Israel and Palestine. Such things as Israel having a moral army, despite its ongoing genocide of men, women and children, or proclaiming it the only democracy in the Middle East, regardless of the institutional racism so prevalent there, have been staples of U.S. proclamations and news conferences.
- Tianjin, China: a village 'land grab' protest spells trouble for the Communist state
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rising anger by China's dispossessed (those displaced from their homes, villages and farms to make way for expanding cities and infrastructure) is posing a threat to the ruling regime. At the root of the problem is the state's inability to tackle endemic official corruption and deliver justice to its citizens.
- The time has come for France to own up to the massacre of its own troops in Senegal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The truth about a massacre of sub-Saharans who fought on the French side in World War II must be acknowledged.
- Time to celebrate real heroes, like the one just lost
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 If you want to meet the best Australians, meet Indigenous men and women who understand this extraordinary country and have fought for the rights of the world's oldest culture. Theirs is a struggle more selfless, heroic and enduring than any historical adventure non-Indigenous Australians are required incessantly to celebrate.
- Time to Jail Auto Executives?
Still Unsafe at Any Speed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rather than allowing automobile industry debacles to float by without inspiring systemic change that will save lives, criminal prosecutions should become an integral part of -- even a priority for -- both federal and state governments.
- Tobacco Gun for Hire James Enstrom, Willie Soon and the Climate Deniers Attack on Merchants of Doubt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Climate denier Fred Singer, scientist working for tobacco companies, asks whether it would make sense to file a lawsuit to try and stop the release of the new documentary, Merchants of Doubt – a film tracing the tactics used by Big Tobacco to spread misinformation.
- Today's media language a little too much like 1984's Newspeak
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canada is not Orwell's imaginary society where peoples' every thoughts and ideas are controlled by The Party, but our own powerful elite has pushed our media closer to censorship and a propaganda-feeding machine than I ever imagined possible.
- Today's Trumbo: Try telling academic critics of Israel McCarthyism is behind us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 "Trumbo," starring Bryan Cranston as Academy Award-winning Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, tells the sordid and tragic story of the anti-communist witch hunt commonly referred to as the "Red Scare," which involved the interrogation and prosecution of suspected communists. Its instrument in Congress was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created in 1938 and not officially disbanded until 1975, which subpoenaed individuals, put them on the stand, and demanded that they answer one key question, "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?"
- Tomorrow's Battlefield
U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 U.S. military is fighting shadow wars in Africa and claims that Africa is the "battlefield of tomorrow".
- Tony Mazzocchi Lives: Blue-Green Organizer Takes Up 'Just Transition' Mantle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Union and environmental activist Alex Lotorto believes environmentalists should be working more closely with organized labour and following the advice of some of labour's more enlightened leaders.
- Top 5 Reasons Eaters should be Worried about Obama's New Trade Deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a wide-ranging deal that would expand corporate rights across member states to the detriment of worker rights, the environment, and public health.
- Top 1 percent own more than half of world's wealth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A new report issued by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse finds that global wealth inequality continues to worsen and has reached a new milestone, with the top 1 percent owning more of the world’s assets than the bottom 99 percent combined. Of the estimated $250 trillion in global assets, the top 1 percent owned almost exactly 50 percent, while the bottom 50 percent of humanity owned collectively less than 1 percent. The richest 10 percent owned 87.7 percent of the world's wealth, leaving 12.3 percent for the bottom 90 percent of the population.
- Toronto Star Supports the Perpetrators of War Crimes in Ukraine
Crazed Warmongers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Toronto Star has distinguished itself for supporting the fundraising projects of Ukraine's extreme-right parties and militias.
- Torture If You Must, But Do Not Under Any Circumstances Call the New York Times
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Monday’s guilty verdict in the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling on espionage charges -- for talking to a newspaper reporter -- is the latest milepost on the dark and dismal path Barack Obama has traveled since his inaugural promises to usher in a "new era of openness."
- Towards a two-tiered knowledge society
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On the Conservative government's actions to reduce Internet access and library access to a large portion of the population.
- TPP a Gift to Plutocrats? Canada's Trade Minister Wrote the Book on Them
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Canada's new trade minister has sitting on her desk the sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal some say will accelerate the gap between rich and poor by protecting corporations' interests over those of workers and governments.
- TPP: Big Pharma's Big Deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We still don't know all the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal tentatively agreed to on Oct. 5 by negotiators from 12 Pacific Rim countries, but already critics are slamming it for many reasons, including its generous concessions to the pharmaceutical industry.
- TPP is "Worst Trade Agreement" for Medicine Access, Says Doctors Without Borders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] will…go down in history as the worst trade agreement for access to medicines in developing countries, said Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in a statement following the signing of the TPP trade deal.
- TPP Trade Pact Would Give Wall Street a Trump Card to Block Regulations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Banks and other financial institutions would be able to use provisions in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership to block new regulations that cut into their profits, according to the text of the trade pact released this week.
- TPP Undermines User Control and That's Disastrous for Accessibility
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) threatens all users' ability to access information and participate in culture and innovation online, but it's especially severe for those with disabilities or who otherwise depend on content in accessible formats. That's because it doubles down on broken policies that were heavily lobbied for by Hollywood and other major publishers that impede the distribution of accessible works.
- Tracking Harper's 9-year-long assault on unions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stephen Harper has been Prime Minister of Canada for almost a decade. In that time, the system of protections that were put in place by decades of advocacy by labour organizations and unions has been partly dismantled. The attacks have been extremely strategic. Ground Zero for these attacks has been the House of Commons, where piece after piece of legislation has taken aim at unions and collective bargaining.
- The tragedy of being a girl in India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 India is the "most dangerous country in the world in which to be a girl". This is stated in a controversial United Nations finding based on a range of distressing social statistics rooted in gender and caste prejudice, much of which can be traced back to 18th century colonialism and the destructive 'divide and rule' methodology employed by the British.
- The Tragedy of the Commodity
Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Although humans have long depended on oceans and aquatic ecosystems for sustenance and trade, only recently has human influence on these resources dramatically increased, transforming and undermining oceanic environments throughout the world. Marine ecosystems are in a crisis that is global in scope, rapid in pace, and colossal in scale. Longo, Clausen, and Clark explore the role human influence plays in this crisis, highlighting the social and economic forces that are at the heart of this looming ecological problem.
- Trans-Canada sues US for $15 billion over KXL refusal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The US government is being sued for $15 billion for its cancellation of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline last year in order to combat climate change. The legal challenge under NAFTA sends a warning to all countries contemplating similar 'free trade' agreements.
- TransCanada Keystone 1 Pipeline Suffered Major Corrosion Only Two Years In Operation, 95% Worn In One Spot
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Documents obtained by DeSmogBlog reveal an alarming rate of corrosion to parts of TransCanada's Keystone 1 pipeline. A mandatory inspection test revealed a section of the pipeline's wall had corroded 95%, leaving it paper-thin in one area (one-third the thickness of a dime) and dangerously thin in three other places, leading TransCanada to immediately shut it down.
- TransCanada Whistleblower Spurs New Probe of Pipeline Giant's Safety Record
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Based on evidence provided by a whistleblower, Canada's National Energy Board (NEB) is investigating pipeline giant TransCanada for safety-code violations.
- The tremendous success of agroecology in Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A quiet revolution has been working its way across Africa. Agroecological farming, constantly adapting to local needs, customs, soils and climates, has been improving nutrition, reducing poverty, combatting climate change, and enriching farmland.
- Tribes, Rights and Justice in India
Interview Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sara Ahrahms interviews Indian writer and commentator Shashank Kela, author of 'A Rogue and Peasant Slave: Adivasi Resistance, 1800-2000.'
- Tsleil-Waututh First Nation rejects Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Kinder Morgan's pipeline project proposes almost 1,000 kilometres of new pipeline to carry diluted bitumen from Edmonton to Burnaby. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation announced that the project would not be allowed to proceed on the Nation's territory. It also released a scathing report on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion, outlining the project's risks to health and environment.
- TTIP: the Corporate Empowerment Act
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have nothing to do with free trade. "Free trade" is used as a disguise to hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use law suits to overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food safety, GMOs, and minimum wages.
- Turkey and its Kurds at war: Recep Tayyip Erdogan's personal quest for survival
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Examining the ongoing civil war between the Turkish government and Kurds, focusing especially on the recent plight of Cizre, a south eastern town with a massive Kurdish population. The author criticises the Turkish government which waged war against its own citizens in the Kurdish regions of the country.
- Turkey's Double Game and the US's Double Standards
What the bombings in Ankara tell us about Turkey's true motives in Syria. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On Saturday morning, in the Turkish capital of Ankara, two suicide bombers targeted a Kurdish-Turkish trade union peace march, killing over a hundred civilians and wounding hundreds more.
- Turkey's Tiananmen in Context
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 At 9:30 Saturday morning Turkish citizens opposed to their government’s war policies gathered at the Ankara Train Station for a demonstration organized by a broad alliance of organizations.
- Turkish newspaper editor in court for 'espionage' after revealing weapon convoy to Syrian militants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The prosecution has asked to imprison Editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet newspaper pending trial for espionage and treason. In May, the outlet published photos of weapons it said were then transferred to Syria by Turkey's intelligence agency. Turkish national intelligence is smuggling weapons into Syria and has been caught in the past.
- The Turn-Verizon Zombie Cookie
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Discussion of Verizon's "supercookie," a header that tracks mobile subscribers, even if they have opted out, cleared their cookies, or entered private browsing mode.
- Turning an issue into a campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As an organizer, your goal is not just to help members solve their workplace problems but to help them build collective self-confidence and power. A campaign is just a series of steps that help people focus on a common issue, identify a solution, and build pressure on the person with the power to solve the problem.
- TV News in the Age of the Super Anchor
Why Brian Williams is Just the Tip of the Scandal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Super Anchor is often more actor than reporter. His or her role is to give the story a certain imprimatur, which it doesn’t always deserve. Much of the real work, digging, and investigation is done by others.
- 21 States Will Take Away Your Driver's License If You Can't Pay Your College Loans, But Activists Are Fighting Back
A grassroots project in Montana is a blueprint for activism across the country Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Thanks to the work of local organizers pressuring lawmakers, Montana residents will no longer have their drivers licenses suspended if they fall behind on their student loan payments. This April, a Montana law that allowed the state to revoke licenses for that infraction was scrapped. However, in at least 21 states, similar laws remain on the books.
- Twenty-First-Century Fascism: Private Military Companies in Service to the Transnational Capitalist Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Globalization of trade and central banking have propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
- Two faces of reformism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In our last issue we advised the radical left in Britain to be open to the sudden fissures that the crisis of the British state can…unexpectedly open up, perhaps making possible a qualitative advance. And the unexpected came very quickly, and in a particularly surprising form.
- Two out of Three Investigative Journalists in US Believe They're Being Spied On
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the wake of the NSA mass surveillance scandal, a vast majority of investigative journalists believe that the U.S. government is spying on them, and large numbers say that this belief impacts the way they go about their reporting.
- The Two-Party System, Part III
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 This perceived marriage of "progressive" change and the Democratic Party grew from conditions that prevailed from the 1930s through the 1960s. The next half century sustained this faith less through positive policies than by comforting images. Integral to this has been the rise of a warfare state with its own logic. The implications of both have made a two-party political order unchanged by the end of either World War II or the Cold War.
- The Two-Party System, Part IV
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 "Progressive" institutions, organizations, and ideologues have clung tenaciously to the faith that the two-party system remains an eternal, ultimately unchallengeable reality.
- Two years since Rabaa massacre, impunity still reigns in Egypt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On this day two years ago, the Egyptian army and riot police launched a deadly onslaught on supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi, leaving hundreds dead and thousands injured.
- The Two-Party System, Part II
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The second part of an overview of the history and origins of the two-party system in the United States.
- Uber and the Luddites
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The fight against the sharing economy, and Uber in particular, can be disorienting. Opposition is often painted as techno-phobia. The good guys in this story are Uber and progress; on the other side are opponents afraid of flexibility and smartphones, kicking and screaming against a future already here. In many ways, this is like the fight of the Luddites (machine smashers) 200 years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. While the Luddites were fighting the way technology was used to further exploit rather than liberate workers, they were and are misrepresented as simply afraid of and opposed to technology.
- Uber Plans to Track Users Should Not Be Allowed, Says Privacy Group
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A formal complaint has been filed against Uber, the car ride company, by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a non-profit advocacy group. The NGO says Uber plans to use their smart phone app to access user's locations at all times, and to send advertisements to user's contact lists.
- UK Media Regulator Again Threatens RT for "Bias": This Time, Airing "Anti-Western Views"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The U.K. Government loves to lecture the world about infringements of liberty generally and press freedom specifically. It does so as it threatens to revoke the broadcasting license of a media outlet for broadcasting "anti-western" views and other perspectives at odds with the U.K. Government, all while shielding (and venerating) the equally virulent biases from pro-state television in the U.K.
- Ukraine Is Banning 'Communist Symbols' and the Kremlin Is Peeved
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ukraine is pushing to erase all evidence the Soviet Union and its defeat of Nazi Germany from its history books.
- UN Battle to 'Shame' Israel Over Abuse of Children
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Palestinian solidarity groups have taken to social media to step up the pressure on United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to include Israel for the first time on a "shame list" of serious violators of children's rights.
- UN General Assembly in One Voice (Almost) Rejects U.S. Cuban Blockade
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The United Nations General Assembly on October 27, 2015 voted on a Cuban resolution calling for "an end to the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba." Approval was all but unanimous: 191 nations voted in favour and two voted against, the United States and Israel. There were no abstentions for the first time since the voting on the resolution began in 1992.
- U.N. Report Asserts Encryption as a Human Right in the Digital Age
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Encryption is not the refuge of scoundrels, as Obama administration law-enforcement officials loudly proclaim – it is an essential tool needed to protect the right of freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age, a new United Nations report concludes.
- The unbearable lightness of Greek democracy
Greeks have abandoned all hope that their political leaders have the skills to rescue the nations economy. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The only certain thing is that a government will be formed by a grand alliance whose only mission will be to implement the most painful, humiliating measures ever attempted by a democratically elected body. This, alas, is the unbearable lightness of Greek democracy.
- Under Fire: Documentary details attacks on journalists during Gaza offensive
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 In the summer of 2014, Israel launched a military operation on Gaza dubbed "Operation Protective Edge". By the time Israeli forces withdrew from the strip, 17 journalists were confirmed dead. No one has been held accountable for their deaths so far.
- Under the Dome
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 A self-financed Chinese documentary film by Chai Jing, a former China Central Television journalist, concerning air pollution in China. It is narrated by Chai, who presents the results of her year-long research mostly in the form of a lecture.
- Under the Radar, Big Media Internet Giants Get Massive Access to Everything About You
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Internet and digital media are becoming a pervasive and manipulative interactive surveillance system. U.S. online companies, while claiming to be supporters of a democratic Internet, are working to have an unlimited and unchecked power to "shadow" us online.
- Unions and the Road to Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The familiar model of union struggle has been ineffective in attempts to change capitalism. I will try to explain why unions have not shaken capitalism's foundations. The explanation will point to the failure to challenge inequalities in returns to labour and capital from production.
- Unions and the Road to Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A discussion of the labour movement's ineffectiveness against combatting capitalism.
- Unite and Fight
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The flim Pride isn’t just excellent labour history. It’s a reminder of what real solidarity looks like.
- The U.S. Army Lost Track of 27 Ballistic Missiles
Military didn't know old Lance rockets were in storage igloos in Alabama Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For 30 years starting in 1962, the U.S. Army deployed Lance ballistic missiles in Europe. Twenty feet long and weighing a ton and a half, an atomic-tipped Lance could zoom 75 miles at Mach 3 and explode with a force of up to 100 kilotons of TNT. The Army retired its last Lances in 1992 … and ultimately lost track of 27 of them at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama.
- U.S. Cold War Nuclear Target Lists Declassified for First Time
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 U.S. Cold War Nuclear Target Lists Declassified for First Time. According to 1956 Plan, H-Bombs were to be Used Against Priority 'Air Power' Targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Major Cities in Soviet Bloc including East Berlin
- U.S. Journalists Who Instantly Exonerated Their Government of the Kunduz Hospital Attack, Declaring it an "Accident"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Shortly after the news broke of the U.S. attack on a Doctors without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, there was abundant evidence suggesting (not proving, but suggesting) that the attack was no accident.
- U.S. Mass Surveillance Has No Record of Thwarting Large Terror Attacks, Regardless of Snowden Leaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Despite the intelligence community's attempts to blame NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the tragic attacks in Paris on Friday, the NSA's mass surveillance programs do not have a track record of identifying or thwarting actual large-scale terrorist plots.
- U.S. Workers and Puerto Rico's Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Puerto Rico has been in the news lately, particularly the financial news. The possibility that its government may default on part of its $73 billion public debt has drawn the attention of Wall Street analysts.
- University for Counterinsurgency and Imperialism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The United States has set aside one day in the year, Memorial Day, to remember those who died in military service. For the University of California-Irvine that is not enough. After reading the Chancellor's message of May 2015, a number of observations and questions came to mind.
- University of Wisconsin's "Budget Crisis"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over $300 million in cuts to the University of Wisconsin system lead students and staff to speculate on the the future of the university.
- Unmasking The GMO Humanitarian Narrative
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Genetically modified (GM) crops are going to feed the world. Not only that, supporters of GM technology say it will produce better yields than non-GM crops, increase farmers' incomes, lead to less chemical inputs, be better suited to climatic changes, is safe for human consumption and will save the lives of millions. Sections of the pro-GMO lobby are modern-day evangelists who denounce, often with a hefty dose of bigoted zeal, anyone who questions their claims and self-proclaimed humanitarian motives.
- The unspun Jeremy Corbyn
Nobody expected a veteran, rebel leftwing MP to be elected to lead the UK labour Party. It's going to be hard for him to manage his own Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A look at the rise in popularity of Jermey Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, and the challenges he faces from the broader British public and from within his own party.
- Up against the clock: Climate, social movements and Marxism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The time frame is incredibly short. The problem is not one for future generations but for our generation, those of us who are alive now. If we continue to produce greenhouse gas emissions at the rate we have been we will have used up the carbon needed to take us to 2°C warming in the next 30 years.
- Up Ghost River
A Chief's Journey Through The Turbulent Waters Of Native History Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A powerful, raw and eloquent memoir about the abuse former First Nations chief Edmund Metatawabin endured in residential school in the 1960s, the resulting trauma, and the spirit he rediscovered within himself and his community through traditional spirituality and knowledge.
- The Urban Green Wars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Struggling for working-class control of cities is crucial to bringing down carbon emissions.
- US accuses China of 'using sea to hide its submarines'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The U.S. Navy is demanding billions of dollars in extra funding to counter the latest Chinese technical innovation. China, it seems, has come up with the devious idea of hiding its submaries under the sea. Darn, why didn't we think of doing that?
- The US arming of Ukraine and the danger of World War III
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Obama administration wants to arm the right-wing regime in Ukraine with billions of dollars in advanced weaponry, which may spark a direct conflict between the US and Russia, two nuclear-armed powers, and ignite a Third World War.
- US Dispatched a Murderous AC-130 Airborne Gunship to Attack a Hospital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Evidence continues to mount that the US committed a monstrous war crime in attacking and destroying a fully operational hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on the night of Oct. 3, 2015, killing at least 22 people including at least 12 members of the volunteer medical staff of Medicine Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), the French based international aid organization that operated the hospital.
- The US/EU Manufactured Egyptian Nightmare has Arrived
The Ogre of Egypt Now Wants a Mandate for Wholesale Slaughter Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Article on the internationally-financed regime of Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt.
- US-Funded NGO in Syria Uses Old Photo to Claim Civilian Death in Russian Airstrikes
Group Lashes Russian Official on Twitter for Noting Picture Wasn't Real Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The "White Helmets" organization, heavily funded by the US State Department, has claimed that Russia killed 33 civilians in its attacks. The NGO attached a photo to the story which was pointed out to be from an incident five days prior and not related to Russia.
- U.S. Government Buys Surveillance Technology To Track Drivers in Real Time
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Local government officials have the ability to track individual drivers in the U.S. in real time and take pictures of the occupants of their vehicles, with new "truly Orwellian" technology purchased from companies like Vigilant Solutions, according to new documents uncovered by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
- US Lies and Excuses for Bombing Hospital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Here is the US changing its story for the FOURTH time of why it launched an air strike on the Doctors without Borders hospital in the Afghan town of Kunduz at the weekend, massacring at least 22 patients and hospital staff.
- U.S. May Be Salvaging Victory For Jihadists In Syria: How & Why
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 According to Britain's Telegraph, in a recent report, the U.S. Tow antitank missiles that U.S. President Barack Obama sent in October to the Islamic Sunni fighters in Syria to use against the forces of the non-sectarian Shiite ruler there, Bashar al-Assad, have been so effective against Russia's forces that Assad had invited in, that Russia-- defending (upon Syria's legal request) President Assad's forces, and attacking the jihadists imported into Syria by the Saudis and the rest of the West -- is now being forced to send into the battle Russia's costly T-90 tanks, which are less vulnerable to America's missiles.
- US pressured Norway to arrest & extradite Snowden, seize all devices - documents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The US repeatedly asked Norway to detain and deport whistleblower Edward Snowden if he tried to enter its territory in the aftermath of his leaks on mass US global surveillance, Norwegian media revealed citing formal requests.
- US Still Seeks Jail for 'Fighter' Captured at 15 in Afghanistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The good news is that a judge in Canada has had the courage and good sense to uphold the release from jail on bail of Omar Khadr, a native of Canada who was captured as a child soldier at the age of 15 in Afghanistan by US forces back in 2002.The bad news is that Khadr, who spent 13 years in captivity, most of them in America's Guantanamo hellhole, should never have been imprisoned in the first place.
- US: The State Murder of an Activist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The murder of Sandra Bland, an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, exposes the impunity of U.S. police.
- The Useful Altruists: How NGOs Serve Capitalism and Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 NGOs are far from revolutionary organizations, but many of us would think that their work still seems more helpful than not. Political differences with them aside, it seems dogmatic to denounce free health care and anti-poverty programs. Short of more radical measures, NGOs seem to serve an important interim function. In fact, though, it can be argued that many NGOs are destructive, both in their current work and in their preclusion of an alternative future beyond the capitalist present. They undermine, divert, and replace autonomous organizing and erase working class struggle and organizing.
- A Useful Prep-Sheet on Syria for Media Propagandists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 State Department talking points on Syria for cable news anchors.
- Vegetarians, ranchers and conscious omnivores of the world, unite!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Thinking people of all stripes are agreed in their opposition to cruel, exploitative animal farming. Cummins suggests moving beyond sterile 'meat-eater versus vegetarian' debates, and unite in their opposition to the daily atrocities of industrial agriculture.
- The Veggie Pride Talk I Didn't Give
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For the first time in many years, I've declined an offer to be the lead speaker at the annual Veggie Pride Parade in NYC’s Union Square Park. I learned the hard way that although the cheers have been loud, the local vegan/animal rights scene wasn't actually hearing me. Since I've opted to no longer howl into an echo chamber, I'll share my thoughts here instead.
- Venezuela: US, elite launch new attacks on democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Venezuela is facing new attempts to subvert its democracy and roll-back the pro-poor process of social change known as the Bolivarian revolution.
- Vermont Healthcare Justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An overview of legislation in Vermont to publicly fund health care.
- A Very Capitalist Condition
A history and politics of disability Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 This book examines the origins and development of disability and highlights the hidden history of groups such as disabled war veterans, deaf people and those in mental distress. Roddy Slorach describes how capitalist society segregates and marginalises disabled people, generating new impairment and disability as it does so.
He argues that Marxism not only helps provide a fuller understanding of the politics and nature of disability, but also offers a vision of how disabled people can play a part in building a better world for all.
- Very Mention of Snowden's Name Makes Prosecutors Tremble
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has become such a powerful symbol of government overreach that federal prosecutors in a terror case in Chicago are asking the judge to forbid defense attorneys from even mentioning his name during trial, for fear that it would lead the jury to disregard their evidence.
- Victory in Vietnam
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Forty years ago on April 30, 1975, the Vietnamese peopl were finally victorious in the long just struggle for national independence and unification against the United States and its puppet regime in Saigon.
- A Victory and Some Risks
Statement from the Fourth International Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It is necessary to create the conditions of democratic debate in all the popular organizations in Cuba.
- Video of Shooting Caught Police Propaganda Machine in Action
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A video supplied to The New York Times, showing the shooting death of 50-year-old Walter Scott at the hands of a South Carolina police officer, appears on first viewing to be the latest example of an unarmed black person killed unnecessarily by a white cop.
- Videos Challenge Israeli Police Account of Shootings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It has been called the "smartphone intifada". After a sharp escalation in violence between Palestinians and Israelis in recent weeks, shocking scenes captured on video have spread across social media.
- Vietnam: From National Liberation to Trans-Pacific Vassalage 1975-2015
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In 1975 the people of Vietnam successfully ended one of the longest and bloodiest anti-colonial wars in world-history – defeating the US, the world's biggest imperial power, after 20 years of struggle.
- A Visual Glossary
Decoding the language of covert warfare Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Along with illustrations, Begley explains some of the terminology employed in the drone warfare.
- Voices of the Paris Commune
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The Paris Commune of 1871 has been the subject of numerous interpretations. Voices of the Paris Commune contains a selection of eyewitness accounts providing a fascinating range of opinions on this historic event.
- Volkswagen and the Quandary of Hidden Code
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 After Volkswagen's emissions-rigging scandal, Blunden states that this company is not the only one engaging in the practice of secretly modifying technology. Rather, systematic hidden codes are embedded in society and promoted by both companies and governments.
- The Volkswagen Scandal Wasn't Exposed by Regulators, but by Two Engineers Working at a Small Non-Profit Lab
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 German automaker Volkswagen was recently exposed for perpetrating a massive deception by installing a small device on as many as 11 million diesel-powered vehicles designed to cheat emissions tests.
- Vulnerable get lost in 'secret' Chicago prisoner warehouse
Mainly black detainees interrogated without access to attorneys Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of those arrested as a secretive interrogation facility, records reveal.
- The Wages of Whiteness is Early Death
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The white working class has never had it easy in American history. It's been viciously exploited, disrespected, deceived, divided, repressed, and otherwise and generally abused from the United States' colonial origins through the present day.
- Wall Street and the Greek Financial Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Michael Hudson and Bill Black zero in on some of the key elements of the crisis. They point out that it is not really 'Greece', let alone the Greek people, who have contracted this debt and who have been bailed out until now.
- Wall Street's Think Tank
The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War.
- Wangari Maathai was not a good woman. Kenya needs more of them.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 25 September, 2015 marked four years since the passing of Kenyan environmentalist and feminist icon, Wangari Maathai. In Kenya, the celebrations were notably muted as her standing in the country has been ambiguous. Maathai challenged the notion of Kenyan women, who are forced to pretend to be "good" to satisfy societal expectations.
- The War against The Lancet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 "An Open letter to the people of Gaza" triggered a furious reaction within Lancet, with complainants suggesting that the publication has sided with the forces of "anti-Jewish bigotry".
- War Against the People
Israel, The Palestinians and Global Pacification Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Governments today are waging a 'war against the people' -- whether 'securitization' against asylum seekers in Fortress Europe, 'counterinsurgency' in Afghanisation, or the subliminal war of policy and surveillance arising everywhere. Israel's contribution to this is key: exporting the high-tech weaponry, security systrems and methods of pacification perfected on the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
- War crime: NATO deliberately destroyed Libya's water infrastructure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya. Since then, the country's water infrastructure has only deteriorated further.
- War Is Realizing the Israelizing of the World
Divide, Conquer, Colonize Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As US-driven wars plummet the Muslim world ever deeper into jihadi-ridden failed state chaos, events seem to be careening toward a tipping point. Eventually, the region will become so profuse a font of terrorists and refugees, that Western popular resistance to "boots on the ground" will be overwhelmed by terror and rage. Then, the US-led empire will finally have the public mandate it needs to thoroughly and permanently colonize the Greater Middle East.
- The War of the World
Easy Chair Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Solnit reflects on the environmental destruction that the world has been experiencing since the Second World War.
- The "War Scare" in the Kremlin, Revisited: Is History Repeating Itself?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Washington Post on October 25, 2015 published an important story based on a recently-published U.S. intelligence review from 1990 that confirmed Soviet leaders in 1983 believed the Reagan administration was using a mobilization exercise to prepare a nuclear surprise attack.
- Warped
Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Recent victories for LGBT rights have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay 'normality' has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. This book shows how the successive 'same-sex formations' of the past century and a half have led both to the emergence of today's 'homonormativity' and 'homonationalism' and to ongoing queer resistance.
- The Wars on Vietnam
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In the past month, the Pentagon, PBS, and the for-profit press took a three pronged approach to the Vietnam Wars: (1) praise the returned troops and promote the notion of a home-country stab in the back; (2) highlight the evacuees and the US heroes of the April ‘75 evacuations; and (3) focus on the post-war babylift and the Vietnamese babies now grown up.
- 'Water man of India' makes rivers flow again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The revival of traditional rainwater harvesting has restored flow to rivers in India's driest state, Rajasthan - thanks to the tireless efforts of Rajendra Singh, recent winner of a Stockholm water prize.
- We Are All Ayotzinapa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Report on the kidnapping and murder of students in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
- We Are All – Fill in the Blank
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 We should condemn violence and terror, and defend freedom of the press. We should do so on the basis of consistent principles -- in contrast to the mainstream media and politicians, who condemn acts directed at 'us' but condone or ignore crimes committed by 'our side'.
- We Believe the Children
A Moral Panic in the 1980's Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A brilliant, disturbing portrait of the dawn of the culture wars, when America started to tear itself apart with doubts, wild allegations, and unfounded fears for the safety of children.
- We Call Them Intuders: Financing Canadian Mining in Africa
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015 If you live and work in Canada, chances are you're connected to Candian mining companies through your savings, taxes, CPP contributions, RRSPs and other investments. We Call Them Intruders travels from Canada to Africa and back again to unearth stories from people negatively impacted by some of Canada's largest international mining projects.
- We must start 'shaming' those who lie to us, destroy our climate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Given how powerless ordinary folk and public interest groups have become, I would like to see people embarrass the hell out of those who take advantage of the public by lying to us, cheating us, or destroying our priceless environment.
- The Weaker Sex? Violence and the Suffragette Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fern Riddell investigates the campaign of terror orchestrated by the Edwardian suffragette movement before the First World War and asks why it has been neglected by historians.
- Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Global wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy elite. These wealthy individuals have generated and sustained their vast riches through their interests and activities in a few important economic sectors, including finance and insurance and pharmaceuticals and healthcare. Companies from these sectors spend millions of dollars every year on lobbying to create a policy environment that protects and enhances their interests further.
- Welcome to the Orwellian world of Wildrose, where keeping your promises makes you a liar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Notwithstanding the unexpected election of a New Democratic Party majority government in Alberta last May 5, 2015, it's pretty obvious a lot of Albertans -- especially the business crowd in Calgary -- still don’t really get this democracy thing.
- We're facing a new Cold War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The linguist and philosopher on the warped coverage of Putin's Russia and the ways we whitewash our war crimes.
- We're Going to Run This City
Winnipeg's Political left after the General Strike Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Explores the dynamic municipal politics thqt came out of the largest labour protest in Canadian history and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
- Western hypocrisy over convictions in Russia of Oleg Sentsov and Alexander Kol’chenko
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Shapinov advocates against the Western disregard for hundreds of criminal cases against oppositionists in Ukraine.
- What austerity has done to Greek healthcare
"What I witnessed appalled me - and brought tears to my eyes" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The shocking 'austerity'-imposed destruction of Greece's once proud healthcare system is a key reason Greeks have turned to Syriza, finds London GP Louise Irvine in an eye witness account.
- What Black Lives Matter means for Labor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An account and analysis of the centrality of the Black freedom struggle to the working class movement as a whole, arguing that the struggle for Black liberation is a precondition for human liberation generallyand recognizing the deep historical thread connecting the centuries-old struggle for Black freedom in the U.S. and the struggle to organize the working class to fight for workers' power.
- What Comes After Capitalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Naomi Klein's incisive critique of capitalism is blunted by her unwillingness to point to its replacement.
- What Does It Mean to Call Dylann Roof a 'Terrorist'?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It would have been unfathomable a year ago for the phrase "white terrorism" to be used by the mainstream media. This shift in discourse is just one effect of the post-Ferguson moment in which there is a halting national discussion of systemic racism. Terminology matters because changing ideological frames is part and parcel of changing policies, institutions, and structures.
- What Does Science Tell Us About Race?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Six points about the complex relation between scientific research and the reality of human group differences.
- What is Going On in Spain?
The End of an Era and the Beginning of Podemos Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Something is happening in Spain. A party that did not exist one year ago, Podemos, with a clear left-wing program, would win a sufficient number of votes to gain a majority in Spanish Parliament if an election were held today.
- What is Lost in Poles' Memories
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Trukhachev reflects on Polish attempts to re-write the history of the Second World War.
- What is Nonviolence Anyhow?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What is it, this nonviolence? Who gets to define it? A kindergarten teacher is nonviolent when she puts a vase of fresh flowers on her desk and smiles at her little students, right? A young man who publicly refuses to be drafted during an invasion of another country is nonviolent, certainly. How about an old man who writes a letter to the editor arguing for peace on Earth?
- What is Stephen Harper doing to Canada? How can we stop him?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Harper regime has had a toxic effect on Canada. The wealthy are better off, but most Canadians are worse off, and rights and freedoms, democracy, access to information, and science have suffered. How can we stop him? Here is a factsheet which can be downloaded, printed, and distributed as a two-sided flyer.
- What Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational agreement that, among other things, threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement.
- What Justice Breyer's Dissent on Lethal Injection Showed About the Death Penalty's Defenders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Just after 2 a.m. on Monday, June 29, 2015 -- some seven hours before the U.S. Supreme Court would reject the latest challenge to the death penalty in Glossip v. Gross -- former death row prisoner Glenn Ford died in Louisiana. Ford, 65, left prison with stage four lung cancer in 2014, after spending almost 30 years facing execution for a crime he did not commit.
- What Really Caused the Implosion of the Occupy Movement - An Insider's View
Taking a hard look at some of the self-sabotaging behaviors of the left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It's a cool night in early October of 2011, the height of Occupy Wall Street. Two months ago I had just moved into my parents' basement, feeling deflated after the end of Bloombergville (a two-week street occupation outside city hall to try to stop the massive budget cuts of that same year), convinced this country wasn't ready for movement. Now I'm in this living room with some of the most impressive people I've ever met, at the shaky helm of a movement that has become part of the mainstream's daily consciousness.
- What Was Missing From Coverage of Netanyahu's Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Reading the lead stories on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress about Iran in five prominent US papers – the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today (all 3/3/15) – what was most striking was what was left out of these articles.
- What We Don't Know Will Hurt Us: Ignorance In The Information Age
Canada Has Changed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The war on knowledge is a war on the health of Canadians. We need a government that will embrace the information age and use evidence to improve our lives. We need a government that has the health of Canadians as its greatest priority. Ten years in, it’s clear that that government is not Stephen Harper’s.
- What's Behind Detroit Happy Talk?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A critical analysis of Detroit's so-called recovery from bankruptcy.
- What's Next for Cuba?
Interview Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Interview with Janette Habel conducted by Jerome Latta and published online by the Left Front in France, December 26, 2014.
- What's really at stake at the Paris climate conference now marches are banned
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The decision to ban demonstrations at the Paris Climate Conference in the wake of the attacks will marginalize those who are most affected by climate change.
- What's Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The French Interior Ministry ordered that five websites be blocked on the grounds that they promote or advocate terrorism.
- When Free Speech Becomes Dead Silence - The Israel Lobby And A Cowed Academia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The sudden cancellation of an academic conference on Israel, as well as the lack of outcry from 'mainstream' media, demonstrates once again the skewed limits to 'free speech' in 'advanced' Western democracies.
- When History Knocks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Naomi Klein is a longtime movement and media icon, a gifted synthesizer and popularizer who, over the past two decades, has been a leading chronicler of anti-corporate, anti-globalization, and anti-capitalist social movements.
- When Marxism is Kids' Stuff
Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Approaches to Children's Literature Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book review of Angela Huber's Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Approaches to Children's Literature.
- When Radicals Beat the Two-Party System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Today, you cannot vote for peace, justice, and environmental sanity within a system predicated on serving the war industry, the wage system sustained by the prison-industrial complex, and deliberate obliviousness to the natural world. Slavery presented the abolitionists with exactly the same problem.
- When 'Salihan' took on the Raj
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Rural Indians were both the foot soldiers of freedom and the leaders of some of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings ever seen. Countless thousands of them sacrificed their lives to rid India of British rule. And many who lived through great suffering to see a free India were mostly forgotten soon after. From the 1990s onwards, p. Sainath recorded the lives of several of the last living freedom fighters.
- When We Fight, We Fuck Shit Up: Keystone XL and Delegitimizing Fossil Fuels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Keystone XL had become a household name when over 1200 people participated in two weeks of sit-ins at the White House demanding that Barack Obama reject the pipeline.
- When will Palestinians learn? Turning to international law isn't the answer - just ask America and Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Throw an old dog a bone and sure enough, he'll go chasing after it. So it is with "Palestine's" request to join the International Criminal Court.
- When Will the Media Really Get Polyamory?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Why do the media so often miss the mark when they write articles or do a feature on polyamory? Why do so many approach the subject with a ready-made idea of what they are looking for?
- When workers' own time begins
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Marx took a long view of realizing freedom in a positive sense. Capitalism, in Marx’s day, used up three generations of workers in a single generation of working days without time limits. The struggle for the eight-hour day spread across the U.S. after the victory over slavery in the Civil War. Marx then traced the generations-long struggle for a normal working day.
- Where Did the Antiwar Movement Go?
War, Sunny Side Up, and the Summer of Slaughter (Vietnam and Today) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I'm not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy. It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer as time passed.
- Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Indeed where do ISIS and al-Qaeda get those wonderful toys we so often see these days triumphantly bedecked with black flags? The ultimate source of virtually all of the jihadists' gear are the deep pockets of the United States government and its client states. Uncle Sam is the veritable Bruce Wayne of Jihad. This was basically admitted in a recently disclosed Defense Intelligence Agency report. But anyone who bothered looking into it could have known this long ago, even if restricting one's self to mainstream sources.
- Where the conspiracies are real
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 US expansionism in Latin America, sometimes violent, sometimes discreet, played such a large role in shaping the history of the continent that many still see the "black hand" of Washington behind every obstacle faced by progressive governments.
- The Whistleblower's Tale
How Jeffrey Sterling Took on the CIA-- and Lost Everything Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 This is how it ended for Jeffrey Sterling. A former covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, Sterling sat down in a federal courtroom with a lawyer on either side, looking up at a judge who would announce in a few moments whether he would go to prison for the next 20 years.
- White and Guilty of the Crime of History?
No. I'm Not Going to the Reeducation Camp Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 I don't think I’m White. I think I am a human being. I don’t know what it is like to be rich and in the top 20 percent of money makers in the USA. I know that I'm color-labeled as White and class-labeled as Middle by the identity and false consciousness hunters that roam the American landscape.
- The White Man in That Photo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sometimes photographs deceive. Take this one, for example. It represents John Carlos and Tommie Smith's rebellious gesture the day they won medals for the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and it certainly deceived me for a long time.
- Who, or What, Is Behind Postmedia's Election Endorsements?
When hedge funds own newspapers, it's difficult to know Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Did thoughtful editors at Postmedia's daily newspapers across Canada consider the needs of their communities and then unanimously decide to endorse the Conservatives in election editorials?
- Whoa Canada
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2015
- Whose Lives Matter in America?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A discussion of Black Lives Matter and the murders of African Americans.
- Why a Future Ride in a Self-Driving Car Could Be a Trip to Advertising Hell
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There's nothing marketers love more than a captive audience. And people don't get any more captive than when they're sitting in a car. That's a powerful motivation for companies developing automated cars, beyond the technical innovation that has made such a vision possible.
- Why Al Jazeera will not say Mediterranean 'migrants'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There is no "migrant" crisis in the Mediterranean. There is a very large number of refugees fleeing unimaginable misery and danger and a smaller number of people trying to escape the sort of poverty that drives some to desperation.
- Why are we afraid of naming and confronting capitalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Many critics of capitalism suggest that capitalism is not the main problem in the world. They do not want to appear, in the eyes of the people and the ruling elite, as too radical or 'ideological'. But the forces for social change must embrace revolutionary engagement with robust ideological clarity: Capitalism is the problem.
- Why big NGOs won't lead the fight on climate change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The cowardly response of prominent climate organizations like 350.org and Avaaz to the protest ban during COP21 demands accountability.
- Why Black Lives Matter Is Game Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Cleveland Black Lives Matter Convening was a "game changer" because it made clear the Movement is long term. Whether its next step will add a call for a break with the two-party system, time and struggle will tell.
- Why Bosses Hate Unions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Unions vastly improve the wages and working conditions of their members. No wonder they're still under attack.
- Why Can't Capitalism Go Green?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 It is more than a quarter of a century since the ruling classes of the world began serious discussions on global warming, in preparation for the 1992 UN-sponsored ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio. Yet no meaningful steps have been taken to tackle the problem, even though the majority of the capitalist establishment has come to understand that something needs to be done. The Paris summit looks very unlikely to break from this pattern. So how can the lack of action be explained?
- Why did Syriza fail?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 How has Syriza ended up this way? This is a question that is tormenting a big part of the left and that all the forces that situate themselves on the left must answer.
- Why Do Jihadis Seem So Evil?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The day before the Paris carnage, two suicide bombers killed at least 40 people in a Shia district of Beirut. The week after, two suicide bombings of street markets in Nigeria killed 49 people. Faced with such atrocities, we can often do little but reach for adjectives such as 'barbarous', 'depraved', or even 'evil'. But what is it that makes people act in such depraved, evil ways?
- Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Article talks about FBI's terrorism strategies and their manipulation of information.
- Why Exxon Executives Deserve the Ultimate Punishment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In a series of articles based on internal documents from Exxon Mobil going back to the 1970s and on interviews with former company scientists and employees, ICN shows that Exxon's "own research confirmed fossil fuels' role in global warming decades ago." Yes, decades ago -- during the late 1970s to be precise.
- Why Greece Doesn't Matter
We have to stop talking about Greece. What must emerge from the calamity of SYRIZA-ANEL is a renewed call for democracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Change in Greece will not come from short-term strategies and tactics of seeking power, but from a long process of coordinated and planned immanent critiques. This political organization will not aim to represent itself in the machinery of parliament -- where the watchful eyes of the IMF and ECB will determine policy -- but will emerge from an organized movement comprising the disenfranchised, the working class, and the intellectual vanguard. It will not compromise. It will instead operate under an ideology for an emancipatory alliance of humanity removed from the spreadsheet, removed from the NATO, and removed from free-market directives. It will not seek to claim power in an election, it will be given it by the people themselves when the movement is ripe.
- Why Hillary Won the Debate (Even though She Didn't)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 CNN and Facebook co-sponsored last week’s Democratic presidential frontrunners' "debate." After the event, CNN conducted a poll. "Who won the debate?" it asked. The result: 83% Bernie Sanders; 12% Hillary Clinton.
- Why I'm Saying Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft
I'm putting more trust in communities than corporations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Gillmor discusses how we are losing control over the technology tools that once promised equal opportunity in speech and innovation.
- Why Is Benjamin Netanyahu Trying To Whitewash Hitler?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted that Adolf Hitler had no intention of exterminating Europe's Jews until a Palestinian persuaded him to do it.
- Why is the Canadian Media Ignoring Evidence of 1948 Massacres?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The better part of a decade ago, I described the Toronto Star's Mitch Potter as "a canary in the mineshaft of liberal Canadian racism." A piece on 1948 Palestine published in a recent edition of the Toronto Star shows the canary very close to asphyxiating.
- Why Is The Daily Beast's Russia Critic Silent About So Many Hideous Abuses?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A comprehensive review by The Intercept of the writings of Sam Charles Hamad - author of this Daily Beast article accusing the "global left" of remaining "silent" on abuses by Russia - reveals that he has been completely silent, shockingly and appallingly so, about the following wide array of severe global injustices, never once writing about, let alone condemning...
- Why Is the U.S. Refusing an Independent Investigation If Its Hospital Airstrike Was an "Accident"?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In Geneva , Doctors Without Borders (MSF) demanded a formal, independent investigation into the U.S. airstrike on its hospital in Kunduz. The group's international president specified that the inquiry should be convened pursuant to war crime-investigating procedures established by the Geneva Conventions and conducted by The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission.
- Why Israel's Netanyahu Is So Desperate to Prevent Peace with Iran
The distinguished professor lays bare Israel's motives Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 For both Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran, says Noam Chomsky.
- Why Logging Forests After Wildfires is Ecologically Destructive
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Bond exposes three prevailing falsehoods about logging that the U.S. Forest Service disseminates.
- Why NGOs and Leftish Nonprofits Suck (4 Reasons)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 NGOs have proliferated like mushrooms all over the world. First deployed in social formations dominated by imperialism, they've now taken over the political scene in capital's base countries as well. They've become the hot new form of capital accumulation, with global reach and billions in revenue. So while ostensibly "non-profit," they serve as a pretty sweet income stream for those at the top, while fattening up large layers of the petite bourgeoisie and draping them like a warm wet blanket over the working class, muffling their demands.
- Why Nonprofits can't lead the 99%
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A seasoned movement elder examines what happens left organizations are led exclusively by college-educated professionals answerable to self-perpetuating boards and philanthropic funders, what happens when union leaderships free themselves from their memberships, and when community organizations become government contractors. Only membership supported and membership-driven organizations, he suggests, can actually lead the 99%.
- Why Not Have Sex With People Who Aren't Your Partner?
Infidelity is treated as selfish, while monogamy is celebrated. But what's so great about living in self-denial? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Although open relationships are not as shocking a concept today as they were 50 years ago, they’re still regarded with overwhelming skepticism and even disdain. The usual assumption is that polyamorous people are selfish, immature, incapable of commitment, and their primary relationship is therefore doomed to failure.
- Why Police Kill So Often
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The FBI reports 404 civilians were killed by police in 2011. All were listed as "justifiable homicides." Under more intense questioning, it was then revealed that figures are not actually kept for "unjustified" police murders and, remarkably, their statistics rely exclusively on incidents self-reported by the cops.
- Why States of Emergency and Extreme Security Measures Won't Stop ISIS
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 There is little sign that the G20 leaders gathered in Turkey have understood the nature of the conflict in which they are engaged. ISIS's military strategy is a unique combination of urban terrorism, guerrilla tactics and conventional warfare. In the past, many states have used terrorism against opponents, but, in the case of ISIS, suicide squads focusing on soft civilian targets at home and abroad are an integral part of its war-making strategy.
- Why the Left Isn't Talking About Rural American Poverty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Within the popular American conscience there are two favoured focal points for discussing the problem of poverty. The first is within the urban, inner city context and the second is the poverty of the Global South: Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and the rest of the developing world. What seldom gets talked about -- and when it is, often with irreverent humor and contempt -- is the poverty of rural America, particularly rural white America: Appalachia, the Ozarks, the Mississippi Delta, the Dakotas, the Rio Grande Valley, the Cotton Belt. So why is the poverty of rural America largely unexamined, even avoided?
- Why the Real Target in the Attack on Stop the War is Jeremy Corbyn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Stop the War, of which I am a founder member, was created to oppose the crude war of revenge against Afghanistan in 2001. I remember arguing at the time that the war would be a disaster for Afghans, it would destabilise neighbouring Pakistan and would end without solving anything.
- Why the Right Loves Privilege Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Right deploys privilege politics to avoid class politics, obscuring where the real power lies in our society.
- Why the rise of fascism is again the issue
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
- Why the United States Leaves Deadly Chemicals on the Market
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Scientists are trained to express themselves rationally. They avoid personal attacks when they disagree. But some scientific arguments become so polarized that tempers fray.
- Why the Western Media Pushes for War on Russia
Operation Get Putin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Author discusses the reasons why the western 'mainstream' media have sharply increased their campaign against Russia and President Putin.
- Why U.S.-Style Health Reform Does Not Work and What to Do about It
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ending the corporate domination of healthcare is part of breaking the domination of the corporate class over our government and our lives. The task is to organize a mass movement that refuses to treat healthcare as a commodity.
- Why We Can't Breathe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On police racism and violence against blacks.
- Why we should feel positive about Paris
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 As the final text of the Paris deal was being wrestled into shape, we were standing near the Arc de Triomphe, underneath a huge red line. This stretch of scarlet fabric was one of many held aloft by chanting and singing members of a 15,000-strong crowd. They - we - were there to demand climate justice; to condemn an international deal that we already knew would cross crucial red lines for the climate. Though the deal was a dud, this was no Copenhagen, argue Jess Worth and Danny Chivers.
- The Wikileaks Files
The World According to US Empire Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 An introduction by Julian Assange exposes the ongoing debates about freedom of information, international surveillance, and justice. With contributions by Dan Beeton, Phyllis Bennis, Michael Busch, Peter Certo, Conn Hallinan, Sarah Harrison, Richard Heydarian, Dahr Jamail, Jake Johnston, Alexander Main, Robert Naiman, Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Linda Pearson, Gareth Porter, Tim Shorrock, Russ Wellen, and Stephen Zunes
- The Wikileaks Files: The World According to US Empire
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 A compilation of contributions from WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, WikiLeaks section editor Sarah Harrison, and a team of journalists, professors, and writers. The book is full of eye-opening scholarly analysis of the diplomatic cables made public by the WikiLeaks group, focusing on the 2010 - 2011 'Cablegate' disclosures. It takes on a huge amount of data and delivers a thorough introduction to the narratives of U.S. policy that the cables reveal.
- Wikileaks releases 'largest trove of docs exposing secret TiSA trade deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 WikiLeaks has published 17 secret documents related to a controversial trade agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors between the US, EU and over 20 WTO members.
- WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In 2010, WikiLeaks became a household name by releasing 251,287 classified State Department cables. The essays that make up The WikiLeaks Files shed critical light on a once secret history.
- Will ANC government ever prosecute South Africans in Israeli Army?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 When South African security services prevented a Cape Town girl from boarding a plane allegedly to join ISIS, many South Africans were pleased but at the same time surprised at how swift the reaction of our security services were. How come the same reaction is not applied to South African Zionist Jews serving in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF)?
- Will climate chaos reign in the Anthropocene?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 To judge by many accounts of climate change, the twenty-first century will gradually become a warmer, stormier, and less biodiverse version of the twentieth. There's an unspoken assumption that the Anthropocene will be less pleasant than the Holocene, but not fundamentally different, and that the transition will be smooth.
- Will El Salvador be forced to pay $301 million for valuing clean water over gold?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The Central American state of El Salvador could be forced to pay US$301 million in damages to an Australian-Canadian mining company, OceanaGold, after the company's application for a mining license was rejected on the basis of the projected environmental damage it would cause.
- Will the Greek elections strengthen the hands of the Global South?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The endorsement of a leftist party is a vote against global lenders imposing governance prescriptions on countries in crisis. If Greece successfully pushes back against its lenders, it will open the door to countries of the Global South to restructure their relationships with lenders such as the World Bank and IMF.
- Wilson's Open Door to World War I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Discussion of the underlying reasons for the United States' participation in World War I.
- A Window on Indigenous Life
Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex and History in the Small Space of Andean Life (Book Review) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Book Review of Andrew Canessa's Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex and History in the Small Space of Andean Life.
- A window to hell in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Spending the day of 17 August in Khuzaa was like peering through a window to hell. But what we witnessed in the landscape of apocalyptic oblivion paled in comparison to the experience described to me by two Palestine Red Crescent volunteers who had attempted to break through the Israeli military cordon during the siege of the town.
- Winners and Losers in Our New Media Moment
Donald Trump, Mass Shootings With an Islamic Terrorist Flavor, and the Rise of the "Spectaculection" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Sometimes what matters most takes up every inch of space in the room and somehow we still don’t see it. That’s how I feel about our present media moment.
- With Power of Social Media Growing, Police Now Monitoring and Criminalizing Online Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Criminal cases for online political speech are now commonplace in the UK, notorious for its hostility to basic free speech and press rights. As The Independent's James Bloodworth reported last week, "around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online."
- With Virtual Machines, Getting Hacked Doesn't Have To Be That Bad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lee explains how to install and use a virtual machine, a fake computer running inside the real computer.
- Women and Socialism
Essays on Women's Liberation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 More than forty years after the women's liberation movement of the 1960s, women remain without equal rights. If anything, each decade that has passed without a fighting women's movement has seen a rise in blatant sexism and the further erosion of the gains that were won in the 1960s and 1970s. This fully revised edition examines these issues from a Marxist perspective, focusing on the centrality of race and class. It includes chapters on the legacy of Black feminism and other movements of women of colour and the importance of the concept of intersectionality. In addition, Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital explores the contributions of socialist feminists and Marxist feminists in further developing a Marxist analysis of women's oppression amid the stirrings of a new movement today.
- Women Under the Gun, 2015
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A discussion of violence against women.
- Women up in Arms: Zapatistas and Rojava Kurds Embrace a New Gender Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Resistance and strength manifest like weeds through cracks in Chiapas, Mexico and transnational Kurdistan where the respective Zapatista and Kurdish resistance movements are creating new gender relations as a primary part of their struggle and process for building a better world. In both places, women's participation in the armed forces has been an entry-point for a new social construction of gender relations based on equity.
- Work Overload: Time for a Union Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Talk to workers in any sector, in any workplace and sooner or later they’ll get to their frustrations with their ever-increasing workloads: ‘I’m struggling’, they’ll lament to fellow workers or anyone ready to listen, ‘to just do the job, never mind do it well’. And yet even though few work-related issues seem to generate more passion, the relentless intensification of every-day work life rarely surfaces as a union priority. Why?
- Worker activism is now the new normal as strikes and protests erupt across China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 China Labour Bulletin’s Strike Map logged record numbers of strikes and worker protests in the first quarter of 2015.
- Workers' Guide to Health and Safety
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Accessible guide to occupational safety. Provides essential tools to support employees, health promoters and union organizers in their efforts to create safer and healthier workplaces.
- Workers of America, Unite! Racism is a Trade Union Issue
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The American working class is the most powerful in the world, is the most productive in the world and we operate the largest and most profitable economy in the world. American workers are also represented by national unions that have the most resources, the biggest staffs and the largest bank accounts, greater than any other trade unions in the world. Yet, without question, American labour is politically the weakest in the world among the large economies, largely because we remain so violently divided.
- Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity
Tackling climate change in a neoliberal world Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Paul Hampton, a Marxist trade union researcher in Britain, addresses the role of workers in the climate justice movement, as well as the tasks of revolutionaries.
- Working Hard in America's Twilight Economy
The Gleaners Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over in the west side of town, gleaners hustle toward the recycling center on Peralta which will pay them cash for their collected goods. They push and pull their rusty supermarket carts filled with bottles, cans and odd goods toward the building before the steel rollup door rumbles down and ends that day's possibility of cash transactions.
- Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution
Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement Resource Type: Book First Published: 2015 Richard Müller, a leading figure of the German Revolution in 1918, is completely unknown today. As the operator and unionist who represented Berlin's metalworkers, he was main organiser of the 'Revolutionary Stewards,' a clandestine network that organised a series of mass strikes between 1916 and 1918. With strong support in the factories, the Revolutionary Stewards were the driving force of the Revolution. By telling Müller's story, this study gives a very different account of the revolutionary birth of the Weimar Republic. Using new archival sources and abandoning the traditional focus on the history of political parties, Ralf Hoffrogge zooms in on working class politics on the shop floor and its contribution to social change.
- Workplace Violence: Silent Epidemic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Workplace violence ranges from threats and curses to murder. Spitting on bus drivers is so common in New York City that their union won them DNA kits last year, to collect saliva.
- Workshop Talks: Reclaim our labor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Lin discusses the precarious conditions under which healthcare labourers work.
- The World Bank Group's Uncounted
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The World Bank has regularly failed to live up to its own policies for protecting people harmed by projects it finances. Over the last decade, projects funded by the World Bank have physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, forcing them from their homes, taking their land or damaging their livelihoods.
- World Bank Projects Leave Trail of Misery Around Globe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 In developing countries around the globe, forest dwellers, poor villagers and other vulnerable populations claim the World Bank -- the planet's oldest and most powerful development lender -- has left a trail of misery.
- World Charter of Free Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 A charter for the democratization of communication.
- The world is my country
A Visual Celebration of the People and Movements that Opposed the First World War Resource Type: Website First Published: 2015 The First World War centenary (2014-2018) is being accompanied by a tidal wave of events, exhibitions, TV series, books and commemorations. However, one key aspect of the War’s history is receiving little or no attention: the history and stories of the people and organisations that opposed the conflict, and took action to stop it.
- 'Worse Than We Thought': TPP A Total Corporate Power Grab Nightmare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On issues ranging from climate change to food safety, from open Internet to access to medicines, the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) is a disaster.
- The worst thing for a journalist is being cut off from his audience
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Slovenian investigative journalist, writes about his experiences of working under pressure while he was investigating irregularities in the organs of repression.
- Wretched US Journalism on Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The most dangerous violation of journalistic principles has occurred in the Ukraine crisis, which has the potential of a nuclear war.
- WTO is back. And this time, no more Mr Nice Guy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Overtaken by massive regional trade agreements like TPP, TTIP, CETA and TINA, the World Trade Organisation has slipped into the background. But this week it's back with a vengeance, with its first big meeting in two years. The US's plan is to globalise the investment protection regime set out in the TTP, and open a new era of corporate rule and the eradication of democracy.
- WTO Ruling on Dolphin-Safe Tuna Labeling Illustrates Supremacy of Trade Agreements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 International trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) need to be carefully examined piece by piece because they can take precedence over a country's own laws.
- XKEYSCORE: NSA's Google for the World's Private Communications
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The NSA's XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people's Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing.
- Ya'alon Bans "Breaking the Silence"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said, on Tuesday, that he had banned Israeli veteran group Breaking the Silence from participating in any official activities with Israeli forces, Israeli media reported.
- Yemen as Laboratory: Why is the West So Silent About This Savage War?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 What is at stake in Yemen that far more systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions than in any of the recent wars which Western powers have supported in the Arab world (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Gaza) are met with resounding silence? For six months there has been a blockade of food and fuel, and management of aid (even that through the UN) as part of war strategy, bombing of civilian, historical, educational, religious and medical targets, destruction of infrastructure from roads to electricity and water, and use of prohibited weapons.
- 'Yes, I Lied': Vindicating Villagers, Star Chevron Witness Busted for Perjury
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Chevron has taken the people of Ecuador and the U.S. court system on a ride, full of lies, deliberate delay, and obstruction of justice, says Amazon Watch.
- Yes, There is an Imperialist Ruling Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Contemporary history is neither a series of random occurrences nor the predetermined plaything of a small cabal of super-empowered conspirators. The truth is somewhere in-between.
- "Yes, We're Corrupt": A List of Politicians Admitting That Money Controls Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Schwarz gives a list of examples where politicians acknowledge that money has an impact on what they do.
- Zapatista Communities: "Resistance and Rebellion Are Our Weapons"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 From May 2nd to May 9th the Zapatistas hosted a tribute to fallen comrades, a celebration of resistance, and a seminar to "provoke thought, reflection, critique." This article presents some of the words of Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés in the event.
- A Zapatista 'Seminar' in Chiapas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 On the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas, famed colonial center of the southern state of Chiapas, over a thousand people from all over Mexico and beyond are attending a weeklong seminar "Critical Thinking Confronting the Capitalist Hydra." It was conceived and organized by the Zapatistas, the Chiapas-based armed insurgency.
- Zapatista women explain things
A review of Compañeras: Zapatista Women's Stories by Hilary Klein (Seven Stories, 2015) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015
- Zionist Power: Swindlers and Impunity, Traitors and Pardons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Over two decades ago, Harvard political science professor, Samuel Huntington, argued that global politics would be defined by a 'clash of civilizations'. His theories have found some of the most aggressive advocates among militant Zionists, inside Israel and abroad.
- Zionist Theatre
From Zundel to Topham Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 The trials of Arthur Topham, Canadian journalist and publisher of Radical Press, for "hate crime" (2007) and "hate propaganda" (2012) under new Criminal Code "Hate Propaganda" legislation, have resulted in exactly the opposite of what the prosecution and B'Nai Brith, wanted. Instead of quietly muzzling the gadfly critic, the result has been the highlighting of past Jewish hate crimes, and the increasing control by Zionist groups of Canadian politics to promote Israel and censor anti-Zionist criticism.
- Zombie Cookie: The Tracking Cookie That You Can’t Kill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 An online ad company called Turn is using tracking cookies that come back to life after Verizon users have deleted them. The information retrieved contains customers' habits on their smartphones and tablets.
- Zombie neoliberalism threatens Ecuador's 'citizen's revolution'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2015 Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and social movements behind Ecuador's "Citizens' Revolution" are engaged in yet another battle against the South American country's elites.
2014
- Academic Fraud and the Ponzi Scheme of 'Higher Learning'
Higher Education in Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It’s sad to say, but U.S. higher education increasingly resembles a pyramid scheme. The schools at the top continue to compete for elite students, by appealing to prospective applicants via the creation of a slew of amenities (the "climbing wall" phenomenon) and offering a unique college "experience." Non-elite colleges and universities are the losers in this process, fighting with each other for a dwindling number of state tax dollars amidst huge increases in tuition costs.
- Academic Freedom in Conflict
The Struggle Over Free Speech Rights in the University Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A look into the changing landscape of the academia, in which government, judges and major donors threaten academic freedom.
- Activist Endurance
A Look Back at the 2004 RNC Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Even in the face of urgent, ecocidal issues, dissent is a marathon, not a sprint. With authentic solidarity, a daily ego check, and an enduring willingness to evolve, we can each find our pace and help make a difference.
- Adolph Reed Jr.: The Surrender of America's Liberals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. talks with Bill Moyers about his provocative titled article in the March issue of Harper's Magazine, and why the left is no longer a significant force in American politics.
- Advocates Argue Free Transit Benefits Us All
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Pablo analyzes the economic, environmental, and social benefits that a fareless public transportation system would provide Canadian cities.
- African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 To Anderson Abbott, the American Civil War was "a war for humanity," a battle "between civilization and barbarism." It was also a struggle that the first Canadian-born black doctor in present-day Ontario felt compelled to join as a surgeon in the Union army.
- Africa's Farm Revolution - Who will Benefit?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A farming revolution is under way in Africa, pushed by giant corporations and the UK's aid budget. It will surely be good for the global economy, but will Africa's small farmers see the benefit?
- The Aftermath of Israel's Latest Assault on Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On August 26, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was agreed upon, bringing a fragile end to a war that killed 2,150 Palestinians (mostly civilians) and 73 Israelis (mostly soldiers). Since then Hamas has not fired a single rocket, attacked an Israeli target, or done anything to break the terms of the ceasefire.
- Against Our Better Judgement
How the U.S. was used to create Israel Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 An account of how U.S. support enabled the creation of modern Israel, and of how U.S. politicians pushed this policy over the forceful objections of top diplomatic and military experts.
- Against the Grain: The British far left from 1956
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Against the Grain views the "far-left" as anything to the left of the British Labour Party. This includes the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Red Action, the Socialist Party (SP), the SWP, other left groupings and anarchist groups.
- The Agrarian Question in the Russian Revolution
From Material Community to Productivism, and Back Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This article was conceived as Part One of a three-part series which would be: 1) the revolutionary epoch 1917–1923, and the ultimately disastrous international influence of the Russian Revolution, illustrated in the cases of the very early French, German, Italian and US Communist Parties; 2) the failed return of the “vanguard party” (Trotskyism, Maoism) in the period from 1968 to 1977 and 3) the ongoing recomposition of the world working class, and forms of worker organization and self-organization, today and tomorrow.
- Agri-Terrorists Accuse Seed Bank of Agri-Terrorism
The Terror of GMOs Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since their beginnings, the USDA and state departments of agriculture have heavily subsidized, and acted as the enforcement arm of, the corporate agribusiness crime syndicate, terrorizing people who presume to feed themselves without paying tribute to their corporate crime lords.
- Agriculture: Steps to sustainable livestock
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With improved breeding and cultivation, ruminant animals can yield food that is better for people and the planet.
- Alberta - tar sands emissions linked to health damage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A report by Alberta's energy regulator links emissions from tar sands oil production with serious health impacts that have forced families to flee their homes in the Peace River region.
- Allan Sekula, Against the Grain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A tribute to the photographer, film-maker, cultural theorist, political activist, and Marxist intellectual, Allan Sekula.
- An alternative media list
Getting the news - and getting behind the news Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Published: 2017 A selective list of English-language alternative media.
- An Alternative to 'Safe Spaces'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Mike Macnair argues that 'safe spaces' aren't liberating -- and proposes an alternative.
- The American Deep State
Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Scott makes a compelling case for a hidden "deep state," a second order of government behind the public or constitutional state, that influences and often opposes official U.S. policies.
- American Revolutionary
The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 A documentary about the ideas and activism of 98-year-old Grace Lee Boggs, covering her lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labour to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond. Boggs’s constantly evolving strategy -- her willingness to re-evaluate and change tactics in relation to the world shifting around her -- drives the story forward.
- America's corporate revolt against clean energy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The US's fossil fuel industry is scared at the growth of solar power, and its ever-declining market cost. So it's fighting back, doing its best to quash solar growth by imposing new costs and restrictions.
- Americas Radical, Underground Climate Change Countermovement
Smoking Out the Kochs Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The year is 2050; rising seas have inundated Miami, America’s most recent ghost city since Detroit. A deadly heat wave scorches Chicago, killing thousands of elderly, and a mega-drought has farmers in the Southwest on their knees, praying for relief, as a dreadful dustbowl blankets the fields. America goes hungry.
- America's Recruitment of Nazis -- Then and Now
Any bastard, so long as he's anti-communist Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The most prominent feature of the Nazi political philosophy was extreme anticommunism and particularly fanatic hatred of the USSR. That hatred set the world ablaze, and, yet, after the war, the Nazi administrators, chief intelligence officers, generals, police chiefs, and intellectuals of that regime of hatred and war were recruited to continue their work in the bosom of our secret National Security State, advising, influencing, and promoting our foreign policy in the Cold War. Did that policy change with the fall of the Berlin Wall? No, it intensified -- still absolutist, still aggressive, still dedicated to political warfare. Russia is still in our crosshairs.
- America's Repugnant Republicans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There is a qualitative difference between today’s Democrats and Republicans. That difference does not lie in the potential to pursue policies that negatively impact the world. The difference is in their attitude toward policy and action as such. While both parties are often dangerously wrong, the Republicans are wrong in a demented ideological fashion. As such, they really are more repugnant than the Democrats.
- America's Use of Terror in Vietnam
The Evil That Was Phoenix Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There’s a reason the CIA wanted to prevent the publication of Douglas Valentine’s 1990 book, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam. This masterwork is more than an exposé of the US pacification program in Vietnam the book is titled after. It is an indictment of a cynical and bloody plan to kill Vietnamese.
- An Analysis of 12F
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A discussion of the events, factors, and actors involved in the protests, deaths, injuries, and arrests in Caracas on Venezuela's annual 'Youth Day'.
- Anarchism in the Rear-view Mirror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is not an attack on the militancy of our libertarian comrades. This text is an attempt to clarify our practices to avoid repeating the historical mistakes of the labor movement, addresses the comrades who are beginning to make a synthesis between Marxism and anarchism.
- And More Fraud Is in the Works
Virtual Economy's Phantom Job Gains are Based on Statistical Fraud Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Washington can't stop lying. Don't be convinced by a recent job report that it is your fault if you don't have a job. Those 288,000 jobs and 6.1% unemployment rate are more fiction than reality.
- And The May Uprising Continues
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Remembrance of the brave women and men of Gwangju, responsible for sowing the seeds of democracy in the Republic of Korea while opposing the infamous martial law and dictatorship. Ten days, starting from May 18, 1980, they made the streets theirs, challenging the might of the State. As the historic May Democratic Uprising is witnessing its 34 th anniversary, Gwangju is celebrating and reminding herself to keep the memory of resistance alive, resistance against oppression and injustice that their heroes had upheld.
- Another Politics: Talking Across Today's Transformative Movements.
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Dixon examines the trajectory of efforts that contributed to the radicalism of Occupy Wall Street and other recent movement upsurges. He presents the histories and principles that shape many contemporary struggles.
- Another Successful American Propaganda Effort
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 American political figures like to talk about "American Democracy". The truth is, there is no "American Democracy", it is something that our rulers like to foist upon the World stage much like parents like to tell their children about Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. It's fiction made in order to keep their "children" in line.
- Antarctica's Accelerating Ice Collapse
Massive Sea Level Rise in Decades Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Imagine Antarctica. Imagine an island, with mountains, peaks, ridges, and valleys. Imagine further that a thick layer of ice covers, not only the surface of the island that lies above the sea but also an extensive portion of the perimeter that is beneath the sea. The peaks are higher above sea level than on any continent. In winter, the sea freezes because temperatures drop to less than -80 degrees Celsius (-112 degrees Farenheight), and the island’s area grows to about 10 million square miles. In summer when some of the ice melts, the ice cover remains on average more than a mile thick, although the overall surface area of the island shrinks to about five million square miles. Even in summer, however, the island is still larger than Europe or Australia. It is Antarctica, and it is impossible to imagine.
- The Anti-Empire Report #124
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of historical and current American imperialist activities.
- The Anti-Empire Report #126
Ukraine Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When it gets complicated and confusing, when you’re overwhelmed with too much information, changing daily; too many explanations, some contradictory … try putting it into some kind of context by stepping back and looking at the larger, long-term picture.
- The Anti-Empire Report #127
Indoctrinating a new generation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Is there anyone out there who still believes that Barack Obama, when he’s speaking about American foreign policy, is capable of being anything like an honest man?
- The Anti-Empire Report #132
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Each of you I’m sure has met many people who support American foreign policy, with whom you’ve argued and argued. You point out one horror after another, from Vietnam to Iraq. From god-awful bombings and invasions to violations of international law and torture. And nothing helps. Nothing moves this person. Now why is that? Are these people just stupid? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions. Consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, and if you don’t deal with these basic beliefs you may as well be talking to a stone wall. The most basic of these basic beliefs, I think, is a deeply-held conviction that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the government of the United States means well.
- The Anti-Semitic and Pro-Terror Myths
The Politics of Distraction Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Past victimization does not excuse current victimizing. Because Jews in Europe had to carry identification cards, use separate streets, live in segregated neighborhoods, etc., does not justify Israel in forcing Palestinians to suffer these same indignities.
- The Anxious Worker
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The author looks at the contemporary conditions of work and examines how these give rise to anxiety and depression.
- AP Blasts "Russian Propaganda War" Over Ukraine
Herding the Media Sheep Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Peter Leonard’s March 15 Associated Press report is entitled: “Russian propaganda war in full swing over Ukraine.” “This is Ukraine today,” he begins, “at least as seen by most Russian news media: the government is run by anti-Semitic fascists, people killed by opposition snipers and the west is behind it all.”
- Appalachia Rising
Which Side Are You On? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On January 9, 2014, a dangerous toxin, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, leaked from a busted tank and into the Elk River in West Virginia. It is believed that nearly 7,500 gallons of the toxin made its way from the 40,000-gallon tank into the river. This is a story too often told in Appalachia.
- Arab Media on the Brink
The Age of TV Jokers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the last year or so in Egypt, much of what has been achieved in terms of carving space for alternative voices in the Egyptian media was quickly and decisively reversed.
- Are We Being Driven Like Cattle?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As we stand in line for security checks at airports, we may have the distinct feeling that we are being herded like cattle. The purpose of the charade is not so much to prevent airliners from being sabotaged as it is to keep the idea of terrorism fresh in our minds.
- Armed robbery in Gaza - Israel, US, UK carve up the spoils of Palestine's stolen gas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel desperately covets Gaza's gas as a 'cheap stop-gap' yielding revenues of $6-7 billion a year, writes Nafeez Ahmed. But first Hamas must be 'uprooted' from Gaza, and Fatah bullied into cutting off its talks with Russia's Gazprom.
- Army Detonates Two Homes In Hebron, Seals One With Concrete Blocs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli soldiers wired and detonated two Palestinian homes in Hebron city, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank, and sealed the home of a third Palestinian with concrete. A Palestinian home was also demolished in occupied East Jerusalem.
- The Arrest and Detention of Amer Jubran
This is Not News Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Amer Jubran might sit indefinitely in detention without charges. Or he may be brought up at any time and charged with “terrorism” before the State Security Court, a rubber stamp court. If so, his lawyer might be told the charges a day or two before the sham trial, which then leads to inevitable conviction–a mere formality. Only a concerted political campaign that gets widespread international attention can make any difference. It’s up to us to create enough visibility to make that possible.
- Arsenic-Laced Coffee is Good for You
Would You Like Sugar With That? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Environmental Protection Agency, in 2013, identified about 1,000 chemicals that the oil and gas industry uses in fracking operations, most of them carcinogens at the strengths they shove into the earth.
- The Astounding Violence Of Israeli Colonialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Recently the world watched the horrific violence perpetrated inside Gaza, as 2,159 Palestinians - including 577 children, 263 women and 102 elderly - were killed during Israel's Operation Protective Edge over the course of 50 days. Zionist supporters, as usual, managed to rationalize the killing by blaming the victims, best exemplified by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's nauseating claim that Hamas "want(s) to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because ... they use telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause."
- The Atrocity
Where's the Outrage Over a Boy Burnt to Death? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Bombs are raining on Gaza and rockets on Southern Israel, people are dying and homes are being destroyed...Again without any purpose. Again with the certainty that after it’s all over, everything will essentially be the same as it was before.
- The Attack on the People of Gaza
Go ahead and stop us... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 According to the conventional wisdom, the purpose of Israel’s assault on Gaza is self-defense, i.e., to stop rocket fire and to destroy “terror tunnels”. However, the facts include repeated attacks on hospitals, an open air market, UN schools designated as safe refuges, playgrounds, zoos, Gaza’s only power plant, etc.) by means of high-tech “smart weapons”, and these attacks are inconsistent with the notion of self-defense. These are calculated, deliberate attacks on civilians and the numbers speak for themselves: about 80% of Israel’s victims are non-combatants, including at least (for now) 318 kids.
- August 1914 and World War I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Smaldone analyzes the political circumstances during WWI to explain why socialism as an international movement failed to take hold and ultimately collapsed.
- Austerity Against Democracy
An Authoritarian Phase of Neoliberalism? Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2014
- Austerity U
Preparing Students for Precarious Lives Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Policy-makers are introducing big changes to university systems under the banner of an austerity agenda. Globally common themes in this agenda include rapid increases in tuition fees, new models of university governance, new ways of teaching, a significant shift in subject matter, an attempt to depoliticize campuses, and major alterations in employment relations.
- Australia: Socialist Alliance's 'International Political Perspectives' Resolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Resolutions adopted by the 10th National Conference of the Socialist Alliance, June 7-9, 2014.
- Australia's Asylum Policy
Teenage Detainees' Plight Shines Light on Regime Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Human rights groups say Coalition's hardline approach to immigration flies in the face of international law.
- Author Donald Gutstein reveals extent of Stephen Harper revolution in new book Harperism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada (James Lorimer & Company Ltd.), Gutstein makes the case that neoliberalism is far more sinister than simply having a desire for smaller government. A central tenet of his new book is that Harper is undermining democracy by marshalling the power of government to create and enforce markets where they’ve never existed before.
- Badass Teachers Unite!
Reflections on Education, History, and Youth Activism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Mark Naison exposes how dominant education Reform policies destabalize low income communities.
- Badass Teachers Unite! Reflections on Education, History, and Youth Activism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Collection of essays on education and youth activism draws from Naison's research on Bronx History and his experiences defending teachers and students from school reform policies which undermine their power and creativity. Naison's focus is identifying teaching and organizing strategies that have worked effectively in New York, and could be implemented in impoverished communities elsewhere.
- The Ballad of Rivka and Mohammad
A song for Gaza Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2014
- Barrett Brown's Partial Victory: Crowd-Sourcing and Crowd Support
If They Drop These Charges, Why Aren't They Dropping All of Them? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Federal prosecutors last week dropped several of the most significant charges facing Internet activist and journalist Barrett Brown — charges that could have drawn a jail sentence of 105 years.
- The Battle for Justice in Palestine
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Ali Abunimah takes a comprehensive look at the shifting tides of the politics of Palestine and the Israelis in a neoliberal world?and makes a compelling and surprising case for why the Palestine solidarity movement just might win. He provides an effective strategy for advancing the struggle for a just, single-state solution in Palestine.
- The Battle of Orgreave
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Battle of Orgreave on 18 June, 1984, saw the establishment carry out a mighty state-organised riot, a conspiracy to trap striking miners and unleash brutality on a scale never experienced before in an industrial dispute in Britain.
- Battle of the Somme: the horrific epitome of the first world war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Thousands of men who went over the top that morning thought they would meet little resistance. 57,000 were dead or wounded by the end of the day.
- Battle to Preserve Palestine's History Rages in New Novel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Radwa Ashour's novel The Woman from Tantoura: A Modern Palestinian Novel (American University in Cairo Press, 2014).
- BDS: Non-Violent Resistance to Israeli Occupation
Is Israel Running Scared? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An outline of the extent and support/opposition of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli apartheid, including a discussion of claims that the campaign is anti-Semitic.
- Be Careful What You Fight For
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 How do the few haves stay on top of the many have-nots? After generations of domination, the haves know how to do it pretty well. They know how to divide and conquer the have-nots. This is the secret of their power.
- Beat off the vulture's swoop
The judge who took an economy hostage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Emerging economies need to issue their state bonds in financial centres where the law blocks vulture funds from profiting from financial woes. New York is off the list.
- Beautiful Trouble - Pocket Edition
A Toolbox for Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Ideas for organizers.
- Beginner's guide to improving online security
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Investigative journalists like the members of ICIJ are facing growing concerns about security. Our members often work with leaks or other materials requiring protection of sources, collaborate across borders with colleagues at risk for their physical safety, and communicate with devices and services open to surveillance or attack.
- Behind the Lies About Venezuela's Protests
John Kerry: the Belligerent Diplomat Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 US Secretary of State John Kerry recently called on the Venezuelan government to end the "terror campaign against its own citizens."
- The Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth
A Response to Economic Sabotage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 November 9 marks the 25th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The extravagant hoopla began months ago in Berlin. In the United States we can expect all the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny to be trotted out.
- Best Government Money Can Buy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Revolving Door Syndrome in the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex
- Bethlehem: 'No matter how many olive trees they destroy, will will plant more!'
The destruction of these ancient trees is the destruction of both the history and future of the Palestinian people. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since 1967, Israeli soldiers and 'settlers' in occupied Palestine have destroyed 800,000 olive trees in an attempt to force Palestinian farmers from their land, writes Megan Perry. 'Our response to this injustice will never be with violence, and we will never give up and leave.'
- Bethune in Spain
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 After getting divorced, being diagnosed with tuberculosis, and failing to introduce medicare to Canada, Norman Bethune left this country. In 1935, the Spanish Civil War began, and Bethune, who supported the Rupublican government during the war, was determined to offer his medical services. He went on to become recognized internationally as a surgeon and for creating and operating a mobile blood transfusion unit.
- Bias Towards Power *Is* Corporate Media 'Objectivity'
Journalism, Floods and Climate Silence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Journalistic bias in favour of the orthodox Western-centric socio-economic perspective is often framed as "objectivity", and departures from the orthodox Western-centric socio-economic perspective are often dismissed as "ideological'. A review of the incidence and framing of climate change reporting illustrates this.
- Big Oil's Chokehold on Canadian Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The fight against Big Oil corporatism may be the most important one you ever support.
- Biggest Strike In China's History Enters 6th Day: Police Arrested Organizers, Workers Battle SWAT Troops
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The largest strike in China's history has entered the sixth day, defying state attempts to repress workers struggling against economic and social injustice. Police arrested several organizers of the strikers at the Yue Yuen factory, which produces shoes for Nike and Adidas.
- Bill Clinton's Most Abominable Freedom Fighters Uncloaked
Return to Kosovo Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Unfortunately, Bill Clinton will never be held liable for killing innocent Serbs or for helping body-snatchers take over a nation the size of Connecticut. Clinton is reportedly being paid up to $500,000 for each speech he gives nowadays. Perhaps some of the well-heeled attendees could flourish artificial arms and legs in the air to showcase Clinton’s actual legacy.
- Bill Gates and the Push to Privatize Public Education
An Interview With Mercedes K. Schneider Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- The biological basis of resilient cities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Biological systems offer design strategies for successfully adapting to an age of climate change and resource depletion. Insights from nature will be essential in creating a green and sustainable future for humankind.
- Biology Fortified, Inc. misleads the public on GMO safety
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- The Birth of a National Anti-Nuclear Movement
A Chapter from the Oral History of How the No Nukes Movement (1973-1982) Saved the United States and Maybe the World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 “The year 1973 was the worst year for nuclear power,” Bill McGee, a retired nuclear industry spokesman, told us when he agreed to be interviewed for this book. “It’s just astonishing when you look back on it. When we built the Yankee Atomic plant in Rowe, Massachusetts, in 1960, everybody thought it was a great idea. It was there because Senator Jack Kennedy said, ‘Please build it here.’ Presidents, senators, congressmen, local people—all thought it was great. And we built six other plants. New England had, prior to 1972, seven plants making one third of the electricity in New England. And everybody thought it was a great idea. What happened?”
- The Bizarre Compulsion of Black Men to "Reach for their Waistbands"
Waistband-Reaching Syndrome Could Get You Killed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If police accounts are to be believed, there is a bizarre urge among young, unarmed black men to provoke their own murder by "reaching for their waistbands" when cops are aiming service revolvers at them.
- Black History and the Class Struggle
#24 Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2014
- Black Sites across America
Health Care in US Prisons: a Human Rights Issue Hiding in Plain Sight Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There are 2.3 million people in US prisons in conditions that are often inhumane and at worst life threatening. The most striking aspect of this scene is the lack of decent medical care for prisoners, whether in solitary confinement or in the general prison population.
- The Black War
Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Clements' book presents the Black War as a horrifying and brutal guerrilla war of attrition. It not only led to the virtual extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, it also took many hundred colonial lives and impacted on every colonial family in Tasmania. Yet unlike the first world war, it is barely recognised today as a major event in Australian history.
- Black Workers, Fordism and the UAW
Book Review of Bates's "The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of Beth Tompkins Bates's analysis of how the automotive industry provided an opportunity for African Americans to fight for equal working rights, unionize, and forge an alliance with white workers.
- Blackwater Founder Remains Free and Rich While His Former Employees Go Down on Murder Charges
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A federal jury in Washington, D.C., returned guilty verdicts against four Blackwater operatives charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians and wounding scores of others in Baghdad in 2007.
- Blair: Bombing Iraq Better. Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The authors critique the British media's coverage of a new essay by Tony Blair which attempts to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.
- Blocking Public Participation
The Use of Strategic Litigation to Silence Political Expression Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Examines the different types of litigation and causes of action that frequently form the basis of SLAPPs (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), and how these lawsuits transform political disputes into legal cases, thereby blocking political engagement.
- Bloodshed in Kiev
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Rob Jones looks at the different forces behind the Ukraine crisis.
- The Blossoming of Idle No More
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The First Nations-led movement Idle No More emerged in Canada in December 2012 to protest legislation that threatened both the rights of First Nations and environmental protections. The movement has since spread into the U.S. and beyond – and has become one of the central voices in the struggle for Indigenous and ecological justice.
- The Blue Engine Behind Fracked Gas Exports PR Blitz
"Our Energy Moment" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Behind nearly every major corporate policy push there’s an accompanying well-coordinated public relations and propaganda campaign. As it turns out, the oil and gas industry’s push to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) plays the same game, in this case via the industry-led PR blitz "Our Energy Moment".
- Bob Carty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Celebrating Bob Carty (1950 – 2014). Tribute given by John Foster on March 10, 2014.
- Bobby Hutton's Hands Were Up
The Search for Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has catalyzed intense U.S. anti-policing/ police demilitarization movement activity, with Ferguson serving as an urgent training ground and meeting point for anti-policing thinkers, writers, artists and activists.
- Bold Scientists
Dispatches from the Battle for Honest Science Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Accounts of scientists working in the public interest despite powerful opposition.
- Bolivian reality versus the 'extractivism' debate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Some left critics of progressive governments in South America point to differences between 'pro-extractivists' and 'anti-extractivists.' Federico Fuentes says that framework hinders real understanding of the issues.
- Bolivians Demand Justice for 2003 Gas War Massacre
Thousands March in El Alto Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Thousands of people marched in El Alto, Bolivia on October 17th, 2014 to demand justice for the 2003 massacre of over 60 people during the country’s Gas War under the Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (Goni) administration. Sanchez de Lozada is currently living freely in the US, and marchers demanded he and others in his government be brought to Bolivia to be tried for ordering the violence.
- The Bonobo Way
The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Author Susan Block writes: "The most revolutionary way bonobos use sex is for conflict resolution. It’s the main reason why these apes are my heroes."
- Born in Gaza
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Born in Gaza provides an intimate, deep look of how violence transforms the lives of ten children in Gaza.
- Borneo's Killer Dams
Mega-Dams in Sarawak Threaten Indigenous Tribes with Ethnocide Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Sarawak, Malaysia, is home to thousands of endemic species, forty indigenous groups, and one of the largest transboundary rainforests remaining in the world. The state is also suffering from one of the world's highest rates of deforestation; only 5% of its primary forests remain. Now, Sarawak's forests and their inhabitants face another threat: the damming of its rivers for hydroelectric power.
- Bosnia's Magnificent Uprising
Heralding a New Era of Class Politics? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Beginning in February 2014, mass protests led by workers, students, and other citizens, have rocked most major industrial cities in Bosnia. Whatever the current uprising is or is not, it is the largest mass outbreak of unalloyed class struggle revolt, untouched by nationalist poison, that we have seen in Bosnia since it was ripped to bits by Serbian and Croatian nationalists.
- Breadking the Grid, Making Our Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Yang provides a reading of E.P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" through the lens of contemporary and historical working-class revolutions and struggles.
- Breaking the last taboo - Gaza and the threat of world war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Pilger discusses the attack on Gaza and the denial of justice to Palestinians. He warns against the threat of a new world war growing by the day.
- BRICS [Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa] and the tendency to sub-imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Despite their anti-imperialist potential, BRICS states have promoted neo-liberal and imperialist practices that facilitate capital accumulation, resource extraction and expansion of their markets. But growing popular unrest against exploitation, ecological destruction and neoliberalism in the BRICS countries may lead to a different, anti-imperialist, course.
- Bringing Books and Seeking Peace in Colombia
Bringing Peace to a Beleaguered Country Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A teacher, two donkeys, and a big pile of books are working to enrich the lives of the children in a small community in Colombia.
- The British Warrior Who 'Matured with Age'
A Kuffiya for Tony Benn Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Long before the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign inched slowly from the fringes of global solidarity with Palestinians to take center stage, Tony Benn had been advocating a boycott of Israel with unrestricted conviction, for years.
- Brooklyn Report
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Tonight, December 8, Lebron James came through on his promise to wear an "I Can’t Breathe" T-shirt during the warm-ups before the Cavaliers game with the Brooklyn Nets at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn.
- The Brown Revolution in Ukraine
The Spectacle in Kiev Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Kiev is now patrolled by armed thugs from the Western Ukraine, by fighters from the neo-Nazi -Right Sector, descendants of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Quisling’s troopers, and by their local comrades-in-arms of nationalist persuasion.
- Bug spotting: Germans hold 'nature walks' to observe rare NSA spy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 'Nature' walks leading protests against digital surveillance.
- Building people power in Toronto: Next Steps
A discussion document on strategy for advancing the organization of people's struggles in Toronto Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 BASICS was launched in 2006 to serve the immediate purpose of building a fight against gentrification in Lawrence Heights. As our paper’s readership grew in this and other communities, our membership did as well, ultimately extending our organization’s coverage and connection to many more issues facing the most exploited, precarious, and brutalized sections of the working class in Toronto.
- Burkina Faso: climate change, land grabs, and revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The economic tensions between local producers and international powers that have contributed to the revolutionary dissatisfaction with the establishment in Burkina Faso can be found in virtually any country subject to the harsh and cruel conditions of the global land grab and the crisis of climate change.
- Burnaby Mountain battle: our notes from the courts, the woods and 100 arrests
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 History unfolded on Burnaby Mountain. This is the Vancouver Observer's account of what we saw.
- By Any Means Necessary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Dave Hann's book Physical Resistance: A Hundred Years of Anti-fascism (Zero, 2013).
- California Leads the Way in the "Block the Boat" Movement
Fighting the Occupation on the West Coast Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In organizing theory, activists often emphasize the importance of formulating what they call an "escalation plan." When pushing for social change, they explain, it is important that one's methods of exerting pressure on power slowly grow in strength, not remain stagnant. Block the Boat is the next step in the escalation plan of US Palestinian solidarity activists. The idea of Block the Boat is quite simple: Hundreds of activists organize a protest in a local dock and prevent Israeli ships from unloading cargo.
- Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth.
- Call the Cops at Your Own Peril
Bullies in Blue Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 “Live free or die” is the motto of the state of New Hampshire. I hope the residents are prepared to die, because living free is not what they do. NH is merely a cog within the Amerikan Stasi State.
- Cambodia: indigenous protests repel dam builders - so far
We don't need any compensation because we are staying here on the lands of our ancestors. Our children will never forgive us if we move. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since the 1980s Cambodia has lost 84% of its primary forests, and the remote Cardamom mountains are the country's last great natural treasure. Just the place for grandiose dam projects? 'No way!" say indigenous people and young eco-activists.
- Campaign to Halt Female Genital Mutilation tops 150,000 Signatures
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Guardian-backed campaign calls on Education Secretary Michael Gove to launch initiative to protect girls from being mutilated.
- Camus in the Time of Drones
The Long-Distance Executioners Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 What would Albert Camus, the great moralist of the 20th century and essayist on the barbarity of the death penalty, think about the latest innovation in administrative murder, Obama’s drone program, a kind of remote-control gallows?
- Can Civilization Survive "Really Existing Capitalism"? An Interview With Noam Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the occasion of the release of his latest book, Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013, Noam Chomsky gave an exclusive and wide-ranging interview to C.J. Polychroniou.
- Can We Criticize Foucault?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since his death in 1984, Michel Foucault's work has become a touchstone for the academic left worldwide. But in a provocative new book published in Belgium last month, a team of scholars led by sociologist Daniel Zamora raises probing questions about Foucault's relationship with the neoliberal revolution that was just getting started in his last years.
- Canada, At War For 13 Years, Shocked That 'A Terrorist' Attacked Its Soldiers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The national mood and discourse in Canada is virtually identical to what prevails in every Western country whenever an incident like this happens: shock and bewilderment that someone would want to bring violence to such a good and innocent country, followed by claims that the incident shows how primitive and savage is the “terrorist ideology” of extremist Muslims, followed by rage and demand for still more actions of militarism and freedom-deprivation.
- Canada: Decoding Harper's Terror Game.
Beneath the Masks and Diversions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Stephen Harper is the most deeply reviled Prime Minister in Canada’s history. On the world stage, he is the servant of Big Oil boiling oil out of tar-sands to destroy major river systems and pollute the planet with dirty oil, while his attack dog John Baird leads the warmongering and bullying of nations like Iran and Syria targeted by the US-Israeli axis.
- Canada more at risk from environmentalists than religiously inspired terrorists: RCMP
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Recent RCMP report warns that Canada's energy sector is more at risk from domestic environmental extremists than from religiously inspired terrorist organizations like Al Qaida and ISIS.
- Canada's journalists cowed into silence while colleagues die in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Rami Rayan, a young Palestinian photojournalist, was the latest reporter to be killed. He was among at least 16 people reportedly killed after an Israeli air strike on a crowded market during a supposed four-hour "truce." The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), which claims to be "the national voice of Canadian journalists", has been noticeably silent. If you check the CAJ's website you won't find so much as a perfunctory statement denouncing the killing of their colleagues in Gaza. Instead, the top item on its website is a story written by members of the association's 'ethics' committee about that old saw: reporters getting too close to their sources.
- Canada's Pro-Israel Zealots
Racist at Its Core Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 From a left-wing community once at the forefront of struggles against racism, unconditional support for Israel has turned a significant proportion of Toronto Jews into promoters of hatred against "Arabs" and into allies of right wing, bigoted, homophobic Christian Bible literalists.
During 15 years of activism in Montréal, Ottawa and Vancouver I haven’t seen anything equivalent to the racist, militarist pro-Israel movement experienced recently in Toronto. And sadly the quasi-fascistic organization driving the charge seems increasingly enmeshed within a community that once led the fight against racism and fascism in the city.
- Canada's Science Library Closures Mirror Bush's Playbook
Similar moves by US Republican president met sharp backlash from 10,000 scientists. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Harper government is now eliminating seven Department of Fishery libraries containing one of the world's most comprehensive collections of information on fisheries, aquatic sciences and nautical sciences.
- Canadian group not dealing with major free expression issue
Celebrating World Press Freedom Day Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We need to address how corporate-owned mainstream news organizations restrict the freedom of journalists and prevent the public from having access to a wide variety of important news and opinion articles. This lack of balanced information affects everything from people having the information they need to decide how to vote to all of us better understanding how power is exercised in our communities. The censorship consists of banning some topics and discussions and filtering out stories and ideas that do not fit the current mainstream media agenda.
- Canadian hands involved in Gaza bombings
Details on Canadian complicity in Israeli apartheid Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Aside from sustained Conservative diplomatic cheerleading for Israel, one key element of Canada's implication less in the public eye but very important, is the key role that many Canadian companies are playing in creating the military devices and technologies now involved in carrying out the deadly bombing raids in Gaza.
- Canadian journalist and activist killed in Syria
Ali Mustafa, In Memoriam Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I will never forget when I first met Ali Mustafa. It was September 2012, during my first year at York and just before I joined Students Against Israeli Apartheid (Ali was a former member), where he did a talk on his visit to Egypt.
- Canadian lawyers and Chevron's court battle over environmental damage in Ecuador
Iler, Kirsten Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A storm of controversy erupted amongst Canadian lawyers when the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) decided to intervene in Chevron's appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The appeal is part of Chevron's battle against Ecuadorian Indigenous peoples who seek to enforce a massive court judgment against the company for environmental damage in Ecuador.
- Canadian mining firm Pacific Rim and El Salvador's struggle against corporate impunity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The controversial legal case that Canadian mining firm Pacific Rim has launched against El Salvador has added fuel to the growing international debate on the balance of corporate rights and responsibilities and the need for new legal international frameworks to address corporate impunity.
- Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014
- Capitalism is failing the planet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If we continue with capitalist business as usual, there will be disastrous consequences for humanity. Capitalism is in unavoidable conflict with environmental sustainability because of three key features that are inherent to the system.
- Capitalism Must Die! A basic introduction to capitalism: what it is, why it sucks, and how to crush it
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Text combined with comics explain in simple terms what capitalism is, how it works, why it's irredeemable, and what we can do to end it.
- The Carbon Underground: reversing global warming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As millions join in climate marches and other actions around the world, the mainstream focus on energy is missing the 55% of emissions that come from mismanaged land and destroyed forests. The key is to replace industrial agriculture worldwide with productive, regenerative organic farming that puts carbon back in the soil.
- Cataloging as Radical Practice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Explores the extent to which new technologies and institutional practices are offering opportunities for community input in building/correcting/amplifying catalogue records.
- Catch your dreams - utopia is possible!
While Marinaleda has its flaws, it reminds us that alternative economic models are not only possible, they already exist. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Amid Spain's general depression, Marinaleda - an Andalucian town sometimes dubbed the 'communist utopia' - is bucking the moribund trend with a heady mixture of direct action, community-level democracy, cooperation and mutual aid.
- Ceasefires in Which Violations Never Cease
What's Next for Israel, Hamas, and Gaza? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On August 26th, 2014, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) both accepted a ceasefire agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind. The agreement calls for an end to military action by both Israel and Hamas, as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.
- Cecily McMillan and the Police State
Justice is Dead in Amerika Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Cecily McMillan is an Occupy protester who was seized from behind by a goon thug cop–a goon thug with a long record of abuse of authority – by her boobs. One was badly bruised. Cecily McMillan’s elbow reflexively and instinctively came up, and Cecily was arrested for assaulting a goon thug. The goon thug was not arrested for sexually assaulting a young woman.
- Celebrating Bob Carty (1950 - 2014)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Tribute given by John Foster at the pass of Bob Carty
- Central American Women Put their Lives on the Line for Human Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Solidarity is at the heart of an initiative that seeks to protect women activists facing harassment, death threats and violence.
- The Chainsaw Collaboratives
The Newest Threat to Our National Forests Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Given the membership of the typical collaborative it is hardly surprising that most support greater logging/grazing of our public lands.
- Challenging a Militarized Police State in the US
From Policing to SWAT Teams Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) and other law enforcement agencies cracked down on protestors March 30, 2014, the city’s finest rolled out a military-style force. Equipped with gas masks, body armor, batons and automatic rifles, they deployed officers on horseback, a SWAT Team and a pair of armored vehicles. After confronting shouting protestors, the APD released tear gas, which seeped into campus dormitories.
- Challenging Tar Sands at its Source
Grassroots Greens Versus Big Greens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With fracking changing the US oil-production and consumption numbers so dramatically, it seems time to challenge the notion that tar sands – and the carbon released if tar sands production continues to climb – is the “make or break point,” an “endgame” whose development signifies “game over for the climate,” as stated several years ago by Dr. James Hansen. Tar sands development is no less extreme, of course, no less destructive, no less genocidal to those living in the affected areas. Shutting down the tar sands– completely, and not negotiated as a phase out nor leaving the corporations in power afterward – is more important than ever, and on as many fronts as possible.
- Chances Are the FBI Has Files on Your Favorite Human Rights Activist
A Safe Bet Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If you have ever openly challenged and mobilized against the structural inequality of capitalism and concomitant imperialism, you definitely have an FBI record.
- The Changing History of the First World War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The war the Tories and their favourite historians would like to spin is one where nationalism was triumphant and where workers and soldiers did their duty for their country. For other historians, the war is a patchwork of fragmented experiences and stories with no “grand” explanation. A truly historical materialist understanding of the war must be able to encompass and learn from the detail—whether of battles or strikes, psychological trauma or the assassination of royalty—and weave it into a world in which the development of capitalism brought about the bleakest and most horrifying catastrophe. And it must be able to explain how the material experience of that catastrophe drove millions to question and to revolt and to present the system as a whole with the most profound threat of its existence.
- The chemical dangers in food packaging
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The long-term effects of synthetic chemicals used in packaging, food storage and processing food could be damaging our health, scientists have warned.
- Chevron Wins Ecuador Arbitration But Money May Go To Amazon Communities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Dutch Supreme Court recently upheld an arbitration tribunal judgment requiring the Ecuadorean government to pay Chevron $106 million for breach of contract. Ironically, activists say Ecuador is now free to hand this money to indigenous communities who have sued the oil giant for pollution in an unrelated case.
- The Children of Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A poem
- Chile's Student Movement Leads the Way
Progressive Prospects for Michelle Bachelet's Second Term Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 “I want to pay special homage to my father and to all those who gave their lives in the fight to recover democracy,” an emotional Isabel Allende said upon taking office as the Senate President.
- China: Mass protests challenge polluters
Resistance to rapid industrialization by poisonous industries led to pitched battles between residents and police in many cities Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In spite of a media blackout, protests in the Chinese city of Maoming against a PX (paraxylene) plant have proceeded for the past week. In March 2014 a thousand citizens took to the streets in protest, followed a few days later by 20,000 occupying the area around the government building.
- A Chinese alternative
Social democracy by the union route Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Dongfang discusses how changing undemocratic Chinese business enterprises, through active labour unions, would also change the social structure of the country.
- Chomsky, Pilger and Loach call on BBC to reflect reality of Gaza's occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Ken Loach are among 45,000 signatories who have signed an open letter to the BBC calling on its journalists to reflect the reality of Gaza’s occupation while reporting on Israel’s current assault.
- Christian Evangelicals Increasingly Support Palestinian Human Rights
David Brog, the Attorney Behind CUFI Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Support for Israel is eroding among American evangelical Christians, with only 30 percent in a recent survey stating support for Israel above Palestinians.
- Christian Høgsbjerg, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (2014)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Scholarship on CLR James, the Pan African and independent socialist, often takes the tone of a thin cultural studies where political insight is minimal and factual detail rooted in archival sources is negligible. Grasping James’s role in intellectual and social movement history requires resisting the tendency to group him narrowly in the fields of “Marxism” or the “Black radical tradition.” These are invented frameworks, shorthand which obscures a limited knowledge of James’s actual innovation and creativity, in contrast to other representative figures, but also mystification of the reality of elite party politics and the self-directed liberating activity by ordinary people in insurgent movements regardless of color.
- Chronology of the Ukrainian Coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The current record of events indicates that the protests were organized by reactionary neo-Nazi forces intent on fomenting a major domestic crisis ousting Ukraine's government. As events continue to spiral out of control, here is the chronology of how the coup was engineered to install a government more favourable to EU and US goals.
- The CIA's Mop-Up Man: L.A. Times Reporter Cleared Stories With Agency Before Publication
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
- CitizenFour
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2014 CITIZENFOUR is a real life thriller, unfolding by the minute, giving audiences unprecedented access to filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s encounters with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA).
- The City Is Ours
Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Through the compilation of the local movement histories of eight different cities, including Amsterdam and Berlin, along with underdocumented cities such as Poznan and Athens, the City Is Ours paints a broad and complex picture of Europe's squatting and autonomous movements.
- Civil Rights, Poverty and Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Oppenheimer examines poverty in the United Stated during the 20th century and analyses the power structures that have prevented improvements to the basic living standards in American society.
- Clara Zetkin
Oppression, Class, and Socialism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Lindsey German responds to John Riddell's article, 'Clara Zetkin in the Lion’s Den'.
- Clara Zetkin in the Lion's Den
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 John Riddell looks at Clara Zetkin a German Marxist theorist, activist, and advocate for women's rights and her fight for workers’ unity and feminism at a Comintern congress.
- The Class Conflict in Venezuela
A Classic Struggle of Left v. Right Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The current protests in Venezuela are reminiscent of another historical moment when street protests were used by right-wing politicians as a tactic to overthrow the elected government. It was December of 2002, and I was struck by the images on U.S. television of what was reported as a “general strike,” with shops closed and streets empty.
- Classical Marxism and the Question of Reformism
Gluckstein, Donny Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A central issue for our movement is whether to work towards a complete revolutionary overturning of capitalism and the state that protects it, or rely on partial methods of struggle. This choice is obvious in places such as Egypt or Greece, but applies with equal force to Britain where defence of the welfare state and living standards can mean waiting for the next election or relying on self-activity from below. This article will focus on the response of Marxists during the first quarter of the 20th century to this question.
- Climate Activists Slapped With Terrorism Charges for Devon Energy Protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Two climate activists who staged a protest at the headquarters of Devon Energy, a Fortune 500 company based in Oklahoma city, have been charged with a “terrorism hoax” after black powder drifted down from a banner that they unfurled.
- Climate Change As A Weapon Of Mass Destruction
The 95% Doctrine Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Climate Crisis, the Deindustrialization Imperative and the Jobs vs. Environment Dilemma
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 So long as we live under capitalism, today, tomorrow, next year and every year thereafter, economic growth will always be the overriding priority till we barrel right off the cliff to collapse.
- C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A chronicles of the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory.
- CO2 Emissions are Being 'Outsourced' by Rich Countries to Rising Economies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Greenhouse gas output of China and elsewhere is increased by making goods that are then used in the US and Europe.
- The Cochabamba Water War of 2000 in 2014
Today's Betrayers Will Not Erase Our Memory Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Today's betrayers will not erase our memory: Fourteen years ago we won, today it seems like we lost, but we have to rise again to win, and we already know how to do it. From April 4 to 14 in the year 2000 the so-called "Final Battle" was waged in Cochabamba, Bolivia to prevent the privatization of our water. It was part of a strategy designed by the people of Cochabamba in the "Water War" that started on November 12, 1999. Today, after fourteen years of this historic struggle, the people's demands are still the same: democracy, transparency, participation and an economic model that allows us all to enjoy the riches that our Mother Earth generously provides for the benefit of all.
- Collective Courage
A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality.
- The Comic Book Simplicity Of Propaganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The referendum campaign on Scottish independence heightened many people's awareness of the pro-elite bias of the 'mainstream' news media. The grassroots power of social media in exposing and countering this bias was heartening to see. But the issue of independence for Scotland is just one of many where the traditional media consistently favour establishment power.
- The Coming Humiliation of Stephen Harper?
A Political Psychopath Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The federal government, that is Stephen Harper, is expected to announce its long anticipated decision on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline sometime in June. The decision could well determine whether or not the Conservatives can win the 2015 election.
The momentum of opposition to the pipeline – and perhaps more importantly to the hundreds of supertankers that would move tar sands bitumen to Asia – is clearly growing in both B.C. and the rest of Canada.
- Command and Control
Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Schlosser uncovers the secrets about the (mis-)management of America's nuclear arsenal.
- Commercialisation: The Antithesis Of Sharing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Sharing is the key to solving the world’s problems’. Such a statement is so simple that it may fail to make an appeal, so we must go much deeper into this subject if we want to comprehend what this means.
- Community Police in Guerrero's Costa Chica Region to Celebrate 19 Years of a Better Way to Combat Crime and Corruption
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The same southern Mexican state where 43 students were disappeared is also home to a grassroots movement that shows how people can police themselves when the state becomes criminal.
- The Complicity of Psychologists in CIA Torture
What the APA Knew Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are two psychologists who played central roles in designing and implementing the CIA’s torture program. Now we also know how lucrative that work was for Mitchell and Jessen: their company was paid over $80 million by the CIA.
- Confirmed: California Aquifers Contaminated With Billions Of Gallons of Fracking Wastewater
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It has now been revealed that California regulators with DOGGR permitted hundreds of wastewater injection wells and thousands more wells injecting fluids for 'enhanced oil recovery" into aquifers protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
- Conforming, Not Transforming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the technology company that, among other things, is responsible for the Firefox browser, resigned after it was revealed that in 2008 he had given a $1000 donation to Proposition 8, the Californian campaign against gay marriage.
- Confronting Injustice
Social Activism in the Age of Individualism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Published: 2016 Confronting Injustice is a call for collective action against the social causes of poverty and climate change, written by a socialist organizer for activists.
- Confronting the Cult of Objectivity
Education in Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As the end of the semester draws near on campuses across the country, I thought I’d reflect on one of the largest threats to academic freedom in this country. I’ve long labeled this threat the “cult of objectivity,” represented in a variety of different pathologies that afflict students, faculty, and administrators.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2014
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- A contemporary account of the German pogroms of November 1938
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Shortly after the November 1938 pogroms, journalist and historian Konrad Heiden wrote a work entitled Night Oath, in which he gave a detailed account of the horrific events marking the transition from social discrimination to the systematic brutalization and persecution of Jews in Germany.
- Contra Hardt and Negri
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- The contradictions and limits of localism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Can co-ops and transition towns transform the world? The author of No Local explains why local counter-institutions won’t lead to revolutionary change.
- Core Secrets: NSA Saboteurs in China and Germany
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
- The Corporate Welfare Bank of the United States
The Elites and the Ex-Im Bank Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Over the past few weeks, the American business lobby and in particular the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have come out in force to support the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. These groups and their puppets in Washington insist that the Ex-Im Bank is good for American small businesses and supports job growth, that failing to reauthorize will harm the overall economy. Conscious of the political atmosphere, the Bank’s supporters have carefully avoided some ugly facts about this vehicle for corporatist cooperation.
- Corporations Spy on Nonprofits with Impunity
Dow Chemical vs. Greenpeace Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Here's a dirty little secret you won't see in the daily papers: corporations conduct espionage against US nonprofit organizations without fear of being brought to justice.
- Costa Rican Farmers Become Climate Change Acrobats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 José Alberto Chacón traverses the winding path across his small farm on the slopes of the Irazú volcano, in Costa Rica, which meanders because he has designed it to prevent rain from washing away nutrients from the soil.
- Coughing up coal
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 India is rivaling China -- in its plans to consume coal. India is aggressively expanding construction of coal fired power plants to meet growing energy needs. Emissions from coal power plants were linked to 80,000 - 150,000 premature deaths in India between 2011 and 2012 alone and to a wide range of diseases from cancers, to respiratory and cardiovascular disorders. Singrauli -- an industrial hub in north central India -- embodies the tragic human toll that a largely unregulated coal industry can extract.
- Crimea, El Salvador & the Fight Against Public Participation
Policing "Irresponsibility" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the Obama administration's disregard for democracy and public participation. Examples include the administration's silence on the coup against democratically-elected Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych and its threats to withhold development aid from El Salvador unless the winner of its presidential elections, the FMLN’s Sánchez Cerén, adopts right-wing economic and social policies.
- The Crisis in Investigative Journalism
The Case of James Risen Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Investigative journalists are the vanguard of the so-called Fourth Estate, bearing the formidable task of watchdogging the other three estates
- Cuba - A Personal Reflection
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A brief history of the revolutionary period in Cuba's history told through the author's experiences.
- The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
- The Cultivation of Hate
The Lies Grow More Audacious Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If there were any doubts that Western “leaders” live in a fantasy make-believe world constructed out of their own lies, the G-7 meeting and 70th anniversary celebration of the Normandy landing dispelled the doubts.
- Curitiba: the Greenest city on Earth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Eco-savvy urban planners have been studying Brazil's seventh largest city for decades.
- Cynicism, Israeli National Policy
From Victim to Super-Mensch Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel has become the worst-case scenario of the degradation of Torah, and worst-case scenario of what was once the deep unadulterated humaneness of worldwide Jews.
- Dairy - the case for greener, healthier, lower performing cows
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With supermarket milk cheaper than spring water, it's time to rethink the modern dairy industry. It's not just the milk that's become a throwaway product - the high-octane Holstein cows that produce it are also in the knackers yard after just two or three lactations, the living waste of a loss-making, environment-trashing industry.
- The dangers of reactionary ecology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Influential metaphors for understanding the environment serve as a bridge between traditional conservatism and outright ecofascism. Here we want to look at how ecological ideas can be deployed to support deeply reactionary politics.
- The Dark Side of the Territory
Hong Kong's Caged Lives Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In a place that values freedom and respect, the legacy of “caged homes” creates a stark and chilling contrast.
- The Dark Side of the Ukraine Revolt
The Rise of the Quasi-Fascists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 While most of the Western media describes the current crisis in the Ukraine as a confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy, many of the shock troops who have manned barricades in Kiev and the western city of Lviv these past months represent a dark page in the country’s history and have little interest in either democracy or the liberalism of Western Europe and the United States.
- Darknet Sweep Casts Doubt on Tor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When news broke of Silk Road 2.0’s seizure by law enforcement a lot of people probably wrote it off as an isolated incident. Silk Road 2.0 was the successor to the original Silk Road web site and like its predecessor it was an underground bazaar for narcotics, fueled by more than $8 million in Bitcoin transactions and operated as a hidden service on the Tor anonymity network.
- Data Secrecy Company Accused of Sharing Information with Media and Military
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Whisper -- a new social network that claims to provide anonymity -- has been accused of secretly tracking users. The allegations were made by the Guardian newspaper, provoking renewed scrutiny of a multitude of data privacy claims made by software companies.
- The deafening silence around the Hamas proposal for a 10-year truce
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Western media have ignored the proposal from Hamas and Islamic Jihad for a 10-year-truce on the basis of 10 - very reasonable - conditions.
- Death in the Eagle's Shadow
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Loewenstein details the circumstances surrounding her friend Anwar Za'aneen's death by an Israeli drone in Gaza, to highlight the severity of the dangers that Palestinians must live with in everyday life.
- The Death and Life of American Labor
Toward a New Workers' Movement Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Aronowitz narrates the decline of the American union movement, the workers' struggles in taking the long view of the labour movement, and how can unions revive.
- The Death of a Reporter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Serena Shim, who leaves behind a family that includes her two young children, found herself chasing the truth in a highly charged situation.
- The Death of the Fourth Estate
8000 Channels With One Corporate Message Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 According to a recent Gallup survey, only 40 percent of Americans believe what they read in newspapers. After scanning today’s tabloids, one only wonders why the percentage is that high.
- Death Train: the earliest art to expose horror of concentration camps
The Mexican art collective Taller de Gráfica Popular used lino prints to transmit an explicit, committed political message Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Mexican art collective Taller de Gráfica Popular used lino prints to transmit an explicit, committed political message. A member of the collective, Leopoldo Mendez, working in 1943, was probably the first to depict the Holocaust.
- Debate: Two tactics in the fight against climate change
Should climate activists limit their demands to what's possible under capitalism? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The question of what demands ecosocialists should put forward in response to the climate crisis is a pressing one. The climate justice movement should demand a cap-and-trade policy, abandoning its traditional stance against carbon trading.
- The Deceptive Use of the Phrase "Peaceful Protests" in Venezuela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Venezuelan opposition and much of the media use the term "peaceful protests" to distinguish gatherings of protesting students and other young people from the more violent actions.
- Deciphering Capital: Marx's Capital and its destiny
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Callinicos tackles the question of Karl Marx's method, his relation to Hegel, value theory and labour.
- Decoding Harper's Terror Game beneath the Masks and Diversions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Stephen Harper is the most deeply reviled Prime Minister in Canada's history. On the world stage, he is the servant of Big Oil boiling oil out of tar-sands to destroy major river systems and pollute the planet with dirty oil, while his attack dog John Baird leads the warmongering and bullying of nations like Iran and Syria.
- De-colonizing North America
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of King's "The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America," and Dunbar-Ortiz's "An Indigenous People's History of the United States."
- Defeat of Reconstruction and the Betrayal of Black Freedom Part One
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Reconstruction was a tumultuous, brief and extraordinary period of American history defined by an unprecedented experiment in interracial democracy. It was an era of exceptional developments, all taking place simultaneously and impacting one another.
- Defeat of Reconstruction and the Betrayal of Black Freedom Part Two
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 During Reconstruction, black people fought to assert their American-ness. Throughout the South, it was blacks and their allies who would march, parade and celebrate the Fourth of July, but not out of gross and vulgar American patriotism. Rather, it was part of a struggle to uphold the ideals of freedom and liberty that came with the Civil War and the promise of equality that came with Reconstruction.
- Defender of the Rockies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 For sheer guts, vision and results, a single organisation stands out among the US's environmental defenders - the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. Jeffrey St. Clair met its leader, Mike Garrity, winner of 2014's Grassroots Activist Award.
- Defending The Defensible: Jewish And Palestinian Boycotts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Oh dear, poor Israel. Poor Israel - the world's 4th largest nuclear military power. Poor Israel - the serial war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression violator. Poor barbaric Israel is being picked on by the non-violent Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which champions, out of simple human decency, Palestinian inalienable rights under international law.
- Defusing George Orwell
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Robert Colls' book George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Defying Fundamentalism
A review of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 To some people Islam has come to represent the ideology of liberation from the yoke of Western imperialism; to others it is a backward and inherently violent faith targeting innocent individuals indiscriminately.
- Defying Fundamentalism
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of "Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism" By Karima Bennoune.
- "Delegitimize Zionism," says Israeli filmmaker
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An interview with Israeli filmaker Lia Tarachansky, whose film "On the Side of the Road" confronts the reality of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and examines how Israelis deal with that past today, how it is taught to youth, as well as which facts are included or deliberately ignored.
- Democracy or Corporatocracy? The choice is ours.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Newly assertive citizens and consumers are putting the world's most feared and powerful corporations on the defensive. Now is the time to press home our advantage.
- Democracy Works in Haiti
From the Bottom Up Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Haiti’s successful rebellion flew in the face of the order of empires built on slavery, colonisation, subjugation and dispossession.
- Demonizing Edward Snowden
Obama Goes Beyond Orwell Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Edward Snowden’s revelations have gone a long way to lifting the veil of secrecy and foul play that is the norm in capitalist America. He has hastened the time when BIG BROTHER’S rules of engagement — and all forms of ruling-class oppression — are brought to an end forever.
- Destroyed by Violence
War, Not Deserting, Is Demoralizing Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Morale is destroyed by war. War’s objective reality always blows to smithereens not just the civilians it is supposed to protect, but the political, economic and chauvinistic rationalizations that get soldiers to kill in the first place.
- Detroit: Your Pension and Your Life!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Amidst the ongoing bankruptcy of Detroit, workers are faced with having their pensions involuntarily reduced.
- Devil and the deep blue sea: how Mediterranean migrant disaster unfolded
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Desperate migrants from Gaza and Syria tell how they put themselves at the mercy of people smugglers in their voyage to cross the Mediterranean.
- DFO Library Closures Anger Scientific Community
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When word first broke that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was closing seven of their libraries, government officials promised that there would be no loss of vital historical material. Today many are skeptical of those claims.
- Dialectics, nature and the dialectics of nature
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Based on Frederick Engel's Dialectics of Nature, Camilla Royle's article asks if nature can be understood dialectically.
- Did Somebody Say Fascism?
Waiting in the Wings of Ukraine Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As Marxist historians of fascism have long argued, fascism at its essence is an outcome of capitalism in crisis. The quintessential counterrevolutionary movement, fascism responds to capitalism’s invariable crises by redirecting potentially revolutionary threats to capitalism to nationalist, (relatedly) racist (or within Europe’s right today, “culturalist”), and militarist violence that preserves the basic material conditions of class society.
- Direct Action Gets Results
Taking on the Enemy Directly Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We are conditioned to think of "activism" as getting someone else to do something. We plead with elected officials and bureaucrats, prodding them to take action. But the best and most effective activism is when we take matters into our own hands and solve our problems -- or strike at our enemies -- ourselves.
- The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela
Agents of Destabilization Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.
- 'Disgustingly Biased' - The Corporate Media On The Gaza Massacre
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The bias in failing to report the brutalisation of a trapped, impoverished people under occupation is staggering.
- Disused oil and gas wells wells a major source of methane
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Long-disused oil and gas wells in the US have been found to be a 'significant' source of the super greenhouse gas methane. The climate impact of oil and gas is underestimated, as this long term impact is not included in existing calculations.
- Do You Play Video Games or Do They Play You?
Mass Culture for Profit Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since the spread of smart mobile devices - smartphones and tablets - the video games industry has learned a lesson in economic Darwinism: develop your mobile business or face extinction. The growth of gaming on the move means a new global division of labour, and the industry is revising its profit margins.
- Does National Security Trump the Blue Whale?
Navy Mischief in the Pacific Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A book that tries to understand why people are so prone to deny or ignore the reality of climate change.
- Down With Tory Crackdown on Prostitution!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Tories, who have slashed billions from social programs and caused immeasurable harm to poor and working-class women, have fraudulently promoted Bill C-36 as a way of protecting victims of "exploitation." In this they are backed by an unholy alliance of right-wing outfits like REAL Women of Canada and the feminist groups that make up the Women’s Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution.
- Drawing a line in the tar sands
A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The fight over the tar sands is among the epic environmental and social justice battles of our time. The very active tar sands struggle is no less than a life-and-death battle for the future of the planet. It is a battle that pits these peoples' movement against the largest and most destructive industrial project -- a project driven by the big the most profitable and powerful transnational energy corporations.
- Drone
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 This documentary covers diverse and integral ground from the recruitment of young pilots at gaming conventions and the re-definition of "going to war", to the moral stance of engineers behind the technology, the world leaders giving the secret "green light" to engage in the biggest targeted killing program in history, and the people willing to stand up against the violations of civil liberties and fight for transparency, accountability and justice.
- Drug War Capitalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The Drug War story throughout the entire region of Latin America and back to US boardrooms and political offices. This book chronicles how terror is used against the population to generate panic and facilitate policy changes that benefit the international private sector, particularly extractive industries like petroleum and mining.
- The Earth vs. Monsanto
A Peoples' Tribunal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Here are a few brief notes about A People’s Hearing, held on 10 May 2014, in Greene County, Ohio, The Indivisible Living Entity of the Planet Earth v. Monsanto Corporation, Defendant.
- Eating your ethics: Halal meat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Halal ritual slaughter has raised huge controversy in the UK press. But the far greater issue is farm animals' entire quality of life - as reflected in the Qu'ranic principle that meat must be 'tayyib' - good, wholesome and from well-treated, healthy animals. Is this something we can all agree on?
- Economics As If Future Generations Mattered
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We have turned a corner on climate change-- a wrong turn-- and it is happening more rapidly than we have predicted. Climate change is already disrupting society, ecosystems, and national economies. We have altered so much of our Earth that we now threaten our own survival.
- Ecosocialism: Why greens must be red and reds must be green
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Ian Angus argues for a movement based on socialist and ecological principles, to save humanity and the rest of nature from capitalist ecocide.
- Ecuador's Bitter Choice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Becker analyzes the politics behind the decision to extract petroleum from Ecuador's ecologically fragile Yasuní National Park.
- The Education Deform Fraud
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book Review of "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools" By Diane Ravitch.
- EFF Launches IFightSurveillance.org and Counter-Surveillance Success Stories
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Sites Highlight How Opponents of Mass Surveillance Around the World Lead by Example
- Egyptian Women and the Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Radwan focuses on the role women are playing in the Egyptian Revolution, their reasons for being active in the movement, and the repercussions they experience as a result of their involvement.
- Egypt's Revolution at Three
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Radwan examines the Egyptian Revolution and the rise of General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi after the ousting of President Morsi.
- 8 Disturbing Photos of Instruments of Torture Used on Black People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 8 disturbing photos of instruments of torture used on black people.
- $88 billion a year in subsidies for climate disaster
Global governments spend more than double what energy companies invest to find new regions for oil and gas drilling, despite climate change Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Despite pledging in 2009 to phase out public subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, G20 countries have disregarded those promises and are currently spending $88 billion a year in taxpayer money to fund the discovery of new gas, coal, and oil deposits around the world.
- 84-year-old ex-librarian arrested protesting Kinder Morgan, calls NEB a "sham"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Barbara Grant criticized the NEB hearings of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion as a "sham" and spoke out about the danger before crossing the police line to be arrested. At 84, she's the oldest person arrested on Burnaby Mountain so far.
- Elected Representatives on the Wrong Side of History: Israel is a Criminal State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) has grown exponentially and gained legitimacy in many parts of the world, while the concept of Israel as an Apartheid state has gained much credibility. In Israel itself, debates that were unheard of a short while ago have entered the public discourse.
- Election and Revolution
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of two volumes by August H. Nimtz: "Lenin's Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels Through the Revolution of 1905" and "Lenin's Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917".
- The Emergence of Marx's Critique of Modern Agriculture
Ecological Insights from His Excerpt Notebooks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Examining Marx’s notebooks, one realizes that he first attained a truly critical and ecological comprehension of modern agriculture in the middle of the 1860s. Although Marx was at first optimistic about the positive effects of modern agriculture based on the application of natural sciences and technology, he later came to emphasize the negative consequences of agriculture under capitalism precisely because of such an application, illustrating how it inevitably brings about disharmonies in the transhistorical “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel) between human beings and nature.
- Empty nests of the North: "Massive chick deaths" in seabird colonies; climate, oceanic changes blamed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Iceland, circled by the food-rich currents of Atlantic, Arctic and polar waters, is the Serengeti for seabirds. But the nests have gone empty in the past few years, and colonies throughout the North Atlantic are shrinking.
- Enduring Security
Volunteer Fire Departments Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ralph Nader on the history, structure, and challenges faced by the United States' volunteer firefighters, who make up two-thirds of the nation's fire-fighting force.
- The Enemy Within
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 In 1984, a conservative government under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared war on Britain's unions, including the National Union of Mineworkers. The government began to close coal mines, threatening the industry, whole communities and a way of life. When 160,000 coal miners stood up for what they believed in, they began the longest strike in British history, the 1984-85 Minter's Strike.
- 'Enough is enough!' Corruptopolis board game satirizes sleazy Spanish politicians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A Spanish student has created a new board game, Corruptopolis, satirizing the corrupt practices of Spain's economic and political elite. In Corruptopolis, players work in teams to answer questions about major corruption scandals to have rocked Spain over the years.
- E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left
Essays and Polemics Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Collection of essays advocating for humanistic and democratic socialism along with the value of utopian thinking in radical politics.
- Ethiopia's 'slow genocide' in the Omo Valley
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A 'slow genocide' is unfolding in Ethiopia - one driven by greed rather than hatred.
- Ethiopia's seed banks - under threat from G8 plan to 'develop' Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ethiopia leads the way in preserving crop seeds by engaging farming communities in the effort, and making the exchange of seeds part of village life and culture, reports Claire Provost. But now it's all at risk from a G8 plan to open Africa to corporate agriculture.
- Ethnic Cleansing by All Means: The real Israeli 'peace' policy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This policy of ethnic cleansing, by different means since 1948, is a consensual issue in Israel and thus leaves very little hope for peace and reconciliation. The current Israeli left, the self-acclaimed 'peace bloc', is willing to oppose new settlements but refuses to acknowledge the historical injustice inflicted on Palestinians in 1948 and denies displaced Palestinians their right to return to their homes and their homeland.
- The European Elections from a Left Perspective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Preliminary analysis, country-specific results and reports on the electoral eve, video statements of the left-wing candidates and our correspondents as well as evaluations in the aftermath – and all of this with a particular focus on the Left.
- Europe's Leaders Visit Athens to Celebrate Their Failure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The start of Greece's six-month presidency of the EU was marked by a ceremony in the Greek capital attended by the EU commissioners. But protests were banned and there was no in-depth talk about the raging controversy over the bloc's handling of the Greek debt crisis and the renewed concerns about the vitality of the Eurozone.
- Europe's new faultine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Front National is expected to win next week’s European election in France; UKIP may well do so in Britain. Both parties combine a visceral hostility to immigration with an acerbic loathing of the EU, a virulent nationalism and deeply conservative views on social issues such as gay marriage and women’s rights. The problems that such parties pose for mainstream politics goes, however, far beyond the odiousness of their policies. What their success expresses is the redrawing of the political map in Europe, and in ways in which mainstream parties often do not understand. The new populists seem to thrive on different political rules to mainstream parties.
- Every Israeli Missile Strike is a War Crime
The Experts' Verdict Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When are going to hear Human Rights Watch or the United Nation’s Navi Pillay stop talking about proportionality or Israel’s potential war crimes, and admit Israel is committing war crimes by definition – right now, as you read this?
- Everyone on the Bus: Rider-Driver Alliances
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Kann sheds light on the increasingly desperate state of transit in Detroit as number and frequency of buses and entire routes are experiencing increasing cuts and riders join in a union with drivers to protest these affairs.
- The evidence that Israel deliberately targeted hospitals and ambulances
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Amnesty International has published evidence that Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) specifically targeted hospitals, health workers and ambulance personnel during the attack on Gaza.
- The E-Waste Tragedy
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 The E-Waste Tragedy takes the viewer on a journey to Europe, China, Africa and the US, revealing a toxic global trade of electronic waste that makes its way illegally into lower income countries, destroying landscapes and endangering lives.
- Exclusive excerpts from Ernest Tate's 'Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Explaining Burma's missing 9 million people - evaporation, or genocide?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In Burma nearly one in five people is not alive who was expected to be alive based upon a modest estimate of the 2% population growth rate. Despite its significance, the figure is met with silence.
- Explore the Documents: Luxembourg Leaks Database
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 ICIJ's Luxembourg Leaks investigation is based on a confidential cache of secret tax agreements approved by Luxembourg authorities, that provide tax-relief for more than 340 companies around the world. These private deals are legal in Luxembourg.
- Eye in the Sky
Surveillance and the Art of Arnold Mesches Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Round about the turn of this century Arnold Mesches, who is neither monk nor medievalist nor Christian, began illuminating manuscripts from the world that long since had killed God but appropriated or accommodated to a version of His all-seeing eye. The manuscripts in question: Mesches’ FBI file, 1945 to 1972.
- Eyeless in Gaza
Locked in an Embrace Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The trouble with war is that it has two sides. Everything would be so much easier if war had only one side. Ours, of course.
- Eyeless in Gaza
Israel's Deceptions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A single incident at the weekend – the reported capture by Hamas on Friday of an Israeli soldier through a tunnel – illustrated in stark fashion the layers of deception Israel has successfully cast over its attack on Gaza.
- The Faces of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Worker Movement
It's important to remember that every movement is larger than any one man. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Prior to the release of the film "Cesar Chavez: An American Hero" by director Diego Luna, this article takes a brief look at the American labour leader and civil rights activist who, along with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers union, UFW). The story includes photographs from the Walter P. Reuther Library Photo Archive at Wayne State University.
- Factory and Lab: Israel's War Business
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel invests more money in research than most other countries -- and in no other place are research institutes, the defense industry, the army and politics as interwoven. The result is a high-tech weapons factory that successfully exports its goods globally.
- Failed Cuban "Twitter" Project Designed By U.S. Government Contractors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 ZunZuneo - a now defunct social media platform similar to Twitter – was designed to undermine the Cuban government by two private contractors: Creative Associates International (CAI) from Washington DC and Mobile Accord, a Denver based company.
- The Failure Of The Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Leftists have been late to the party when it comes to raising the alarm on climate change. The reliance on corporate media makes it difficult for anyone questioning the narrative of consumerism and progress to get their message out.
- The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This new book by Ndongo Sylla is an insider's critique of the fair trade model as practiced by Fairtrade International (FLO, or Fairtrade Labelling Organizations). (The book has been translated from French, and I found the translation to be quite readable and engaging.) Based on his own experiences working for FLO, Sylla seeks to point out the flaws in the fair trade system. As with most research about fair trade, Sylla's focuses primarily on the fair trade coffee initiative. In the fair trade coffee system, cooperatives of small coffee growers pay thousands of dollars to FLO to join the network and for compliance fees. In exchange for ethical production, the growers receive a guaranteed minimum price for each pound of their coffee sold as "fair trade."
- Fake cell phone 'towers' may be spying on Americans' calls, texts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 More than a dozen 'fake cell phone towers' could be secretly hijacking Americans' mobile devices in order to listen in on phone calls or snoop on text messages, a security-focused cell phone company claims. It is not clear who controls the devices.
- Fake grassroots advocacy part of TransCanada's plan to silence Energy East critics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Documents show plans to "pressure" pipeline critics by working with third parties and industry-funded grassroots advocacy groups in favour of Energy East.
- Fakethrough! GMOs and the Capitulation of Science Journalism
Total Information Control Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Good journalism examines its sources critically, it takes nothing at face value, places its topics in a historical context, and it values above all the public interest. Such journalism is, most people agree, essential to any equitable and open system of government. The science media has somehow escaped serious attention. This is unfortunate because no country in the world has a healthy science media.
- The Fall of the House of Dixie
The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 History of the lasting impact of the Civil War on America. Originally undertaken to preserve the status quo, it turned into a second American Revolution that upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South.
- Farmageddon
The True Cost of Cheap Meat Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 An investigation and implication of the global industrial farming industry.
- Farming Freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A simple agricultural technique could release farmers from the grip of agrochemical corporations. With no patents, no royalties and no licensing fees, this system just benefits the farmers.
- Fascism, American-Style
One-Step from the Third Reich? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel.
- The Fascist Threat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Deep economic crisis, savage austerity, and social upheaval have polarised Greek society. One result has been the rise of Golden Dawn, responsible for brutal attacks on immigrants and left-wing activists. Christina Ziakka reports on the response of the political establishment – and why the left and workers’ movement must provide a genuine alternative.
- The Fateful Collision - Floods, Catastrophe And Climate Denial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An epic struggle is currently taking place that will determine the fate, and perhaps the survival, of our species.
- The FBI Can Bypass Encryption
Why Cyber Security is a Magic Act Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- FBI director wants access to encrypt Apple, Google users' data, demands law 'fix'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The FBI director has slammed Apple and Google for offering their customers encryption technology that protects users’ privacy. "Deeply concerned" James Comey wants to push on Congress to "fix" laws to ensure police can still access private data.
- The FBI Director's Evidence Against Encryption Is Pathetic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 FBI Director James Comey gave a speech Thursday about how cell-phone encryption could lead law enforcement to a “very dark place” where it “misses out” on crucial evidence to nail criminals. To make his case, he cited four real-life examples — examples that would be laughable if they weren’t so tragic.
- The FBI's Secret Meetings With TransCanada, Inc.
Guardians of the KXL Pipeline Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On April 4, 2012 the FBI held a daylong “strategy meeting” with TransCanada Corporation, the company building the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, according to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal through a Freedom of Information Act request.
- FCC Wants to Give Corporations Their Own Internet
The New Proposal Mocks Net Neutrality Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When a federal court trashed its “net neutrality” compromise policy in January, the Federal Communications Commission assured us that the Internet we knew and depended on was safe. Most activists didn’t believe federal officials and this past week the FCC demonstrated how realistic our cynicism was.
- Fed Up
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2014 An examination of America's obesity epidemic and the food industry's role in aggravating it.
- Ferguson on Center Stage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Miah examines race relations in Ferguson, Missouri after the recent police murder of Michael Brown as a result of racial profiling and police brutality.
- Fighters against apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Alan Wieder's book "Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid" is a triumph, describing his subjects with compassion and criticism.
- Fighting Big Oil's Cynical Arts Sponsorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A growing movement is opposing fossil fuel industry sponsorship of the arts. Pop-up protests and performances denouncing Shell, BP and others are winning the popular vote.
- Fighting fracking in Poland: the farmers resistance movement
An improverished farming community in Zurawlow is using creative tactics to stop Chevron's shale gas plans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When Chevron arrived in Zurawlów, a small village in Poland's rural Grabowiec county, it was like a UFO landing in the open wheat fields. In June last year a high-tech surveillance caravan appeared in the village to stake the firm's claim to the shale gas below.
- Fighting King Coal in Indian Ocean paradise
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A $395 million coal fired power station is planned for Mauritius - bulldozed aver the wishes of the population, official advice and the environment ministry.
- Fill the gap: Ontario should insure injured migrant workers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We want to sound the alarm over the unjust federal and provincial immigration and health policies that are based on the exploitation of human labour and xenophobia. Migrants increasingly enter Canada to work under temporary foreign worker programs through which they are denied equitable access to services while still being required to pay taxes.
- Film Review: Revolutionary Medicine - A Story of the First Garifuna Hospital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of the provocative documentary Revolutionary Medicine, which tells the story of the first Garifuna hospital, in Honduras.
- Filthy, deadly mayhem in India
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Along with the choking fumes and piles of putrid waste, sound systems and a constant bombardment of honking horns from cars, lorries and screaming buses assault residents and the unprepared in towns and cities throughout India.
- Financial Terrorism
The Wonga Payday Lending Experiment Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Keeping people poor in a world of seedy abandonment. Borrowing at phenomenal rates. Loan sharks running wild, dressed by the language of assistance and salvation. All of this should be the stuff to be binned and repelled by governments, but in an age when governments forfeit, rather than affirm responsibility in the face of the economy, the phenomenon of Wonga, a deferred deposit loan operator, has come to thrive. Private indebtedness has become both a condition and a lifestyle.
- Fire in the dark: the astonishing story of the Courrieres mine disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 One hundred and eight years ago today, on March 10, 1906, an explosion and fire occurred deep underground in a coal mine owned by the Courrières mining company underneath the village of Billy-Montigny in northern France. A total of 1,099 miners died, including many children.
- First Nations' anti-Keystone XL alliance years in making
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Indigenous organizers say Reject and Protect gathering in DC marked the culmination of years spent building solidarity across nations and across borders, and that more will be on the way.
- Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza - Debunked
Israel claims that it is merely exercising its right to self-defense and that Gaza is no longer occupied. Here's what you need to know about Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past 21 days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.
- The Flood From the North
Washington's Role in Triggering the Child Migrant Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 International law and basic morality demand that the children of Central America are treated with the care and dignity that they and previous generations have been robbed under several decades of US foreign and immigration policy. Achieving this end would require overcoming the convenient myths of power and the culture of indifference in which they take root.
- The Floods of Forgetfulness
A Brief History of Logging, Floods and Landslides Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In thousands of stories about the recent floods in the U.S. Northwest, only one mentioned any possible connection between logging and floods.
- Florida's sugar barons grow fat on subsidies, diabetes and Everglades destruction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Big Sugar is the new Big Tobacco, writes Alan Farago - lethal to human health, wreaking environmental devastation, gouging huge public subsidies, and with the political clout to stop First Lady Michelle Obama from breathing a word against it. Only an alliance of green, health and taxpayer campaigners can kill the beast.
- Follow the Money, Part 1 - The Weston Family
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 You've seen him in television ads hyping President's Choice dessert ideas, naming fake supermarkets after enthusiastic customers, sitting down with moms around the kitchen table and talking to President's Choice farmers on their hormone-free farms.
- Follow the Money, Part 2 - Barrick Gold's Peter Munk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Fraser Institute awarded Barrick Gold chairman Peter Munk its T.P. Boyle Founder's Award at a gala dinner in Toronto in 2010. This is the think tank's most prestigious award, which it gave to Munk "in recognition of his unwavering commitment to free and open markets around the globe and his support for enhancing and encouraging democratic values and the importance of responsible citizenship." Equating "free and open markets" with "democratic values" is a long-standing neoliberal marketing mantra.
- Follow the Money, Part 3 - Big Oil and Calgary's School of Public Policy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If it disseminates pro-free market studies like a right-wing think tank, and if it courts Big Oil money like a right-wing think tank, and if it recruits conservative scholars like a right-wing think tank, then it probably is a right-wing think tank.
- Follow the Money, Part 4 - Who Owns the National Post?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It"s no secret that Postmedia Network, publisher of the National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun and other major Canadian dailies, is hemorrhaging money.
- Follow the Money, Part 5 - The Tobacco Papers Revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Michael Walker, former executive director of the Fraser Institute, long denied that institute directors — the people who fund the institute’s work — can tell researchers what to do.
According to this rosy view of the think tank’s mission, Big Oil directors from Calgary, for instance, don’t tell Fraser Institute researcher Kenneth Green to produce studies denying global warming or proving that the Keystone and Northern Gateway pipelines are crucial for Canada’s economic survival. Green does these on his own because that’s what his research indicates.
- Follow the Money, Part 6 - Obesity: A new role for second-hand-smoke-causes-cancer deniers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The tobacco industry has shifted its doubt-manufacturing operations to countries like Russia, Indonesia and China, where the incidence of smoking — and cancer — continues to rise. But other industries with deep pockets need to manufacture doubt about the health risks of their products.
- Food Chains
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 In this exposé, an intrepid group of Florida farmworkers battle to defeat the $4 trillion global supermarket industry through their ingenious Fair Food program, which partners with growers and retailers to improve working conditions for farm labourers in the United States.
- For an easy win on carbon emissions - cut global trade!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If the world's leaders really cared about climate change, there's one easy way to reduce emissions -- drop the obsession with increasing trade, and all the pollution that goes with it. A world based on local production, consumption and finance will be a better one for people and the environment.
- Forbes 400 list of world's richest people highlights growth of social inequality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Forbes magazine published its 28th annual list of the world's wealthiest individuals and families on Monday. In all, the research team behind the Forbes Billionaires list found a total of 1,645 billionaires worldwide, with a combined net worth of $6.4 trillion, an increase of $1 trillion from 2013. The number of new billionaires, at 268, was the highest figure in the report's history.
- Foreclosure Is Blight!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Using her experience working with the Detroit Eviction Defense group, Feeley examines the current housing crisis in Detroit and offers insight into how to combat evictions, foreclosures and underwater mortgages by combining legal defense with direct action.
- Forget The Propaganda From Big Agritech, The Key To Reducing Poverty And Ensuring Food Security Lies With Small Farmers
Small farms produce most of the world's food Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A new review carried out by the organization GRAIN reveals that small farms produce most of the world’s food. However, they are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world’s farmland. The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of the rich and powerful. If we do nothing to reverse this trend, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself.
- The Forgotten Coup
How the Same Godfather Rules from Canberra to Kiev Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Washington’s role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed.
- The Forgotten Coup
How America and Britain Crushed the Government of Their "Ally" Australia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Across the political and media elite in Australia, a silence has descended on the memory of the great, reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam, who has died. His achievements are recognised, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.
- Forgotten Graffiti Sheds New Light on Long, Hot Journeys to Vietnam
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Inside a rusting former US army ship, historians found vivid details of the hopes and fears of soldiers bound for war.
- Forty years after the portuguese Carnation Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the eve of April 25, 1974, Portuguese society was smouldering from contradictions accumulated in half a century of dictatorship. At the heart of these contradictions was a war that lasted thirteen years, to hold on to the African colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe. This conflict conditioned the whole of national life, because of the social suffering caused by the mobilization of two hundred thousand men, a tenth of the working population (a human cost equivalent to twice that of Vietnam), because of the wave of migration driven by hunger and the war, and because of the impossibility of a military solution, the only one contemplated by the regime.
- 40 years ago: the grandeur and the limits of the Portuguese Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Portuguese Revolution plunged its roots in the crisis of the Salazar regime. A fascist dictatorship based on a reactionary ideology which would serve as inspiration for the Vichy regime, the Estado novo (“New State”) presents original features in comparison with the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler, features that help to explain both its longevity and its weakness at the moment of its crisis in the early 1970s.
- Forward to a mass workers' party in Southern Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The conference of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), held in December 2013, was indisputably a momentous occasion in the struggle in South Africa. It epitomizes an extraordinary separation not only from the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest organisation of conservative ‘black’ nationalism, but also from the South African Communist Party (SACP), one of the last so-called communist parties from the Soviet era.
- A Fossil Fuel Exit Program
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A complete transition away from fossil fuels is necessary within a few decades. The question is how to construct an exit strategy that will accomplish this. James Hansen has provided a starting point for a realistic climate-change exit strategy.
- A Fossil Fuel Exit Program
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ekeland analyzes climate activist Hansen's climate change exit strategy and why it has not been supported or pursued by political and environmental groups.
- Fracking Hell
The environmental costs of the new US gas drilling boom Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 The gas stored in the Marcellus Shale formation is the subject of desperate drilling to secure US domestic energy supplies. But the process involved - hydraulic fracturing - is the focus of a bitter dispute over environmental damage and community rights.
- Fracking is the death spasm of a defunct economic order
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Political support for fracking is not just about energy, writes Paul Mobbs. It reflects the greater ecological and resource crisis at the root of our current economic woes - and only postpones the essential shift to a new kind of economy.
- Frame of Reference and Journalistic Integrity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A criticism of the article, "Journalism and the Illusion of Objectivity" by Michael Holtzman, challenging Holtzman's claims on the nature of objectivity and bias in reporting.
- Freak Out
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 This qirky and fascinating documentary employs interviews, animation, archiwal footage and reenactment to reveal the untold story of the origins of the counter-culture movement that started over 100 years ago with a group of radical thinkers in Monte Verita in Switzerland.
- Fred Ho, Presente!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A tribute to saxophonist, composer, and revolutionary Marxist activist Fred Ho, who was an active member of the Jazz and radical left-movements.
- Free and Accessible Transit Now
Toward a Red-Green Vision for Toronto Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The free transit model makes public transit a right of all people, which would dramatically increase its use. While serving he vast majority of Torontonians and strengthening the public sector's role in meeting their needs, it would also address the special mobility requirements of the last mobile and most public-transit-dependent.
- Free Trade Explained In An Excellent Comic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are the latest in a long line of international free trade agreements. But why are they bad for the majority of people and the planet and what are the justifications given by politicians, economists and big corporations for pushing them? This fanstastic comic explains.
- Freedom...But to Do What?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Freedom. Everybody says freedom is such a very good thing that it's worth fighting for. But something so good and important deserves a clear meaning, no? Well, what is it?
- Freedom National
The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Oakes revisits the process of emancipation and the forces behind the incentives and threats that eventually led to the end of slavery in the U.S.
- Freedom Now Vision Unfinished
Book Review of LeBlanc and Yates's "A Freedom Budget for All Americans" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Miah critiques LeBlanc and Yates' analysis of the Civil Rights Revolution, in light of the fact that the Freedom Budget issued during this time remains unfulfilled.
- Freedom Summer, 1964: An Overview
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Oppenheimer provides a historical overview of the events leading up to and surrounding the 1964 Freedom Summer, when organizers worked to register Black voters in segregationist Deep South in the United States.
- Freedom Summer, 50 Years After
The Power of Stories Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In his memoir, Challenging the Mississippi Firebombers, Memories of Mississippi 1964-65, Jim Dann put to paper the stories from his time in Mississippi 50 years ago, working as a young college student for fifteen months in Sunflower County to establish Freedom Schools and to help register African-Americans to vote.
- Freedom Summer Remembered
Interview with Walter Kaufman Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Walter Kaufman is a retired attorney, psychotherapist and former community college teacher living in Berkeley, California. He was a participant in the 1964 Freedom Summer, working in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Against the Current editor David Finkel interviewed him for the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer project.
- Freedom Summer Remembered
Interview with Walter Kaufmann Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Finkel interviews retired community college teacher Walter Kaufmann about his experiences in the Freedom Summer project and teaching in the Freedom Schools.
- From Israel to ISIS
Harper's 'Orwellian' Foreign Policy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It’s getting difficult to remember a time when the Canadian Parliament actually tried to make principled decisions regarding foreign policy and our place in the community of nations.
- From Maoism to Trotskyism
Recollections of a Participant Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In 1968, a massive movement of radical students in the U.S. was attracted to Maoism. By 1972, the movement had already ruptured and was rapidly dissipating. What happened?
- From Mass Strike to New Society
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Jeremy Brecher examines where and how mass strikes have progressed into the working class attempting to run society in its own interests and the lessons we can learn from them.
- From Somaly Mam to ''Eden'': How Sex Trafficking Sensationalism Hurts Sex Workers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Most activists, regardless of ideology, are trying to do the right thing. But when it comes to human rights and sex work, doing the right thing is often much more complicated than calling the cops or donating 75 cents a day to a starving child on TV.
- From Sykes-Picot to "Islamic State": Imperialism's Bloody Wreckage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When the Jihadist group Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) changed its name and declared the establishment of the Caliphate, it did so with the release of a promotional video entitled "The End of Sykes-Picot." This was a reference to the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that marked the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of two zones of influence, British and French.
- The Fun of Empire: Fighting on All Sides of a War in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Now the Obama administration and American political class is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the failed “Bomb Assad!” campaign by starting a new campaign to bomb those fighting against Assad – the very same side the U.S. has been arming over the last two years.
- The future is agroecology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The way to a sustainable, people-centred agriculture lies in agroecology - farming based on ecological principles, taking account of the interdependence of all living things.
- The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire
The Wages of Hubris and Vengeance Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel is in the grip of a kind of collective schizophrenia. Not only its governors but the majority of its Jewish population have delusions of both grandeur and persecution, making for a distortion of reality and inconsistent behaviour. Israeli Jews see and represent themselves as a chosen people and part of a superior Western civilization.
- G4S To End Israel Prison Contracts Following Protests
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 G4S, the Anglo-Danish security contractor, has agreed to withdraw from prison work in Israel after activists disrupted the company annual general meeting for the second year in a row. The company is also under fire for ill-treatment of detainees in the UK, including the death of an Angolan man.
- Galileo's Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In celebration of the 450th anniversary of Galileo's birth, this article examines the famous scientist's life, contributions, and relevance today.
- Gary Webb: Vindicated
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Family Members of the Intrepid Investigative Journalist — Soon To Be Immortalized By An Upcoming Hollywood Movie — Share Their Story With The World.
- Gas company: Amazon tribes vulnerable to 'massive deaths'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Amazon tribes in Peru's rainforest are at risk of 'massive deaths' from new diseases to which they lack immunity, gas company Pluspetrol admits - as it tries to expand its Camisea gas project into a Reserve for isolated indigenous people.
- Gassing the American People
Fracking Democracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Last year the World Health Organization said over 7 million people died from air pollution, making it the largest killer on the planet – killing almost 80 times more people in one year than died of poison gas over the 4 years of WWI.
- Gates Foundation 'feeds the world' with corporate agriculture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Gates Foundation is spending half a billion dollars a year to 'feed the world', most of it aimed at Africa. But as GRAIN discovers, it is imposing a model of high-tech, high-input 'green revolution' farming, complete with GMOs, agro-chemicals and a pro-business neoliberal agenda, all in in alliance with corporate agriculture.
- Gaza and the Press
Dress the Gaza Situation Up All You Like, But the Truth Hurts Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The latest bloodbath in Gaza, which is being so graphically covered by journalists that our masters and our media are suffering a new experience: not fear of being called anti-Semitic, but fear of their own television viewers and readers – ordinary folk so outraged by the war crimes committed against the women and children of Gaza that they are demanding to know why, even now, television moguls and politicians are refusing to treat their own people like moral, decent, intelligent human beings.
- Gaza Crisis: Far-Right Israelis Chant 'There's No School Tomorrow, There's No Children Left in Gaza!'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Right-wing Israelis have been filmed chanting "There's no children left there [in Gaza]" and "Gaza is a cemetery" in celebration of their military's attacks on Gaza.
- "Gaza is a graveyard," sing joyful Israeli youths
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 This video shows an Israeli mob actually singing in celebration of children’s deaths in the style of a soccer fans’ song: “In Gaza there’s no studying, No children are left there, Olé, olé, olé-olé-olé.”
- Gaza - is annexation Israel's 'permanent solution'?
The real estate of Gaza would be an additional boon - and a highly valuable one, releasing 365 square kilometres of prime development land, Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As Israel pursues its war on Gaza with ever-increasing ferocity, and with 25% of Gaza's people forced from their homes, what's the final objective? It's unthinkable that Israel's aim is to 'cleanse' the territory of its people, seize its vast gas reserves, and annex some of the Med's hottest real estate. Isn't it?
- Gaza: Israel bombs water and sewage systems
If this situation continues Gaza residents will be subjected to a humanitarian crisis even worse than the immediate one of trying to survive Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel's armed forces have destroyed vital water and sewage infrastructure in their bombing campaign of the besieged territory. This constitutes a severe breach of the 1977 Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the part of Israel and all those conceiving, planning, ordering and perpetrating the attacks.
- Gaza, Israel and 'Human Shields'
The People Putting Innocents in Danger are the Israelis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 What does it mean to use human shields? Employed by the Germans and Japanese in the Second World War, the tactic is premised on an underlying trust in your enemy’s humanity. It appeals to the compassion and mercy of the combatant that they not slaughter the innocent in order to avenge their target. The ‘shield’ is not the human bodies surrounding the ‘guilty’ party, the shield is the clemency that mankind instinctively affords the innocent. The shield evaporates only when confronted by an enemy who is not merely a fellow solder locked in a power battle, but a psychopath unconcerned with the pain of others.
- Gaza: Israeli Soldiers Shoot and Kill Fleeing Civilians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli forces in the southern Gaza town of Khuza’a fired on and killed civilians in apparent violation of the laws of war in several incidents between July 23 and 25, 2014. Deliberate attacks on civilians who are not participating in the fighting are war crimes.
- Gaza: Israel's $4 billion gas grab
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The purpose of Israel's escalating assault on Gaza is to control the Territory's 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas - and so keep Palestine poor and weak, gain massive export revenues, and avert its own domestic energy crisis. If Palestinians develop their own gas resources, the resulting economic transformation could in turn fundamentally increase Palestinian clout.
- Gaza: water crisis grows as Israel targets essential infrastructure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel's war on Gaza has seen the systematic and widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure essential for human survival. This represents an apparently deliberate 'cutting off of life support' to those that survive the bombardment now under way.
- Gaza: Whole Villages Have Been Wiped Off the Map
A VIsit to Khuza'a Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I’m writing now from my home, but I still feel dizzy from shock and nauseated by the sights and smells on my visit to Khan Younis and Khuza’a.
- Gaza's Torment, Israel's Crimes, Our Responsibilities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It is important to understand what life is like in Gaza when Israel’s behavior is “restrained,” in between the regular manufactured crises like this one. When Israel is on “good behavior,” more than two Palestinian children are killed every week, a pattern that goes back over 14 years. The underlying cause is the criminal occupation and the programs to reduce Palestinian life to bare survival in Gaza, while Palestinians are restricted to unviable cantons in the West Bank and Israel takes over what it wants, all in gross violation of international law and explicit Security Council resolutions, not to speak of minimal decency.
- Gazonto
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 What would Israel's attack on Gaza in 2014 look like if it took place in Toronto?
- Genetic Testing of Citizens Is a Backdoor into Total Population Surveillance by Governments and Companies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The new Chief Executive of the National Health Service (NHS) in England, Simon Stevens, was recently reported arguing that the NHS must be transformed to make people’s personal genetic information the basis of their treatments.
- A German Lenin?
Book Review of "In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi" edited by David Fernbach Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of the compiled writings of Paul Levi, a leading figure in the German Communist movement.
- German police declare parts of Hamburg "no-go zone"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Early Saturday morning, police in the northern German city of Hamburg declared the entire district of St. Pauli and large parts of Altona, Eimsbuettel and Sternschanze to be a "no-go zone." The announcement of such a broad "no-go area" is unprecedented in German post-war history. In such areas police officers are entitled to arbitrarily check and search any individual and demand they leave the zone.
- Germany and Britain: Memory and Myopia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ernst Barlach was one of Germany's great expressionist artists of the early twentieth century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to the First World War, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering that he saw as the human condition.
- Ghana's farmers battle "Monsanto law' to retain seed freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ghana's government is desperate to pass a Plant Breeders Bill that would remove farmers' ancient 'seed freedom' to grow, retain, breed and develop crop varieties - while giving corporate breeders a blanket exemption from seed regulations. But the farmers are fighting back.
- The Global Battle for Free Speech
WikiLeaks: Bringing the First Amendment to the World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since 2011, waves of global uprisings have been erupting as never before. The crisis of representation helped spawn decentralized movements as a manifestation of people’s aspiration to take the reins of their own destinies. For many, the presumption of legitimacy of their governments has been crumbling. What triggered this widespread global crisis? WikiLeaks was a game changer. Their publication of disclosed documents along with established media reaction showed the true face of liberal institutions and the waning effectiveness of the politics of representation.
- Global Health Watch 4
An Alternative World Health Report Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Global Health Watch, now in its fourth edition, is widely perceived as the definitive voice for an alternative discourse on health and healthcare. It covers a range of issues that currently impact on health, including the present political and economic architecture in a fast-changing and globalized world; a political assessment of the drive towards Universal Health Coverage; broader determinants of health, such as gender-based violence and access to water; stories of struggles, actions and change; and a scrutiny of a range of global institutions and processes. It integrates rigorous analysis, alternative proposals and stories of struggle and change to present a compelling case for a radical transformation of the way we approach actions and policies on health.
- Global inequality, illustrated, described, explained
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Global inequality depitcted through images and quotes.
- Globalizing Gaza
How Israel Undermines International Law Through "Lawfare" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 At the same time as it engages in repeated massive military assaults on a primarily civilian popuation in Gaza, Israel is also engaged in an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR people and politicians. It is an effort not only to get Israel off the hook for massive violations of human rights and international law, but to help other governments overcome similar constraints when they embark as well on “asymmetrical warfare,” “counterinsurgency” and “counter-terrorism” against peoples resisting domination. It is a campaign that Israel calls “lawfare” and had better be taken seriously by us all.
- Glyphosate found in breast milk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A pilot study of American mothers' milk has found levels of the herbicide glyphosate around 1,000 times higher than allowed in European drinking water. Campaigners are demanding a ban on the use of glyphosate on food crops.
- Glyphosate is a disaster for human health
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Extensive, long running evidence for the cancer-causing effects of glyphosate, and other toxic impacts, have been ignored by regulators. Indeed as the evidence has built up, permitted levels in food have been hugely increased.
- GMOs show 'substantial non-equivalence'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 New studies document substantial differences of GM maize and GM soybean from their non-GM counterparts, writes Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji - exposing a permissive regulatory regime that has failed miserably in protecting public health and safety.
- God's plan for climate change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 How, and why, does the US Right and its evangelical 'Christian' wing campaign for mal-education, ignorance, corporate dominance, and the profligate consumption of fossil fuels?
- Good for the gander? As Alaska warms, a goose forgoes a 3,300-mile migration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Scientists have documented that increasing numbers of black brant are skipping that far southern migration and staying in Alaska instead. Fewer than 3,000 wintered in Alaska before 1977. In recent years, however, more than 40,000 have remained north, with as many as 50,000 staying there last year, during the most ice-free winter that Izembek had seen in more than a decade.
- Google doesn't want you to limit its ability to follow you around the internet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Behind our screens, tech companies are racing to extract a price for what we read and watch on the web: our personal information.
- Great moments in satire: a love note to the haters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An article by Hugh Goldring about Great Moments in Leftism, a comic strip that highlights the often absurd nature of the radical left.
- The Great Schism
Socialism and War in 1914 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This article sketches the limitations of Second International Marxism before outlining the strengths and weaknesses of Lenin’s alternative.
- The Great Spreadsheet Blunder
Reinhart and Rogoff: One Year Later Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It has been a bit more than a year since the Excel Spreadsheet error that shook the world. For those who may have missed it, in April of 2013, Thomas Herndon, a University of Massachusetts graduate student in economics, found an error in the calculations of Harvard Professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff on the relationship between government debt and economic growth.
- "Greater Israel" in Real Life
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book Review of "Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel" by Max Blumenthal.
- Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed
Fruits of Stalinist Class Collaboration Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The sharp polarization of Greek society has brought the memories of the Civil War in the 1940s, where workers and peasants under the leadership of the Communist Party (KKE) opposed the Greek ruling class. Seven decades later, these events remain a living part of the consciousness of the working class.
- A Green New Deal for New York
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Green Party outlines its revised goals for their campaign plan in the election for governor and lieutenant governor of New York.
- Grieving the children of Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Through all the turmoil of these last weeks and months I have been tortured by thoughts of children, Jewish children, Palestinian children, Syrian, Iraqi children – all those who most innocently of all, and most grievously of all, are the victims of the Middle East Madness.
- Guernica, 1937 / Gaza, 2014
Only the Insignias Change Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I invoke the Guernica example, not for spurious comparison or analogy, but because its occurrence is inscribed in the very DNA of modern historical oppression, in this case possessing precisely the same elements of overwhelming force on a largely defenseless population, in this case, having less to do with stopping rockets than a) terrorizing a people into abject submission, and b) testing out aerial warfare to soften an enemy and perhaps even clear the way for ground action—beyond consolidating settlement gains in the territories, also serving notice on Iran and whomever else (viz., Arab democracy) is viewed as a real or potential threat down the road.
- Gulf-Bound Tar Sands for Export?
Follow the Oiltanking Trail Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The U.S. Senate failed to get the necessary 60 votes to approve the northern leg of TransCanada‘s KeystoneXL pipeline, but incoming Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already promised it will get another vote when the GOP-dominated Senate begins its new session in 2015.
- Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
Is GCHQ awesome and 100% legal? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.”
- The Half Has Never Been Told
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A sweeping, authoritative history of the expansion of slavery in America, showing how forced migrations radically altered the nation's economic, political, and cultural landscape.
- Half of U.S. Farmland Being Eyed by Private Equity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire, even as new evidence indicates this land is being strongly pursued by private equity investors. In the long term, this dynamic could speed up the already fast-consolidating U.S. food industry, with broad ramifications for both human and environmental health.
- Hamas Rocket Launches Don't Explain Israel's Gaza Destruction -- Israeli Forces' Manipulated Figures and Fake Evidence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel and its supporters abroad have parried accusations of indiscriminate destruction and mass killing of civilians in Gaza by arguing that they were consequences of strikes aimed at protecting Israeli civilians from rockets that were being launched from very near civilian structures.
- Harold Pinter: Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Poetics
Art, Truth & Poetics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A lecture given by the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Pize for Literature, Harold Pinter. The lecture reflects on the concept of "truth" in regard to a creative process.
- Harper government silences pain of Gazan children
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This past summer Israel's advanced military bombarded the tiny, impoverished and overpopulated Gaza Strip for a third time in six years...Nowhere was safe as schools, hospitals and mosques were targeted...Ignoring pleas from hospitals, health-care workers, the Ontario government and a petition by over 40,000 Canadians, his government refuses to grant the 100 visas Dr. Abuelaish needs.
- Harper, The Ottawa Shooter, and Selling of War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The sensationalized media coverage of the police and military responses to the violent actions of one or more shooters in the Canadian capital of Ottawa Canada on Oct. 22 was truly global in scope. Among the newspapers that used on their front pages dramatic photographs of the elaborate militarization on Canada’s Parliament Hill were the New York Times.
- The Hate Preachers Fueling Sectarianism
Al Qaeda's Second Act Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the public support systems, media presence, and propaganda of a second wave of fundamentalist jihadist organizations.
- Healing the Dark Legacy of Native American Families
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) - educational issues among indigenous families.
- Health experts question handling of songbird-killing Superfund site
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Health experts are questioning the Environmental Protection Agency and Michigan state officials for their decades-long delays in cleanup of a Superfund site that is killing songbirds in yards, possibly leaving people at risk, too.
- Heavy metal songs: Contaminated songbirds sing the wrong tunes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Scientists have long known that mercury is a potent toxicant: It disrupts the architecture of human brains, and it can change birds' behavior and kill their chicks. But after extensive research in Virginia, scientists have shown that mercury also alters the very thing that many birds are known for -- their songs.
- Here come the thought police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared his intention to fast-track legislation expanding CSIS and police powers of “surveillance, detention and arrest.”
- The Hidden History of the Equal Rights Amendment
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Origins and history of the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Feminist supporters of the ERA had been divided over the issue of whether this legislation should be extended to men as part of the ERA or whether a "pure" ERA should be the goal of the feminist movement.
- "A Hideous Atrocity": Noam Chomsky on Israel's Assault on Gaza & U.S. Support for the Occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Hideous. Sadistic. Vicious. Murderous. That is how Noam Chomsky describes Israel’s 29-day offensive in Gaza that killed nearly 1,900 people and left almost 10,000 people injured. Chomsky has written extensively about the Israel/Palestine conflict for decades.
- The Highlights of "ChinaLeaks"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Reports by ICIJ and its partners revealing the secretive offshore holdings of China’s political and financial elite have generated a global wave of media coverage and an aggressive censorship campaign by Chinese authorities. These are some of the highlights of a worldwide selection of the original reports and ensuing media coverage.
- A History of Political Terror
The Ritual of Beheading Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Decapitation is a public ritual of political theatre that dates from ancient times. It is designed not simply to gruesomely kill a victim, but to send a powerful message to adversaries, both local and foreign. It is designed not simply to gruesomely kill a victim, but to send a powerful message to adversaries, both local and foreign.
- A history of struggle - book review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In his review of "Neil Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals", Stone posits that Neil Faulkner’s history is one which, in the classical Marxist tradition, is both profoundly internationalist, and which celebrates the self-activity of the exploited and oppressed and their potential to shape the future.
- Holding The Silent Killers Of Environmental Destruction Accountable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The findings of the most recent IPCC report are sobering. We have 15 years to mitigate climate disaster. It is up to us to make a major transition to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy within that timeframe. Big Energy and our plutocratic government are not going to do it without effective pressure from a people-powered movement.
- Hollywood's Gary Webb Movie and the Message that Big Media Couldn't Kill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Gary's email arrived quite by surprise. I knew about his Dark Alliance series, five years prior, documenting the CIA's trafficking of cocaine to fund paramilitary squads in Central America. I also knew he had been pummeled by corporate media and had lost his job over it. "They're trying to turn you into me," he said, “but you can win because you don't have a boss who can sell you out."
- Honduras and Mexico: Open Season for Journalists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Washington has long been at the forefront of an effort to promote cultural devastation, targeting journalists, artists, and independent thinkers more generally. This cultural ruin is a predictable consequence of U.S. support for repressive regimes.
- Honduras and the dirty war fuelled by the west's drive for clean energy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The palm oil magnates are growing ever more trees for use in biofuels and carbon trading. But what happens to the subsistence farmers who live on the lucrative land?
- Honoring Marta Russell (1951-2013)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A tribute to the life and work of the late disability rights advocate Marta Russell.
- 'Hostile to privacy': Snowden urges internet users to get rid of Dropbox
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Edward Snowden has identified Dropbox and other services as 'hostile to privacy." He urges web users to abandon unencrypted communication and adjust privacy settings to prevent governments from spying on them in increasingly intrusive ways.
- How Big Oil Plans to Win Ugly in New York
Leaked Transcript from PR Maven Shows Energy Companies will be Told to Make the Fight Against Fracking Opponents Personal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A PR firm well known for its hardball tactics in defense of Big Tobacco will deliver the keynote address at tonight’s Independent Oil and Gas Association conference.
- How Can I Keep From Singing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Excerpts from an interview with Pete Seeger.
- How Can the US Accuse Russia of Violating International Law?
Not Funny, But it's Still Hard Not to Laugh Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If you want to make moral or legal pronouncements, or to condemn bad behaviour, you have to be a moral, law-abiding person yourself.
- How "Extreme Levels" of Roundup in Food Became the Industry Norm
Roundup Contamination of GMO Soybeans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Surprisingly, almost no data exist in the scientific literature on herbicide residues in herbicide tolerant genetically modified (GM) plants, even after nearly 20 years on the market. The authors' research, however, demonstrates that roundup Ready GM-soy accumulates herbicide ingredient residues and also differs markedly in nutritional composition compared to soybeans from other agricultural practices, while organic soybean samples show a more healthy nutritional profile than both industrial conventional and GM soybeans.
- How Greens and Labor can Win ... Together
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activists and the New South Wales Labourers Federation by Meredith and Verity Burgmann (UNSW Press, 1998).
- How Human Rights Can Build Haiti
Activists, Lawyers, and the Grassroots Campaign Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A cataclysmic earthquake, revolution, corruption, and neglect have all conspired to strangle the growth of a legitimate legal system in Haiti. But as How Human Rights Can Build Haiti demonstrates, the story of lawyers-activists on the ground should give us all hope.
- How I Became Radicalized
It Can Happen To Anyone Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I’m not exactly sure when I became radicalized, but it was sometime in the mid 1980s. I purposely use the term radicalize because, with the rise of globalized insurgency in general and al Qaeda and now ISIS in particular, the word has become a favorite in the media, especially for those on the right.
- How I Stopped Being a Jew
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Sand, an Israeli historian, does not examine Judaism as a religion, but focuses on the question of Jewish ethnicity. Through historical and political analysis, Sand examines the implications of embracing the identity tag "secular Jew" in the 21st century. The crux of the issue for Sand is whether there is such an entity as secular Judaism.
- How International Financial Elites Change Governments to Implement Austerity
Global War on the 99% Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Many countries around the world are plagued by all kinds of armed rebellions, economic sanctions, civil wars, “democratic” coup d’états and/or wars of “regime change.” These include Ukraine, Venezuela, Syria, Thailand, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia and Lebanon. Even in the core capitalist countries the overwhelming majority of citizens are subjected to brutal wars of economic austerity.
- How Israel Spins War Crimes
The Secret Report That Helps Israelis Cover Atrocities Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli spokesmen have their work cut out explaining how they have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, compared with just three civilians killed in Israel by Hamas rocket and mortar fire. But on television and radio and in newspapers, Israeli government spokesmen such as Mark Regev appear slicker and less aggressive than their predecessors, who were often visibly indifferent to how many Palestinians were killed.
- How much for your data?
What you whistle in the shower Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Rapacious financialisation risks turning everything we are and have into a productive asset. And the foremost asset is our personal data, mined by digitalised technology.
- How NGOs Failed Afghanistan
"They Killed Every Incentive to Farm" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the failures, opportunities, and complications of international aid with a particular focus on Afghanistan. Includes a discussion of a successful canal-building effort in Lower Shabelle province, Somalia -- a project run not by NGOs but a local al-Qa'ida affiliate.
- How Protests Against Israeli Bombing of Gaza Stopped Zim Ships
With Longshore Workers Support Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Protests against the Israeli bombing of Gaza erupted around the world but none had a more powerful impact than picketers in the port of Oakland, California in August and September.
- How Rich Are the 400 Richest Americans?
And What They Do With Their Money Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 According to Forbes, a leading business magazine, the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans has now reached the staggering total of $2.3 trillion. This gives them an average net worth of $5.7 billion – an increase of 14 percent over the previous year.
- How Social Movements Can Win More Victories Like Same-Sex Marriage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The rapidly expanding victory around same-sex marriage defies many of our common ideas about how social change happens. This was not a win that came in measured doses, but rather a situation in which the floodgates of progress were opened after years of half-steps and seemingly devastating reversals. It came about through the efforts of a broad-based movement, pushing for increased acceptance of LGBT rights within a wide range of constituencies.
- How Syria's Secular Uprising Was Hijacked by Jihadists
Al Qaeda's Second Act Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On Syria's descent into a sectarian civil war.
- How the Media Gets It Wrong
On Asking the Wrong Questions and Mapping Media Dead Zones Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- How the NSA Helped Turkey Kill Kurdish Rebels
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On a December night in 2011, a terrible thing happened on Mount Cudi, near the Turkish-Iraqi border. One side described it as a massacre; the other called it an accident.
- How the NSA Infiltrated Mexico's Computers
A Cyber Invasion Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 NSA internal information provided by former security consultant and whistleblower Edward Snowden once again shows that Mexico features prominently as a target for massive U.S. espionage.
- How the Obama Administration Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
US nuclear policy is undermining our safety and national security Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008, he famously pledged to place nuclear disarmament at the center of his national-security strategy. Why, then, we must ask, is the Obama administration moving forward with an ambitious nuclear-weapons modernization program that could dramatically raise the threat of nuclear war?
- How the People's Climate March Became a Corporate PR Campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I've never been to a protest march that advertised in the New York City subway. That spent $220,000 on posters inviting Wall Street bankers to join a march to save the planet, according to one source. That claims you can change world history in an afternoon after walking the dog and eating brunch.
- How the UAE Tried to Silence a Popular Arab Spring Activist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Earlier this year (2014), as a wave of counterrevolution and repression continued to roll back popular democratic uprisings across the Middle East, one of the Arab Spring’s most popular online activists found himself sitting in a jail cell.
- How the U.S. Department of Justice Makes Murder Respectable, Kills the Innocent and Jails their Defenders
Redefining "Imminent" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In order to justify its global assassination program, the Obama administration has had to stretch words beyond their natural breaking points. For instance, any male 14 years or older found dead in a drone strike zone is a 'combatant' unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving him innocent.
- How to Jump-Start Your Union
Lessons from the Chicago Teachers Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 How to Jump-Start Your Union tells how activists transformed their union and gave members hope. Readers will learn how to run for office, work with their communities, build stewards' networks, train new leaders, run a contract campaign, and strike.
- How to Jumpstart Your Union (Book Review)
A Guide to Fighting Back Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An invaluable book for any union activist. It details the successful 2010 strike by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), starting with the formation of CORE (Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators) back in 2008 when they had only 22 members; their election to union leadership positions in 2010 when their membership had swelled to 400; and their determination to maintain the struggle in the aftermath of the strike.
- How to Remove the Rich from Power and Abolish Class Inequality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Here are step by step instructions for removing the rich from power and abolishing class inequality. The instructions, however, will be in reverse order.
- Human Rights Watch's Revolving Door to US Government
A Letter from Nobel Peace Laureates Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Human Rights Watch characterizes itself as “one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.” However, HRW’s close ties to the U.S. government call into question its independence.
- I will be nude, I will protest, and I will challenge you to your core!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A nude woman is the antithesis of the idealised veiled and submissive woman. Whilst nude protest is not the only way to resist Islamism and the veil, it is a very modern, practical and appropriate way of doing so. It also challenges discrimination against women and a system which profits from the commodification and sexualisation of women’s bodies.
- Ian Birchall reviews Ernie Tate's 'Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Anyone who was active in Britain's Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) in the late 1960s will remember Ernie Tate, whose energy and enthusiasm made such a contribution. Now, 45 years later, he has published two volumes of memoirs from the 1950s and 1960s.
- The ICC Must Investigate Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
The Credibility of the Court is at Stake Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Regardless of the efforts of Israel or its closest ally, the United States, to prevent the International Criminal Court from seeking justice for the Palestinians and international aid workers killed and wounded in Gaza, the Court has a duty to at least open an investigation. The credibility of the ICC hangs in the balance. No individual who violates international law should escape justice. If Israeli officials are not investigated for possible war crimes in Gaza, then the tragic lessons learned from the last century about failures in international criminal justice and the consequences of inaction will have been in vain.
- If Gaza's Dead Were America's Dead
Imagine the Outrage Over 27,000 Dead Kids... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Imagine the Outrage Over 27,000 Dead Kids...
- "If not now, when?" On BDS and 'singling out' Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is an edited version of a letter I've sent to a relative in the US who's been trying to figure out the BDS issue in the wake of the recent onslaught against the American Studies Association's decision to support the academic boycott.
- Illegal loggers remain hidden in Peru's forest but timber finds global buyers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 State exercises little control over remote Amazon region blighted by poverty and illiteracy, and organised crime fills the vacuum.
- Illegal logging behind deaths of indigenous leaders
Assassination of forest defenders highlights extensive network of logging and the illegal timber trade. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 "In the forest, the silence at night is absolute," says Sara, a settler who owns a plot of land in the middle of Peru's central jungle. "But suddenly, at 9 p.m. you start hearing chainsaws in the distance. I get up immediately and go quietly with my gun and my dogs to see where they are cutting down my trees. But I don’t find the loggers. They hide. In the morning I find felled trees and cut planks that they were unable to take away."
- The Illusion of Debate
Consensus for the People that Matter Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A recent article in FAIR reviewed the findings of its latest study on the quality of political “debate” being aired on the mainstream networks. It studied the run-up to the military interventions in both Iraq and Syria. Perhaps the arbiters of the study intended to illustrate what we’ve learned since the fraudulent Iraq War of 2003. Well, it appears we’ve learned nothing.
- Imagine
Living in a Socialist USA Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA is at once an indictment of American capitalism as the root cause of our spreading dystopia and a cri di coeur for what life could be like in the United States if we had economic as well as a real political democracy. It features thirty-one essays by revolutionary thinkers and activists on various aspects of a new society and, crucially, on how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, living in a society that is truly fair and just.
- Imagining Socialism in Our Lives
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of "Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA" edited by Francis Goldin, Debby Smith and Michael Steven Smith.
- In an era of wars and revolution: American socialist cartoons of the mid-twentieth century
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The cartoons collected in this book depict US politics, workers' struggles, Jim Crow racism, the Roosevelt New Deal, and Stalinism at its height, as revolutionary socialists saw them at the time.
- In Memoriam, Gabriel Kolko
b. Paterson, Aug. 17, 1932-d. Amsterdam, May 19, 2014 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- In refuge on Refugee Rights Day: The Awan family story
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On a day where we remember migrant and refugee struggles for freedom, dignity and security and recommit to fighting ongoing injustice, we highlight the struggle of the Awan family.
- In Ten Years, We Will Have Zero Privacy
Spying on Consumers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When we consider the “progress” that has been made in the ability to delve into the private lives of consumers, it’s terrifying. They know where we shop, where we vacation, what we buy, what we read, what we watch on television, and what we visit on the Internet.
- In the battle of people vs. pipelines, round one went to the people
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Last Wednesday I was arrested. I crossed a police line intended to mark the area where Kinder Morgan plans to drill into a mountainside as part of the survey work for an expanded Trans Mountain pipeline to carry diluted bitumen from the tar sands to the ocean.
- In the Shadow of the Fatwa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Twenty five years ago not even death threats, bombings, and murders could not stop the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Today, all it takes is for one person to shout ‘offence’ for liberals to haul out the metaphorical burqa to protect our sensitivities. But in defending one's right to say what they wish, even if it is deemed by some to be offensive, what we are truly defending is the necessity for a plural world.
- In the US: Imagining Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book review. This welcome book, Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, is an important and unique attempt to bridge that gap between the obvious and mass apathy. As an argument for socialism, presented from multiple angles in short essays by some thirty contributors, it is persuasive, passionate, and at times eloquent.
- In the Wake of Carnage
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book review of "Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru" by Kimberly Theidon.
- 'Incapacitating' chemical weapons threaten a new arms race
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 December's meeting of the Chemical Weapons Convention offers the opportunity to control very dangerous and often fatal chemical agents deemed 'incapacitating'.Currently a legal gray area, it's essential to bring the development and use of these substances before a full blown arms race breaks out.
- India - Now Nuclear and Environmental Dissent is a Crime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In modern India any form of dissent from the neoliberal corporate model of development is being criminalised. Opponents of nuclear power, coal mines, GMOs, giant dams, are all under attack as enemies of the state and a threat to economic growth.
- India, Where Corporate Socialism is a Growth Industry
$608 Billion in Write-Offs Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It was business as usual in 2013-14. Business with a capital B. This year’s budget document says we gave away another $88.6 billion to the corporate needy and the under-nourished rich in that year.
- Indian Journalist Offers Harsh Critique of Globalization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- India's Coal Inferno
100,000 Premature Deaths a Year and Rising Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As India pursues its aggressive path of coal-powered industrialisation, its leaders are showing themselves willing to sacrifice millions of people and huge swathes of the country to a dark and uncertain future.
- India's Rice Warrior Battles to Build Living Seed Bank as Climate Chaos Looms
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Rice conservationist Debal Deb grapples with 'mindless Indian elite' to reintroduce genetically diverse, drought-tolerant varieties
- An Indigenous People's History of the United States
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.
- The injustice industry
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There is a major legal business in corporate lawsuits against governments, seeking either a change in proposed legislation to suit corporate demands, or compensation. Under TTIP, European governments could face the same claims.
- Inside El Salvador's Military Blacklist
The Yellow Book Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Yellow Book (Libro amarillo) is a 270 page document from 1987 that the National Security Archive in Washington DC made public on September 28th, 2014. The Yellow Book includes 1,975 photographs that the Salvadoran Armed Forces and the State Department of Intelligence of El Salvador used to catalogue people as “terrorists” and “enemies” of the state. The Yellow Book is the only military document that has been made public to this day.
- Inside Komen's NGOized Culture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The authors analyze the monopoly that the Komen Foundation has over breast cancer research and how the process of "NGOization" has cultivated a consumer culture in how participants engage with the movement.
- The Insidious Power of Propaganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 To study the effects of political propaganda in what used to be called the 'free world' there could hardly be a better time than now. We are living through an instance of insidious propaganda that has clean contours. It fills a common need. In a period of large-scale slaughter and other man-made disaster the morally conscious person can do with some clear categories of good and bad, desirable and despicable.
- The Intelligence Apparatus Is Checking Out Your "Intimate Body Parts"
Privates Eyes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 According to the latest Snowden revelation, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which works in close collaboration with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), has been intercepting and storing images of millions of Yahoo webcam-chat users in a program appropriately code-named "Optic Nerve."
- The internet, social media and the workplace
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Upchurch argues that the impact social media has on social movements is overestimated. Instead, it is imperative to focus on the impact of communication technology in the workplace, at the point of production, if we are to fully understand its implications.
- Intersectionality and black communist women
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Erik S McDuffie's book "Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism and the Making of Black Left Feminism" looks to an especially marginalised group, black women in the United States who joined the Communist Party.
- The Intractable Marginality of the Activist Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Strikes are only one form of struggle, and perhaps less and less important as the years pass. But the disappearance of strikes is not an anomaly. It reflects a pattern of diminishing overall levels of oppositional social mobilization. Although there aren't (as far as I know) statistics on it, it is obvious that levels of social struggle generally, in the Canadian state, are lower now than at any time since written records have been kept.
- Introduction to the Israel Lobby
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Israel lobby is one of the most powerful and pervasive special interest groups in the United States. It consists of a multitude of powerful institutions and individuals that work to influence Congress, the president, academia, the media, religious institutions, and American public opinion on behalf of Israel.
- The Invisibility of Fascism in the Postwar United States
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Vials examines the use of the term "fascism" in post-war United States politics since the Tea Party have twisted its meaning to denote a left-wing phenomenon.
- The IPCC report: Between nightmare and revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Belgian ecosocialist Daniel Tanuro says the latest IPCC report has sounded an alarm that we must not ignore. Only radical change can avert climate disaster.
- IRS seizes hundreds of perfectly legal bank accounts, refuses to give money back
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Internal Revenue Service has been seizing bank accounts belonging to small businesses and individuals who regularly made deposits of less than $10,000, but broke no laws. And the government is refusing to return all the money taken. The practice - called civil asset forfeiture - allows IRS agents to seize property they suspect of being tied to a crime, even if no charges are filed, and their agency is allowed to keep a share of whatever is forfeited.
- Is Israel singled out for its human rights violations?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Some people assert that human rights activists and the international community are disproportionately – and unjustifiably – focusing their attention on the Jewish state. They are "ignoring" human rights violations elsewhere — Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Chad, wherever — in order to unfairly vilify Israel. This bias, the argument usually goes, is motivated by anti-Semitism.
- Is Water a Human Right in Detroit?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Feeley examines the questionable actions of the Detroit Water and Sewage Department's recent decision to shut-off the water of residents with outstanding bills, a process that penalizes the large portion of the population that is low-income in a city that is undergoing bankruptcy.
- ISIS and the IDF: Canada's Double Standard
Who are the Real Terrorists? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Why can westerners join the Israeli Defense Forces while westerners joining Islamic State are despised and killed? In what sense is the IDF scenario any less reprehensible than the IS one?
- Israel does not want peace
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Rejectionism is embedded in Israel's most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone.
- Israel ignoring "tectonic change" in public opinion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 World public opinion is important. More than that, it is vital. The British parliament’s resolution may be non-binding, but it expresses public opinion, which will sooner or later decide government action on arms sales, Security Council resolutions, European Union decisions and what not.
- Israel/Palestine Lexicon For Mainstream Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If you are writing for mainstream media, you need to learn special uses of words and phrases that are specific to Israel/Palestine. If you use common usage, you will run into confusions, paradoxes, and hostile responses from pro-Israel people. Please follow these guidelines and you will have no problems with editors, politicians, or organized pro-Israel groups. For each phrase, this guide will present first (a) the common usage, and then (b) the specific Israel/Palestine usage that you must use in order to write for major US (and UK and Canadian of course) media (NYT, Toronto Star, BBC, CBC, etc.)
- Israel showed restraint in Gaza before attacking? You must be kidding
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli journalist Amira Hass, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, demolishes some myths.
- Israeli calls for Palestinian blood ring at fever pitch
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Concerned humanists may have hoped that when a group of Jewish Israelis confessed to kidnapping and killing Muhammad Abu Khudair, a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem — forcing him to drink gasoline and torching him to death from inside his body — that top Israeli legislators and rabbis would have been horrified at what their revenge rhetoric had triggered.
- Israeli Cease Fire Violations and Media Propaganda
The Conquest of Palestine Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Israeli conquest of Palestine has always been a difficult issue for Western mainstream media to cover. The difficulty lies not in the task of reporting the facts on the ground and transmitting an accurate depiction of them to the public, but in refraining from doing so.
- Israeli Company 'Doing Good' Using Luxembourg Outpost
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The international business and philanthropic group led by Israel's richest woman includes a Luxembourg subsidiary that shares its address with more than 1200 other companies, and uses complex financial structures like internal loans and hybrid tools, according to analysis of secret tax documents by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
- Israeli Company Targeted by Oakland Blockade Imports Ammunition Into US
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli-owned shipping company Zim, the target of recent port blockades organized by Palestinian solidarity activists in California, is importing millions of rounds of small arms ammunition into the United States each year.
- Israelis have the Upper Hand when it Comes to Vengeance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As Human Rights Watch warned, Israel’s recent actions – mass arrests; armed raids; the killing of Palestinians, including minors; lockdowns of cities, house demolitions; and air strikes – amounted to “collective punishment”, international law’s euphemism for revenge, against Palestinians. In the face of the enduring violence of Israel’s occupation, and the licence it provides soldiers to humiliate and oppress, ordinary Palestinians have a stark choice: to submit or resist. Ordinary Israelis, on the other hand, do not need to seek revenge on their own account. The Israeli state, military and courts are there every day doing it for them.
- Israelis rattled by search for truth about the Nakba
First 'truth commission' avoids issue of reconciliation as veteran Israeli fighters due to confess to 1948 war crimes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The first-ever "truth commission" in Israel will feature confessions from veteran Israeli fighters of the 1948 war who are expected to admit to perpetrating war crimes as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes. The commission is the culmination of more than decade of antagonistic confrontations between a small group of activists called Zochrot, the Hebrew word for Remembering, and the Israeli authorities, as well as much of the Jewish-Israeli public.
- Israel's anti-African dragnet tightens
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The past year saw some of the most ruthless Israeli attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since the territories were occupied in 1967. Israeli political leaders incited violence against Palestinians and soldiers and civilians carried out these commands, while the government’s parallel war on African refugees raged on.
- Israel's atrocities in Gaza prompt unprecedented political fallout
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 "Carnage" in Gaza – "the killing of children and the slaughter of civilians". Not the words of a Palestinian spokesperson but rather French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. Australia's FM Julie Bishop condemned what she called "shocking" and "indefensible" incidents, with "hundreds of innocent people" killed.
- Israel's education system peddles intolerance and lies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 John Kerry spent last week testing the waters with the Israelis and the Palestinians over his so-called framework agreement – designed to close the gaps between the two sides. But the issues he is trying to resolve appear more intractable by the day.
- Israel's Exterminatory Impulse Toward Gaza
A Protracted Genocide Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Disproportionate power yields the psychopathology of sadism.
- Israel’s Fascistization of Judaism
A Nation in Authoritarian Lockstep Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Israel's Gaza backlash targets Arab minority
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel's large Palestinian minority is facing an unprecedented backlash of incitement and violent reprisals as Israeli Jews rally behind the current military operations in Gaza, human rights groups and political activists have warned.
- Israel's occupation is more complex than a genocide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli officials were caught in a revealing lie late last month as the country celebrated the Jewish New Year. Shortly after declaring the most popular boy’s name in Israel to be "Yosef", the interior ministry was forced to concede that the top slot was actually filled by "Mohammed".
- Israel's War Against Gaza's Women & Their Bodies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As Gaza is pummeled, the level of anti-Palestinian racist incitement from top Israeli political, religious and cultural figures continues to ring at peak pitch, and has taken on a dangerous misogynistic tone.
- Israel's War on African Refugees
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Isral implements public policies that support a racist agenda. In the past twenty-four months, the country has deported thousands of non-Jewish Africans and the Netanyahu government has declared that it will not rest until the remaining 50,000 are expelled.
- Israel's War on Africans
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 72-minute slideshow about Israel's treatment of non-Jewish African asylum-seekers, given at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada on March 9, 2014.
- Israel's War Echo Chamber
Lost Voices of Dissent Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 For several days now, some of my neighbours have suggested that the time has come to “destroy them”- meaning either Hamas or Palestinians – “once and for all”. Government ministers, members of Knesset and leading media commentators have also been consistently pouring oil onto the fire. Indeed, it seems the only vocal criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is that he is too soft on the Palestinians. There is no public debate about the necessity of another war, but only about how punitive Israel should be.
- It's War on the Poor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Miah analyzes the increase in numbers within the working poor class and the economic structures that keep them poor.
- "It's not just 2 pesos; It's the country:" Mexico City's #PosMeSalto Movement Protests Rising Transit Costs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The author surveys the 2 peso transit fare hike in Mexico within the context of the country's suffering ecomomy and low living wage to showcase why the decision is a mistake.
- It's not just radicalised Islamists - what about foreign fighters who flock to the IDF?
Is the Government interested in UK citizens who have been fighting in Israeli uniform in Gaza in the past couple of weeks? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Let us hope and pray that no UK citizens have been involved in such terrible deeds. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it, if the lads in blue had a friendly word with them when they arrive back at Heathrow – and insist on knowing exactly what they were up to when they wore another country’s uniform.
- It's not just the bees! 'Neonic' pesticides linked to bird declines
The higher the imidacloprid concentration the more severely the bird populations dropped. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A study published today in Nature shows a strong correlation between concentrations of a popular neonicotinoid pesticide in water, and bird declines. Regulators are under pressure to tighten up, but the industry still claims there's 'no substantiated evidence'.
- It's Raining Bombs and Shells
A Doctor's Notes From Gaza Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I’m still alive. I don’t know what this means, but I can say that most of the time I can still walk and do some work with people who need help. It all depends on my luck. And here, for people living in Gaza, luck means how close to you the bombs fall from Israel’s tanks, planes, or warships. Some hours it’s raining bombs. Americans say “It’s raining cats and dogs.” In the new Gaza idiom, we say “It’s raining bombs and shells.”
- J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars and the Persistence of Tradition (Yale, 2013) (Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Review of Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars and the Persistence of Tradition by J. Arch Getty (Yale, 2013).
- Jerusalem: the Unholy City
A Long and Checkered History Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Jerusalem is called "the City of Peace". This is a linguistic mistake. True, in antiquity it was called Salem, which sounds like peace, but Salem was in fact the name of the local deity. It is also a historical mistake. No city in the world has seen as many wars, massacres and as much bloodshed as this one. All in the name of some God or other.
- Jewish Groups' Whitewash of Israeli Racism Ensures It Will Fester
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As news spreads of the circumstances surrounding last week's murder of 17-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdair, many international observers are responding with incredulity.
- The Jihadis Return
ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Though capable of staging spectacular attacks like 9/11, jihadist organizations were not a significant force on the ground when they first became notorious in the shape of al-Qa'ida at the turn of century. The West's initial successes in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan weakened their support still further. Today, as Middle East commentator Patrick Cockburn sets out in this new book, that's all changed. Exploiting the missteps of the West's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as its misjudgments in relation to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist organizations, of which ISIS is the most important, are swiftly expanding.
- John Ball Was Right!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 John Ball was a leader of the English Peasant Rebellion of 1381, also known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion from the name of another of its leaders. Ball was a priest at a time when the feudal society consisted largely of "villeins" and "gentlefolk".
- John Handcox, "Sharecropper's Troubadour"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Robin Lindley interviews University of Washington labour history professor Michael Honey regarding his biography about singer and labour activist John Handcox.
- John Holt: Homeschooling Pioneer and Visionary Progressive
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The stereotype of homeschooling as the haven for conservative, religious ideologues overshadows the movement's radically progressive roots. One of the movement's foremost pioneers, John Holt, was an egalitarian atheist who explicitly opposed patriarchy, corresponded with progressive thinkers including Paul Goodman and Noam Chomsky, and helped initiate the still emerging children’s rights movement.
- Joint Declaration by International Law Experts on Israel's Gaza Offensive
The International Community Must End Israel's Collective Punishment of the Civilian Population in the Gaza Strip Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the targeting of objectives providing no effective military advantage, and the intentional targeting of civilians and civilian houses have been persistent features of Israel’s long-standing policy of punishing the entire population of the Gaza Strip, which, for over seven years, has been virtually imprisoned by Israeli imposed closure.
- The Jordan Valley: stolen land, stolen childhood
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Jordan Valley in the Palestinian West Bank is under active annexation to Israel - in breach of the 4th Geneva Convention. Victoria Brittain went there to explore what this means for the people of the Valley.
- Journalism’s Search for Metaphor and Meaning
Barking Dogs and Sinking Ships Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Journalists often aren’t alert watchdogs, but limiting the profession to the role of a barking dog is a dead-end anyway.
- A Journalist’s Death in Oaxaca
The Murder of Crime Reporter Alberto López Bello Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas to practice journalism.
- Journey of an Unrepentant Socialist
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Kneen describes his book as his “political theological autobiography.” The book is a personal life-story with a focus on the 1950s and '60s, coming from someone who was active in the peace and social justice movements in the USA and Canada over the past 5 decades or so. It starts with an inside story of the New Left and the peace and Civil Rights movements in North America, and the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference, and continues with his life as a farmer and writer in Canada.
- Judge approves Detroit bankruptcy plan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The more than yearlong bankruptcy case in Detroit concluded Friday with a US judge sanctioning a savage restructuring plan for the city, which creates a new precedent for an assault on public workers throughout the United States.
- Just How Bad Is Yelp's Fake Review Problem?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 You're probably aware of multiple controversial issues surrounding Yelp reviews. There are several to choose from. You have some businesses accusing the company of holding positive reviews hostage (with advertising being the ransom). You have a court ordering Yelp to turn over the identities of anonymous Yelp reviewers. You have people paying other people to write fake reviews, whether it's negative reviews for competitors or positive reviews for their own business.
- Kavita Krishnan: 'Women's Liberation, Everyone's Liberation'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Kavita Krishnan, a socialist organizer and a well-known international spokesperson for the movement against sexual violence in India, speaks on sexual violence, everyday sexism, protest, solidarity, and public space in India.
- Keeping us in the dark
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The TIPP negotiations are being conducted almost in secret, with governments and the European Parliament deliberately denied essential information. However, business lobbyists can access all areas, and do.
- Kerry's Propaganda War on Russia's RT
When specialists insist that war with Russia is "not unthinkable" precipitated by events in Ukraine, one should take note Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Secretary of State Kerry, who has bumbled through a string of propaganda fiascos on Ukraine, decries Russia's RT network as a "propaganda bullhorn" that Americans should ignore - just trust what the U.S. government tells you, an idea that ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern rejects.
- Keystone Cops
TransCanada Cultivates Close Ties With Nebraska Police Agencies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since August 2011, the Nebraska Information Analysis Center (NIAC) – one of more than 70 Department of Homeland Security “fusion centers” – and TransCanada Corporation, the company behind the Keystone XL Pipeline, have shared information about anti-pipeline protesters, Nebraska landowners, and opposition to the project.
- Kill a Black Kid and Get Rich
An American Disgrace Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is America folks. Where you can kill a black kid and justified or not (NOT!) you will then become a millionaire through interviews and book deals and film rights. This is your capitalist system at work. No laws that make this illegal. A cop can actually kill someone on purpose if he wants, because cops get away with almost anything, with the knowledge that they can then quit their awful jobs and become rich.
- Killing Trend - The Cruise Missile Liberals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 News that 2015 might turn out to be the first year since 1914 when British troops will not be fighting a war somewhere in the world appeared to come as a shock to many.
- "A kind of super-stress": The Experiences of a Temporary Agency Worker in Montreal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Immigrant's experiences reflect the difficulties faced by temporary agency workers in Montreal.
- Kinder Morgan's $136 million pipeline 'war chest' to be paid by Canadians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In what an economist calls an "unfair" decision, the National Energy Board has allowed Kinder Morgan to build a $136 million 'war chest' to fund its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion application through shipping surcharges. The charge, called a "firm service fee", allows Texas-based pipeline company Kinder Morgan to offload the cost of the pipeline application to Canadian shippers.
- The KKK and Other Grassroots Movements
Venezuela isn't as divided as its right-wing opposition would have you believe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A sign of a real revolution is its knack for conjuring a counter-revolution. To the extent that the Bolivarian Revolution has problems, the solution to them won’t come from chats with those looking to overthrow it, but rather the organization of workers trying to fulfill its potential. There can be no neutral ground between those two positions.
- #KMFace photos mock Kinder Morgan claim that facial expressions are a form of "assault"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Anti-pipeline protestors took to social media to post their best #KMFace, following Kinder Morgan's court case against residents this week, where the company's lawyer stated that the protestors' angry snarls are "not just intimidation," but "actually assault."
- The KXL's Big Fail
An Empty Victory Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Keystone XL bill failed to pass Congress. The Big Fail marks a huge success for groups who have been struggling to expose the KXL for the dirty policy it represents. The actions taken on the day of the vote, including disrupting the Senate vote in the chamber and blocking Senators Bennet (D-Col.) and Carper (D-Del.) from leaving their offices, speak to the dedication and tirelessness of the movement to stop the pipeline.
- Labour's lost leader
The legacy of Tony Benn Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 From an interview to Tony Benn - sometime in the mid-1990s - his point of view about how broad and profound was the defeat of both trade unionism and the democratic socialist left over the previous decade.
- Lack of regulation behind West Virginia water disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A chemical spill at the Etowah River Terminal, near Charleston, West Virginia, resulted in nearly 300,000 people in the state losing access to drinkable water. Since then, several reports have been released detailing the decades-long lack of regulation by state or federal agencies of the site responsible.
- Lakota vow: dead or in prison before we allow the KXL pipeline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On February 2,7 2014 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement activists joined in a four-directions walk to commemorate Liberation Day, an event to mark the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. As they do each year, four groups gather to the north, south, east and west and then walk eight miles until converging on top of Wounded Knee, where they honour the fallen warriors and the tribe’s rich history of resistance.
- Lancet: an Open Letter for the People of Gaza
The Massacre Must Stop Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A public letter from doctors and scientists to stop the massacre.
- Land Conflict and Injustice
Development in 'New India' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On agrarian crisis and the commercialization of the countryside in India.
- Land & Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Explores humanity's contradictory relationship with the environment: our role in destroying nature, and our potential to for positive change.
- Last Harvest
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Last Harvest follows the riveting journey of an elderly Chinese farming couple whose relocation is imminent as a result of China's controversial South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the largest of its kind in the world. Wang captures a remarkable and engaging human story at the intersection of connection and disconnection from land and culture and of old and new China.
- Latin American coups upgraded
These days the military go back to their barracks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The classic Latin American coup used to put the military in direct command and control of a country. That doesn’t work well on the world stage, and is being replaced by more clever manipulation, however the same people end up in power.
- Latin American progressives and environmental duplicity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Left wing governments across the Americas are faced with a dilemma - high social spending programs financed by income from destructive mining and hydrocarbon extraction - or a slower but sustainable development path that puts ecology, equity and justice first. Their answer - a constant pushing back of the resource frontier.
- The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A call to white Americans to unite with suppressed minorities who are incarcerated daily, killed in the streets, and who hold little political power against these militarized police forces.
- Laws Unto Themselves
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A frequent criticism of “free trade” agreements is that corporations are elevated to the level of a country. It might be more accurate to say that corporations are elevated above countries.
- Lawsuit Against Google Highlights Mining of Student Data
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Children have become lucrative targets for data mining companies, according to a study by Politico magazine. Just weeks after Google settled a lawsuit for selling student data for advertising, the publication revealed an entire industry devoted to marketing data gathered from Internet applications offered to students and their teachers. Many modern software companies offer free tools to everyone like email, games and search engines that come with strings attached. Google is perhaps the best known because it offers students an entire suite of applications from calendars to chat services and data storage. In return the company has made money by selling personal information gleaned from users for targeted advertising.
- Lawsuit Against Google Highlights Mining of Student Data
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Children have become lucrative targets for data mining companies, according to a study by Politico magazine. Just weeks after Google settled a lawsuit for selling student data for advertising, the publication revealed an entire industry devoted to marketing data gathered from Internet applications offered to students and their teachers.
- Laying the Children's Ghosts to Rest
Canada's Home Children in the West Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Between 1869 and the early 1930s more than 100,000 children were rounded up from the streets of Britain to be used as labourers in Canadian homes; often little more than slaves. Today there are two million or more descendants of what were derisively known in Canada as 'home children'. Writer and journalist Sean Arthur Joyce was shocked to learn in middle age that he was one of those descendants.
- The Leading Terrorist State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 "It's official: The U.S. is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it." That should have been the headline for the lead story in The New York Times on Oct. 15, which was more politely titled "CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels."
- Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies' Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny European duchy, leaked documents show.
- Leaked Records Reveal Offshore Holdings of China's Elite
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Close relatives of China's top leaders have held secretive offshore companies in tax havens that helped shroud the Communist elite's wealth, a leaked cache of documents reveals.
- Lean & Mean Health Care
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Chern examines the Affordable Care Act from the perspective of being an industry and how this will regulate, standardize, and consolidate the healthcare system.
- Learning from our History
Ernie Tate's Memoir of His Early Years Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Richard Fidler reviews political activist Ernest Tate's two volume Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s: Ernest Tate, A Memoir.
- Left Gun Nuts
Opposition to Gun Control Comes from Many on the Left Also. Here's Why They're Wrong Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the aftermath of the Isla Vista massacre, we can expect the far Right to vehemently oppose any renewed call for gun control. They will tout the supposedly Constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms.
- Legal Ruling Will Allow Rain Forest Indigenous Peoples to Pursue Chevron in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ontario Court of Appeal says communities of Ecuador affected by Chevron can enforce Ecuadorian rulings in Canada.
- Lenin 1917-18: the road to the authoritarian state.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Lenin’s focus when he returned to Russia in 1917 was on the facts of the revolution, rather than outdated Bolshevik theory. He began with what was real, rather than an abstract possibility.
- Lenin: Yes! Leninism: No?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It is currently a commonplace on the left and not-so-left to announce that Leninism is dead. Indeed, one might wonder why it is necessary to keep repeating the point. Nobody is writing articles to explain that alchemy or social credit are dead. The enthusiasm to bury Leninism tells us that this is something that people want to be dead.
- Lenin's Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917
The Ballot, the Streets - or Both Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Nimtz details Lenin's efforts to guide the electroal strategy of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the Third and Fourth State Dumas.
- Lenin's Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels Through the Revolution of 1905
The Ballot, the Streets - or Both Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 This book explores the time in which Lenin developed his attitude to electoral strategy, beginning with the Marxist roots of Lenin's politics, and then detailing his efforts to lead the deputies of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the First and Second State Dumas, concluding with Russia's first experiment in representative institutions from 1906 to 1907.
- Let's Call Out Institutional Insanities
A Grotesque Inversion of Priorities Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 What are the signs that an institution is clinically insane? For over thirty-five years I have been trying to persuade psychological and psychiatric specialists and their professional associations to take up this serious subject for study and corrective suggestions. Alas, to no avail.
- Let's Just Pretend
We Didn’t Offshore Manufacturing? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Is an iPhone made in China and exported to Europe a U.S. export? Is an Apple executive a manufacturing worker? Yes, and yes. At least those could become the answers if a new proposal afoot among some in the administration is allowed to take effect. Federal agencies grouped under the bland-sounding Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC) are proposing to radically redefine U.S. manufacturing and trade statistics. The proposal would deceptively deflate the size of reported, but not actual, U.S. manufacturing trade deficits, while artificially inflating the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs overnight.
- Letter From Mexico: The Privatization of PEMEX
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In 2009, the Compañia Luz y Fuerza (or LyFC, Luz y Fuerza del Centro), a semi-state company providing electricity to Mexico City and some other states in the centre of the country, was disappeared on a moonless Saturday night.
- Letter From Thailand II
Resource Type: Letter First Published: 2014 The wealthy businessman Thaksin Shinawatra was first elected in 2001. His fortune was built using family money and taking advantage of contacts he developed, a sort of cronyism that is de rigueur in Thailand.
- Letter Regarding Canada’s Extradition Law and the Case of Dr. Hassan Diab
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In light of the case of Hassan Diab, a Canadian citizen under threat of extradition to France, we, the undersigned, call on the Federal Minister of Justice to substantially revise current Canadian extradition law. We further demand that the Federal Minister of Justice refuse the request from France that Dr. Hassan Diab be extradited, a refusal that ought to have been rendered six years ago when this nightmare began.
- Lettuce Picking and Left-Wing Organizing
A Bottom Up View of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Early reviews Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in The Fields of California by Bruce Neuburger, who spent much of the 1970s as a lettuce- and agricultural product picker during the heyday of the United Farm Workers (UFW).
- The liberal climate agenda is doomed to failure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Liberal environmentalism represents a dangerous delusion, writes Scott Parkin - that 'playing nice' with Earth-destroying corporations and politicians can yield results worth having. Radical change on climate will only result from bold, confrontational direct actions against the fossil fuel industries and their apologists.
- Libertaria: A Libertarian Paradise
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Most people have never heard of Libertaria (not to be confused with Liberia), so let discover a little bit about this most interesting nation. It is a veritable libertarian paradise. With a population of fifty million people and plentiful natural resources, Libertaria is truly blessed.
- Libertarian communism: an introduction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A short introduction to what we at libcom.org refer to as communism or libertarian communism, what it is and why we think it is a good idea.
- The Lie Machine
The Media and the TTIP Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I have come to the conclusion that the West is a vast lie machine for the secret agendas of vested interests. Consider, for example, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnership.
- Life Inside of the Song of History with Pete Seeger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Remembering Pete Seeger, his music, and his impact.
- Like a Dull Knife: The People's Climate "Farce"
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2014 Even in a top-down format, one hopes the upcoming march could draw much-needed attention to the climate movement.
- A Line in the Tar Sands
Struggles for Environmental Justice Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The fight over the tar sands in North America is among the epic environmental and social justice battles of our time, and one of the first that has managed to quite explicitly marry concern for frontline communities and immediate local hazards with fear for the future of the entire planet.
- Lineages of the Arab Revolt
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of "Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East" by Adam Hanieh.
- Lise Vogel and the politics of women's liberation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory.
- The Logic of Torture
It's About Domination, Not Intelligence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Torture seems to have been as bureaucratic as any other government program, with the interrogators more obsessed about memos and ass covering and obscure turf wars than stopping the progress of ticking time bombs. Like all the other Beltway drones, the CIA’s team kissed up and kicked down, sucking up to their superiors while they tortured men to death.
- The Loneliest Library in the World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 At 73, P.V. Chinnathambi runs one of the loneliest libraries anywhere. In the middle of the forested wilderness of Kerala’s Idukki district, the library’s 160-books — all classics — are regularly borrowed, read, and returned by poor, Muthavan adivasis.
- The Look of Silence
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 The Look of Silence (Indonesian: Senyap, "Silence") is a 2014 internationally co-produced documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer about the Indonesian killings of 1965–66. The film is a companion piece to Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary The Act of Killing.
- Looking back in anger - The Miners' Strike 30 years on
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With new papers released by the National Archives about the Miners’ Strike Chris Strafford caught up with Harry Paterson, author of the upcoming book Look Back in Anger: The Miners’ Strike in Nottinghamshire 30 years on, to discuss what we have learnt.
- Loon, interrupted: Chicks dying, social chaos. Is their comeback unraveling?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It’s a scenario playing out across North America -- loons are raising fewer chicks to fledgling stage than they were two decades ago. Researchers suspect that hormone-disrupting pollutants such as flame retardants may have eroded the birds' delicate social structure and contributed to a mysterious drop in Squam Lake’s loon population. In other parts of the Northeast, scientists have implicated acid rain and mercury in declining numbers of chicks.
- Losing Toronto: How Olivia Chow and the left may be giving away an election
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As we head into the Labour Day weekend that may be accurately deemed to be the start of the homestretch of Toronto's very long mayoral and council election season, the news is not good for leftists or progressives in the city.
- Loss of Librarians Devastating to Science and Knowledge in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The closure of federal libraries and loss of specialized librarians impacts negatively on the state of science and knowledge in Canada.
- Loss of night: Artificial light disrupts sex hormones of birds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Around the world, scientists seeking to answer that question have gathered mounting evidence that city lights are altering the basic physiology of urban birds, suppressing their estrogen and testosterone and changing their singing, mating and feeding behaviors. One lab experiment showed that male blackbirds did not develop reproductive organs during the second year of exposure to continuous light at night.
- The Lost Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A discussion of the Haitian revolution, read through the lens of Julia Gaffield's paper on the lost and found Haitian Declaration of Independence.
- Love in the Time of Israel's War on Africans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Sheen discusses the unchecked popular hostility and racism towards Africans in Israel.
- Lying to Ourselves About the Air War
The Killers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Most US citizens have never been subjected to an air raid. They have never heard the roar of planes flying high above them while an air raid siren wails, its whine competing with the planes’ roar and piercing the audio centers of the brain making sequential thought difficult if not impossible. Nor have they heard the sound of bombs — canisters filled with high explosives and fire — whistling as they fall through the air toward their targets on the ground. Nor have most US citizens ever sat in a bomb shelter wondering if their homes will survive the aerial assault they are hoping to survive themselves.
- Made in the USA: Report Shows ISIS Using US Arms from 'Syria Rebels'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 From the moment the US began sending lethal arms to Syrian rebel factions, there was a chorus of people expressing fears that those arms would end up in the “wrong hands,” and US officials insisted they were going to carefully vet everyone who got those weapons.
- Mainspring of the Arab Revolt
A review of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This book ought to be read — or better, studied — by every socialist interested in the Middle East.
- Making a Sow's Ear from Palestinian Protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The recent decision by the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) to place a pig's head in what was assumed to be the kosher section of Woolworths, and then, in fact, turned out to be the halal section, could be written off as a mere "fail of the week."
- Making the Rulers Obey
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of "Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements" edited by Clinton Ross and Marcy Rein.
- Making Their Own Freedom
Book Review of Rediker's "The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Rediker's re-centering of The Amistad Revellion toward a bottom-up perspective from that of the African slaves involved.
- Manifesto
10 Theses of the Leftist Opposition in Ukraine Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Replacing one set of politicians and oligarchs with another without overall systemic changes will not improve Ukrainian's lives. Instead, the Left Opposition Collective, a group of social and union activists, is proposing ten basic conditions for overcoming the economic crisis and ensuring Ukraine’s future growth.
- Manufacturing Bankruptcy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The authors analyze the politics behind Detroit's manufactured bankruptcy through an analysis of capitalism's expropriation of assets in order to produce wealth -- a process that is at the expense of the working-class majority.
- The many shades of Ukraine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When is an invasion not an invasion? When is sovereignty not sovereignty? When is an unelected regime more legitimate than an elected government? The answer, it seems, is when we are discussing Ukraine.
- The Margins and the Center: For a New History of the Cultural Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Repost of an informative reflection on the lessons to be learned from China's "Cultural Revolution" in light of China's grim political situation circa 2014, centered on a review of Yiching's Wu's pathbreaking new book, Cultural Revolution at the Margins.
- Marikana, Gaza, Ferguson - 'You Should Think of Them Always As Armed'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In colonial wars the occupying power invariably reaches a point where it has to acknowledge that its true enemy is not a minority - devil worshipers, communists, fanatics or terrorists - subject to external and evil manipulation, but the people as a whole. Once this point is reached every colonised person is taken as a potential combatant and the neighbourhood and the home are cast as legitimate sites of combat.
- Martin Luther King Jr's Radicalism Muted by MLK Archives' Corporate Sponsors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The MLK Archive, sponsored by JPMorgan Chase and Co., omits Martin Luther King Jr's speech delivered at Carnegie Hall on February 23, 1968 on the 100th anniversary of W.E.B Du Bois' birth. The speech is included in its entirety here.
- Marx and Engels Belong to the Workers of the World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Lawrence & Wishart, the British publisher of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (MECW), has compelled the Marxists Internet Archive to remove free digital versions of this 50-volume treasure from its Web site. This step is meant to further the publisher’s pursuit of private, profitable licenses with paying customers.
- Marxism and Feminism in the student movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The ideas of Feminism have traditionally found support in universities, and these ideas are currently enjoying a surge in popularity amongst students. At a time when the ideas of Marxism are also finding a growing echo in the student movement, what attitude do Marxists take towards different feminist ideas? How far are these schools of thought compatible? What are the points of contention between them? And what does it mean to call yourself a "Marxist-Feminist"?
- Marxism and the Fight Against Native Oppression in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Published: 2015 Our political tendency has always emphasized the need to combat the special oppression of Natives, blacks, women and others. Such oppression is intimately connected with the “normal” capitalist exploitation of the workers and must be fought by means of the class struggle. Most of our opponents on the left these days reject historical materialism, just as they reject the perspective of working-class revolution and instead push variants of Native cultural nationalism and "ecosocialism."
- A Marxist view of ecology and human history
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review on Martin Empson's "Land & Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History."
- Masking Tragedy in Ukraine
Sinister Illusions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It is no secret that Barack Obama is one of the supreme illusionists of modern times. The disconnect between his words and his deeds is so profound as to be almost sublime, far surpassing the crude obfuscations of the Bush-Cheney gang.
- Mass Incarceration and Capitalism
The Violence of Economic Exploitation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the intersections of race, class, capitalism, and social repression via mass incarceration in the United States.
- Mass Incarceration and the Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Thompson opens up a discussion regarding the American criminal justice system and why incarceration does not lead to rehabilitation back into society.
- Mass murder by botulism: Surge in Great Lakes bird deaths driven by invaders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The botulism bacterium "is the most toxic natural substance on Earth. Just one gram could kill off like two million people. And for these birds it's essentially just widespread food poisoning."
- Mass murder in a Turkish coal mine
Over 300 miners have been killed by a system that values fossil fuels and profits above the lives of those who are paid poverty-level wages Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Think about the last time you reached the top of a mountain one mile high. Now think about descending that distance below the surface of the earth, foot by dark foot, far below all life, light or oxygen. You go down there to dig.
- Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A narrative account of the Paris Commune.
- Maybe we can all learn from smaller islands?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Europe's periphories are meant to be in a state of collapse - but not so the Shetland Isles, where it can be found a land of open skies, howling storms, historic traditions, and an active, growing community of notable individuals.
- The Maypole's Revolutionary Heritage
Time to Replant Trees of Liberty Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- The Media and the Paranoid State
Das Bild to FoxNews Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In 1975, West Germany was often under varying degrees of lockdown. Roadblocks were set up at autobahn exits and identification was checked; groups of heavily armed police were seen in city centers holding machine guns and looking menacing; and airports were under armed guard. The reason given for this military-like presence was the existence of a leftist terror group known as the Rote Armee Fraktion.
- Media spies put all journalists in danger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The increasing tendency of the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies to disregard previous prohibitions against the use of journalists as agents puts every legitimate reporter around the world in jeopardy.
- Meet The Folks On The Front Lines Of Fracking In California
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The oil and gas industry has worked very hard to push the narrative that fracking is completely safe, and that any opposition is led by a small group of full-time activists.
- The Menace of Boko Haram and Fundamentalism in Nigeria
Sexual Slavery, Sexual Terrorism and the Context of the Kidnapping Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 ‘I will sell your girls in the market.’ - Abubakar Shekau. From time to time in the life of a society, one episode or a series of episodes shock the social system and brings to the fore long festering sores that need resolution. The kidnapping of over 200 young girls and the depravity of those who proclaimed that these youths would be sold into sexual slavery are one of such episodes. The statement about selling the girls in the market brought out the deep contradictions of Nigerian society and called for firm and clear resolution of the questions of slavery, exploitation, sexual violence, male oppression and the manipulation of religion to serve the needs of particular sections of the looters and zealots of Nigeria.
- Metadata Is More Intrusive Than Direct Listening Of Phone Calls Says Snowden
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Government monitoring of “metadata” is more intrusive than directly listening to phone calls or reading emails.
- Metal madness: Lead doesn't just poison birds, it scrambles everything they need to survive
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It's well-known that high levels of lead kill birds. But now it's becoming clear that amounts commonly encountered by waterfowl and raptors can mess up their digestion, brains, hearts, vision and other body processes critical for their survival in the wild.
- Metastasizing of the Police State of America
NY Times Report Documents Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The latest news on the burgeoning police state in the US -- a page-one investigative report in the New York Times disclosing that at least 40 agencies of the US government from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Supreme Court (!) are using undercover agents to spy on and even to entrap law-abiding American citizens -- suggests that we have passed the tipping point.
- Mexico: Community Police and the War on Drugs
Self-Defense vs. Vigilantism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Various "self-defense" groups or “community police” have emerged in rural areas, mainly in the states of Guerrero and Michoacán. The embrace of such "alternative security" schemes by nearly all of the left is rooted in a sub-reformist liberal perspective. As long as capitalism is not overthrown, any group dedicated to "fighting crime" will act as an auxiliary of the capitalist state and will have, in the final analysis, a fundamentally reactionary character.
- Mexico - Subcomandante Marcos Steps Down: What's Next for the EZLN?
Subcomandante Marcos, announced he ending his role as the group's spokesperson and military commander. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In stepping down, Marcos pointed to demographic changes in the thirty-year old organization as new younger, indigenous leaders stepped forward replacing an older largely mestizo leadership, several of whom came out of the student and guerrilla struggles of the 1970s and 1980s.
- Michelle Goldberg Goes to Washington
The problem isn't just voting for Democrats, it's letting a rightward-moving Democratic Party set the Left's political horizons Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The author defends his electoral position during the U.S. election, which was described by Michelle Goldberg as "electoral nihilism".
- Middle class would go to jail for what big corporations are allowed to do
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government issued a report on November 18 which revealed that seven of the 30 largest US corporations paid more money to their CEOs last year than they paid in US federal income taxes. US corporations have enough profit to grease the wheels of Washington DC to have legislation that benefits them, and their workers which are becoming fewer and fewer, are shouldering the tax burden.
- The Middle East's "World War"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The editors compare the reasons driving the United States' involvement in Iraq and Syria with those behind the decision to invade Afghanistan.
- Militarism degrades, disrupts and destroys democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As the Canadian government plays at fighting wars in Iraq/Syria and in eastern Europe, we see daily examples of how militarism ultimately degrades, disrupts and destroys democracy.
- Military Emancipation
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of Levine's "The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South," and Oakes's "Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865."
- The Mill Hill, Natural Communism, And The Loray Mill Strikes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There are no less than six books on the Gastonia Loray Mill strike of 1929. There are scores of papers, hundreds of opinions and a common conception that although the strike itself was a failure, it led to better working conditions for many workers that followed.
- Millions Missing From DEA Money-Laundering Operation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 At least $20 million went missing from money seizures by law enforcers, critical evidence was destroyed by a federal agency, a key informant was outed by a US prosecutor — contributing to her being kidnapped and nearly killed — and at the end of the day not a single narco-trafficker was prosecuted in this four-year-long DEA undercover operation gone awry.
- The Minimum Wage Debate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In a discussion of the debate over the minimum wage increase in the United States, Miah advocates for a socialist mentality and a focus on individual rights in order to provide an economic solution to the decline of the middle class caused by capitalisim.
- Minneapolis 1934 Strike Revisited
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of "Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934" by Bryan D. Palmer.
- The Mississippi Summer Project 50th Anniversary Reunion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Greenwood was the place where the first major cracks in the wall of Mississippi racism were broken open.
- Missouri's Legacy of Violent Racism
Quantrill's Raiders Come to Ferguson Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 What is clear about the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is that the cop murdered Michael Brown pretty much in cold blood. What is also clear is that if Michael Brown was a suspect in this shoplifting case and regular procedures were followed, then he should have been arrested and gone to court. What is less clear is whether or not this killer cop will ever see justice.
- Mobilizing Temporary Migrant Workers
A Compendium of Forms and Preliminary Discussion Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 While labour migration has been a recurring phenomenon in human history, what is new in the post-1970 period of restructuring in the world capitalist economy is the increased use of temporary migrant labour by employers around the world. The widespread rise of employer use of temporary migrant workers in various economic sectors internationally can be dated from circa 1990.
- Monsanto and Ukraine
GM Food, Ukraine and the Return of Hill + Knowlton Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), under terms of their $17 billion loan to Ukraine, will force that country to permit genetically-modified (GM) crops and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture.
- The Monster That Israel Helped Create
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There is a terrible irony in Israel’s current assault on Gaza. More than 200 Palestinians have died in an onslaught supposedly aimed at weakening Hamas and degrading its capacity to fire rockets into Israel. It was Israel itself, however, that helped Hamas to power in Gaza.
- Montreal spends $110,000 on private lawyers to fight challenge to anti-protest bylaw
There's room for austerity around everything except repression Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As the city of Montreal tightens its belt-buckle and is cutting budgets, two Montrealers who are challenging the city's regulations around demonstrations are questioning the amount of resources the city is putting in to defend the bylaws.
- Moral bankruptcy of capitalism': UK's top public doctor shames western society over Ebola
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Western countries should tackle drugs firms' "scandalous" reluctance to invest in research into the virus which has already killed over 700 people in West Africa, the UK's top public doctor said, adding, “They'd find a cure if Ebola came to London.”
- More chance of dying from work than going to war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Going to war may seem one of the most hazardous ordeals on the planet, but perhaps not. The International Labor Organization (ILO) says there is more chance of dying from work than fighting for your country on the battlefield.
- More from the Greatest [sic] Generation
This is What We Are Up Against Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Nazi-CIA connection is ancient news but is finally getting play some seven decades later when it’s safe to file it under "Mistakes, well-intentioned." Here’s my “scoop”: The Nazi-CIA connection should be filed under "Policy, standard operating."
- Most US drone strikes in Pakistan attack houses
Drone strikes in Pakistan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.
- The Mother Behind the Galway Children's Mass Grave Story
'I Want to Know Who's Down There' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It was amateur historian Catherine Corless's painstaking research that brought news of the children's mass grave in Tuam to the world's attention. She tells how her search for the truth turned her life upside-down.
- Mounting evidence of deliberate attacks on Gaza health workers by Israeli army
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An immediate investigation is needed into mounting evidence that the Israel Defense Forces launched apparently deliberate attacks against hospitals and health professionals in Gaza, which have left six medics dead, said Amnesty International as it released disturbing testimonies from doctors, nurses, and ambulance personnel working in the area.
- Much Has Been Said...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the wake of Nelson Mandela, Finkel brings attention to contemporary political activists being imprisoned by their governments.
- Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jeremy Hammond; Political Prisoners In The Sacrifice Zone Of Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Recently, two cases concerning the constitutional rights of people in prison came to public light. They involve two U.S. political prisoners: Mumia Abu-Jamal who is serving a life sentence at a facility in Frackville, Pennsylvania and Jeremy Hammond, who is serving a ten year sentence at a federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky.
- Mumia on COINTELPRO Activists and Other Ordinary Heroes
The Linear Ancestors of Edward Snowden Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Mumia Abu-Jamal was one of hundreds of journalists who received in the mail a packet of covertly-copied COINTELPRO documents. They were sent by eight activists who broke into FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania in 1971—and whose identities just became known last week. The papers detailed names and activities of individuals he knew well for years, living and working closely together in communal spaces, who were FBI informants.
- My Last Talk with Gary Webb
"I Knew It Was the Truth and That's What Kept Me Going" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The 'Dark Alliance' series in the Mercury News came under fire by other news organizations, and the paper’s own investigation concluded the series did not meet its standards. Mr. Webb resigned a year and a half after the series appeared in the paper. He then published his book, 'Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.'
- The Myths of 'Green Capitalism'
A system based on the accumulation of capital without restraint will require unsustainable growth, however cleverly we measure our ecologica Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Environmental politics in the U.S. appears hopelessly polarized. Liberals and progressives try to sustain and occasionally strengthen environmental legislation, while those on the right are unalterably opposed, even seeking to defund core institutions such as the EPA.
- The naked class politics of Ebola
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Just as a glass prism differentiates sunlight into its component colours, corresponding to the different wavelengths, the Ebola crisis ravaging three West African countries has produced three distinct responses, corresponding to the three principal classes of capitalist society.
- The National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela
The Stealth Destabilizer Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As protests have been taking place in Venezuela the last couple of weeks, it is always good to check on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Empire’s “stealth” destabilizer.
- National liberation and Bolshevism reexamined: A view from the borderlands - An analysis of the socialist debates on the national question up through 1914
A view from the Czarist empire's borderlands obliges us to rethink assumptions about the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The following paper analyzes the socialist debates on the national question up through 1914. I argue that an effective strategy of anti-colonial Marxism was first put forward by the borderland socialists, not the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his comrades lagged behind the non-Russian Marxists on this crucial issue well into the Civil War.
- National Liberation and Bolshevism Reexamined
A View from the Borderlands Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A view from the Czarist empire's borderlands obliges us to rethink many long-held assumptions about the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, as well as the development of Marxist approaches to national liberation, peasant struggle, permanent revolution, and the emancipation of women.
- NATO Expands to Border of Russia, Then Blames Russia for Being On NATO's Doorstep
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Russia at the gates? US State Dept, Pentagon grilled over NATO expansion. Watch the video or read the transcript: with clowns like these, it is no wonder that the USA has lost wars in Viet Nam, Afganistan, Iraq, etc.
- NATO - New York Times Convoy Fabrications
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On Saturday, the entire humanitarian convoy of 227 trucks crossed back into Russia without incident after having successfully delivered its contents to the Luhansk distribution centre. The unwavering round trip project from Russia surmounted considerable bureaucratic delays and political obstacles including wild assertions that the convoy’s true purpose was to ‘smuggle weapons’ to the east Ukraine rebels.
- NATO and Serbia, 15 Years On
The Bombs that Failed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As Ukraine’s situation accelerates with actions of sanctions, annexations, coups and counter-coups, it is worth noting how another compact was firstly dissolved and then subsequently tortured in the 1990s. The trends are similar – the moralising, the external interference, the bullying of powers extraneous yet obsessed with holding the levers of a disintegrating country. On NATO, the Yugoslavian Federation, and the Kosovo bombings.
- The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left
Learning From Ferguson Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Iit would be hard to deny that the police are a racist institution par excellence. They kill young Black, Latino, and Native people at a disproportionately higher rate than white youth, and the institution itself descended from the patrols created to capture fugitive slaves in the South and police urban immigrants in the North.
- The Nature of War Has Changed
The Vicious Forces of Sectarian Strife Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A new kind of war is developing. It is very different from the mass conflict of the First World War when governments mobilised millions of men and vast industrial resources. Wars have got smaller, but are equally and, on occasions, more vicious than in the past.
- Nature, science & power
Questions need to be asked... Resource Type: Website First Published: 2014 Here many questions will be asked, some answers attempted. This blog connects to a new book: Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, published in 2014 by Between the Lines.
- The Need for Clear Demands at the Peoples' Climate March
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In New York City on September 21st, a major climate march is planned. It will take place two days before UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's UN Climate Summit -- a one-day closed door session where the world's "leaders" will discuss "ambitions" for the upcoming climate conference (COP20) in Lima Peru.
- Nelson Mandela's Long Walk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A look at Nelson Mandela's book, "Long Walk to Freedom" in the context of the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s.
- Neonicotinoids are Poisoning Entire Farmland Ecosystems
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The widespread use of neonicotinoid insecticides is causing a neurotoxic overload afflicting entire farm ecosystems from earthworms to bees, other pollinators and birds. A collapse in food production may inevitably follow.
- Netanyahu's Operation Stupidity
Who is Winning in Gaza? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Who is Winning in Gaza? Which must be answered, the Jewish way, with another question: how to judge?
- A Network of Indigenous Language Digital Activists in Mexico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Internet has emerged as a space where many in Mexico can communicate online using indigenous languages, as well as to create new digital content instead of being just consumers of content.
- New Bank Leak Shows How Rich Exploit Tax Haven Loopholes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The identities of thousands of wealthy offshore clients of a major Jersey, Channel Isles private bank have been leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The data leaks reveal how the very richest families dip in and out of British jurisdiction as it suits them, exploiting what academic experts call Jersey's 'fictitious space.'
- The New Cold War Policy Has Backfired
How the US Created Its Own Worst Nightmare Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The world’s geopolitics, major trade patterns and military alliances have changed radically in the past month. Russia has re-oriented its gas and oil trade, and also its trade in military technology, away from Europe toward Eurasia. The result is the opposite of America’s hope for the past half-century of dividing and conquering Eurasia: setting Russia against China, isolating Iran, and preventing India, the Near East and other Asian countries from joining together to create an alternative to the U.S. dollar area.
- The new conquistadors making their presence felt at COP20 in Peru
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A new report released at COP20 by CEO, the Democracy Center and Transnational Institute shows how corporations causing social and environmental destruction in the Andes and Amazon are driving climate change, whilst enjoying influential seats at the climate-negotiating table.
- The New Face of the Radical Right?
Amerika's Would-be Pravy Sektor Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Political Research Associates agreed that Anarchist Nationalism "could become the new face of the radical right" in the USA. Attempting to mix subcultural anarchist mores with a cross-cutting class analysis that hinges on racial separatism and ancestral traditions, such as tribalism, Anarchist Nationalism demonstrate a worrying tendency of reactionaries to co-opt radical language in attempts to gain control over large popular fronts.
- New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A book that compiles workers struggles on a global basis, examining the formation and expansion of radical unions in the Global South and Global North.
- New generation: Growing up reading Rachel Carson, scientists unravel risks of new pesticides
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Like biologist Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring warned about the devastating effects of DDT, a new generation of scientists is trying to figure out if new pesticides -- which are being used in ever-increasing numbers, quantities, and combinations -- are harming living things they’re not intended to kill, including birds.
- A New Language is the Number One Imperative for a New Left Project
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Socialists “use words few people know to make arguments few people understand to fight for causes few people recognise on people who don’t care.”
- New report details 'brutal' Israeli policies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The first bullet struck 16-year-old Samir Awad in his left leg. He staggered away as fast as he could, but was too slow. A second round slammed into his left shoulder, exiting from the right side of his chest. Then, moments later, a third bullet penetrated the back of his skull and exited from his forehead.
- New Seeds, Old Pesticides
A Farmer on 2,4-D and Next Gen GMOs Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I doubt very many people have ever heard or seen a "tank mix." Simply put, it is a mix of several crop chemicals used together to control a variety of weeds. I have not looked into a swirling mix of chemicals in a crop spray rig for probably 20 years – that's about how long it has been since we have used any herbicides on our farm.
- The new strikes in China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An article by "friends of gongchao" describes the development of strikes in China in recent years as well as the strike at Yue Yuen shoe factories in Dongguan, South China, in April 2014.
- The New Struggle for Public Transit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In an argument against privatization of Toronto's transit system, Rosenfeld draws on Booth's examination of the ongoing situation in London since the city had turned over responsibility of planning, operating, and budgeting transit to private companies and have since suffered from economic decline and inefficiency.
- A New Way of Life and the New Underground Railroad
Making a Break for Freedom During the Era of Mass Incarceration Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This radio documentary is the third segment in Truthout's serialization of Chris Moore-Backman's Bringing Down the New Jim Crow based on Michelle Alexander's book of the same name. The series explores and gives voice to the continuing struggle for racial justice in the United States during the era of mass incarceration.
- New Zealand Cops Raided Home of Reporter Working on Snowden Documents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Agents from New Zealand's national police force ransacked the home of a prominent independent journalist earlier this month who was collaborating with The Intercept on stories from the NSA archive furnished by Edward Snowden. The stated purpose of the 10-hour police raid was to identify the source for allegations that the reporter, Nicky Hager, recently published in a book that caused a major political firestorm and led to the resignation of a top government minister.
- The Next New Left: A History of the Future
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The Next New Left explores the challenge of activist renewal in the age of austerity. Over the past few decades, state policy-makers and employers have engaged in a massive process of neoliberal restructuring that has undermined the basis for social and labour movements. In this book, Alan Sears seeks to understand the social environment that made activist mobilization possible -- and was largely taken for granted -- during the twentieth century.
- NGOs Are Cages
How Capitalists Control Mass Movements Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We really need to understand the methods used by NGOs to undermine radical political organizing efforts and divert us into political dead ends.
- NHS Patient Data to be Made Available for Sale to Drug and Insurance Firms
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients once a single English database of medical data has been created. Privacy experts warn there will be no way for public to work out who has their medical records or how they are using it.
- The Nigerians Who Dare to Speak of Love as a Tide of Anti-gay Hatred Rises
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A new crackdown on gender minorities has led to arrests and fears of mob violence. But a brave few are still fighting for sexual freedom.
- 9 things you need to know about Venezuela and the recent violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Behind the attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan government.
- 1934: American workers in revolt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In 1934 three mighty strikes brought the bosses and bankers to their knees and ushered in a new era of labour-capital relations in the United States writes Sean Ledwith
- No child should be afraid to drink a glass of water ...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Nasser Nawajah wrote this open letter to Israel's economics minister Naftali Bennett - leader of The Jewish Home - about the water starvation suffered by Palestinians.
- No More Missouri Compromises
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I do have some ideas about the larger set of circumstances that resulted in Michael Brown’s murder and some suggestions for things that might be done to bring the fight where it needs to be fought beyond the streets of Ferguson.
- No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Glenn Greenwald recounts his 10-day trip to Honk Kong where he acquired the Snowden Files. Additionally, Greenwald discusses the NSA's unprecedented abuse of power, as well as the media's habitual avoidance of adversarial reporting on the government and their failure to serve the interests of the people.
- NO SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT FREE SPEECH
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Fredrik deBoer, who teaches at Purdue University in Indiana, recently wrote a passionate polemic about the way that what he calls the ‘social justice left’ has abandoned the struggle for free speech, and indeed take up the struggle for censorship.
- The No State Solution: Institutionalizing Libertarian Socialism in Kurdistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In what many outside of the territory are referring to as the Rojava Revolution, a major shift in political philosophy and political programmatics has taken place in Kurdistan.
- No to Crackdown on Prostitution!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In eight years, the Harper Tories [Conservative Party under Prime Minister Stephen Harper] have waged war on pretty much everyone. Now it is prostitutes and their clients who, if the government has its way, are to be abolished.
- Not Worth The Risk
A Community Report on the Line 9 International Energy Board Hearings Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2014 Enbridge's Line 9 pipeline – a 38 year old pipeline that is almost identical in build and age to the Line 6B pipeline that ruptured into the Kalamazoo river – seeks to gain approval to reverse its flow, increase its capacity, and carry a dangerous heavy crude known as dilbit, or diluted bitumen. Line 9 runs through sensitive ecosystems and important farmlands throughout Southern Ontario and Quebec, and passes within 50 km of over 9 million people, including 18 First Nations communities.
- Not Your Father's Far Right
Populist Radical Versus Traditional Extremism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 All over Europe, the new, populist far-right parties have become part of the political scene. They're not defined, as the old far-righters used to be, by what they want, but by what they don't want.
- Not Your Mother's Electrolux
Planned Obsolescence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Documentary goes on to present new evidence on the school of engineers who were driven by the market and who were clearly interested in making the most disposable product that they could. Electrolux began selling its vacuum cleaners in the UK.
- Notes on a Staggering ISO
The Slow Death of "Leninism" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A critique of the International Socialist Organization and discussion of the decline of Leninism.
- Notes on Alabama: Searching for the Ghost of "Big Jim" Folsom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Huntsville Free Clinic in Alabama is a Free Clinic that serves the poor and working class of Huntsville not covered by Alabama’s stingy Medicaid program. Many users of Free Clinic services work, but at jobs that don’t offer health insurance.
- Notes on the Current Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The editors debate the subjectivity of international law as the United States publically denounces Russia's seizure of Crimea yet condones Israel's occupation of Palestine and treatment of its people.
- Nothing Left
The long, slow surrender of American liberals Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the gradual decline of the U.S. liberal-left party and its principles.
- Now it's Israel's IDF Leveling Gaza
Once it was Nazis Leveling the Warsaw Ghetto Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Once it was Nazis Leveling the Warsaw Ghetto, Now it’s Israel’s IDF leveling Gaza.
- NSA, GCHQ mapping "political alignment" of cellphone users
New report reveals Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 New information made public by Edward Snowden reveals that the governments of the United States and United Kingdom are trawling data from cellphone “apps” to accumulate dossiers on the “political alignments” of millions of smartphone users worldwide.
- The NSA's Corporate Collaborators
Willing Accomplices Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Emails published by Al Jazeera America, in addition to showing hi-tech executives and senior intelligence officials interacting on a casual first-name basis, reference a government program referred to as the Enduring Security Framework (ESF).
- The NSA's Mantra
Collect It All Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is the world we’re living in now. One where privacy is quickly becoming a thing of the past – where the government collects our metadata using dragnet surveillance. Who you talked to, where, when, and for how long are collected with each and every phone call. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Microsoft, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and numerous other corporations partner with the NSA to subvert your right to privacy. The NSA has even been physically intercepting packages containing servers and switches, taking it from FedEx or the US Postal Service, opening the package, and planting a device that redirects information sent over these servers back to the NSA.
- Nuclear Weapons Spoilers Sentenced to Long Prison Terms
Injustice in Knoxville Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Three anti-war activists who easily snuck into what is touted as one of the United States' most secure nuclear weapons facilities were sentenced to long terms in federal prison on February 18, 2014.
- Nukes Now: Obama Worse Than Reagan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 President Obama released his fiscal 2015 budget March 4. Ready for this? It asks for considerably more money (in constant dollars) for nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production than Reagan spent in 1985, the historical peak of spending on nukes: $8.608 billion, not counting administrative costs.
- Obama Administration Muzzling Its Scientists
Just Like Canada's Harper Government Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Muzzling of scientists matters because they make policy decisions with real-world impacts on society.
- Obama food aid ravages Third World farmers
Despite uplifting rhetoric, Obama is perpetuating a program that sabotages foreigners' self-sufficiency Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The US taxpayers who finance foreign food aid surely believe they are feeding starving people. But the truth is the reverse - it is undermining indigenous agriculture in recipient countries - creating famine and chronic malnutrition, while sabotaging self-sufficiency.
- Obama Launches an Illegal War in Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 President Obama’s decision to bomb Syria stands in stark violation of international law, the UN Charter, as well as the requirements of the U.S. Constitution.
- Obama Pushes for Regime Change in Venezuela
Once Again, South America Says No Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When is it considered legitimate to try and overthrow a democratically-elected government? In Washington, the answer has always been simple: when the U.S. government says it is. Not surprisingly, that’s not the way Latin American governments generally see it.
- Obama's House of Cards
Will Russia and China Hold Their Fire Until War Is the Only Alternative? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Barak Obama's September 24 speech at the UN is the most absurd thing I have heard in my entire life. It is absolutely amazing that the president of the United States would stand before the entire world and tell what everyone knows are blatant lies while simultaneously demonstrating Washington's double standards and belief that Washington alone, because the US is exceptional and indispensable, has the right to violate all law.
- Obama's Hypocritical Crusade Against Extremism
Will the Feds Soon be Targeting People With a "Bad Attitude"? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In his speech last month to the United Nations, President Obama summoned foreign leaders to join his "campaign against extremism." Obama has repeatedly invoked the "extremist" threat to justify attacking abroad and seizing more power at home since taking office in 2009. But the president's own record makes it tricky for him to pirouette as the World Savior of Moderation.
- The Obliteration of Privacy
Snowden and the NSA Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It’s remarkable how little outrage Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations have provoked in the American public. One often heard response is something like, “Well, I don’t have anything to hide, so I don’t care if the government is listening to what I say. And if they catch some terrorists, so much the better.”
- The Occupation's Dark Underbelly Exposed
The Revelations of the Israeli Refuseniks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A letter signed by 43 veterans of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit declaring their refusal to continue serving the occupation has sent shockwaves through Israeli society.
- An Ode on Whistleblowers and Revolutionaries
Give Thanks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 May 27th marked exactly four years of prison time for whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Four years for releasing documents disclosing torture and abuse by US and allied forces: rape, whippings, electric drills used on body parts, waterboarding, beatings, murder. Four years for disclosing previously unreported civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan – deaths that number in the tens of thousands. Four years for pulling back the fog of war and exposing US wars abroad for what they are - not the clean, surgical, tactical operations that we hear about on the news but dirty, bloody, and filled with the bodies of innumerable civilian victims: the bodies of men, women, and children who did nothing more than appear in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the ‘wrong’ skin color and the ‘wrong’ god.
- An Ode To Seasons For Peter Matthiessen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When human survival is continuously being threatened by varieties of anthropogenic injuries (ecological, economic, social), our capacity to think about the non-human animal become very limited indeed. Nevertheless, it is our ethical obligation to also consider their survival as well.
- Officers caught on video beating California homeless man to death acquitted of all charges
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Two former Fullerton, California police officers, Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, are found not guilty in the killing of Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old schizophrenic living on the streets.
- Oil and Gas Industry's "Endless War" on Fracking Critics Revealed by Rick Berman
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Leave it to Washington's top attack-dog lobbyist Richard Berman to verify what many always suspected: that the oil and gas industry uses dirty tricks to undermine science, vilify its critics and discredit journalists who cast doubt on the prudence of fossil fuels.
- Old Wine, Broken Bottle
Ari Shavit's Promised Land Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 My Promised Land by Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit has been one of the most widely discussed and lavishly praised books about Israel in recent years. It has garnered encomiums from a broad spectrum of influential voices, including Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Jonathan Freedland, Jeffrey Goldberg, Franklin Foer, and Dwight Garner. Were he not already inured to the logrolling that passes for informed opinion on this topic, Norman Finkelstein might have been surprised, astonished even. That’s because, as he reveals with typical precision, My Promised Land is riddled with omission, distortion, falsehood, and sheer nonsense.
- Omar and the Checkpoint
The Essential Story that is Rarely Told Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Omar is a 7-year-old boy from Gaza. His family managed to obtain the necessary permits that allowed him to cross the Erez checkpoint to Jerusalem, through the West Bank, in order to undergo surgery. He was accompanied by his father. On the way back, the boy and his father were stopped at the Qalanidya checkpoint, separating occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank. The father needed another permit from the Israeli military to take his son, whose wounds were still fresh hours after the surgery, back to the strip. But the soldiers were in no obliging mood.
- On Academic Labor
How Higher Education Ought to Be Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA.
- On E.P. Thompson's Legacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In a tribute to E.P. Thompson, Cohen gives insights into his work "The Making of the English Working Class" regarding its valuable focus on the self-activity and self-organization of the people.
- On Israel, Ukraine and Truth
The Return of George Orwell and Big Brother's War Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. "Democracy" is now a rhetorical device. Peace is "perpetual war". "Global" is imperial. The once hopeful concept of "reform" now means regression, even destruction. "Austerity" is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.
- On Media Outlets That Continue to Describe Unknown Drone Victims As "Militants"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Most large western media outlets continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as "militants" -- even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware that the term had been "re-defined" by the Obama administration into Alice in Wonderland-level nonsense. They count the corpses and they're not really sure who they are.
- On Morality and Moralism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Comments in a discussion about moralism at the recent Battle of Ideas conference.
- On the Cowardice & Irrelevance of Social Science Scholars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The stakes are too high for scholars to continue down this path of irrelevance.
- On the ethics of immigration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- On the Importance of the Right to Offend
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There is something truly bizarre that someone should become the focus of death threats and an international campaign of vilification for suggesting that an inoffensive cartoon was inoffensive. What gives the reactionaries the room to operate and to flex their muscles is, however, the pusillanimity of many so-called liberals, their unwillingness to stand up for basic liberal principles, their fear of causing offence, and their reluctance to call so-called community leaders to account. Such backsliding liberals need reminding of some basic points about liberalism, free speech and the giving of offence.
- On 'Human Shielding' in Gaza
How the Israeli Army has Tried to Justify Striking Civilian Areas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 All fighting within cities and all bombardments of urban spaces, even the most “precise and surgical”, is a potential death trap for civilians. Consequently, the permeation of war into cities inevitably transforms their inhabitants into potential human shields.
- Once more on left reformism: A reply to Ed Rooksby
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Paul Blackledge replies to Ed Rooksby’s arguements about left reformism.
- One Group Has a Higher Domestic Violence Rate Than Everyone Else - And It's Not the NFL
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In families of police officers, domestic violence is two-to-four times more likely than in the general population -- from stalking and harassment to sexual assault and even homicide.
- One Historian's Journey
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of "A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor" by Nelson Lichenstein.
- 100 Best Non-Fiction Books (in Translation) of the 20th Century... and Beyond
A CounterPunch Reading List Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As the clock clicked down on the arrival of the new millennium, Alex and I were bemused at the spate of “100 best of the century lists” pouring forth. The lists were predictable and not many of the entries remained on our groaning shelves. So we decided to compile our own catalogue of the best books written in English and, later translated into English, during the 20th Century. We spent weeks whittling it down to roughly 100 titles for each.
- 100 years ago: Two calls to struggle against the world war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, 100 years ago, two Russian socialist leaders, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, published antiwar manifestos that greatly influenced the international socialist response to the conflict.
- One in five Israelis lives in poverty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With just over 8 million people, Israel has over 1.7 million, more than 20 percent of the population, living below the poverty line, according to the latest report issued by the National Insurance Institute (NII) and the Central Bureau of Statistics. Issued in December, the figures relate to 2012 and will have worsened since then.
- One of History's Biggest B & E's
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The story told in Betty Medsger's new book The Burglary is a tale of a government drunk on its own power, some citizens determined to end the binge, and a time when heroes were not only made in sporting venues and the movies. It is about people putting their lives on the line in opposition to an encroaching police state and the men determined to imprison those people for their opposition.
- One River Many Relations
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 The Alberta Oil Sands are one of the world's most controversial industrial developments. They are the target of high profile protests and debate around the globe. One essential voice is largely excluded from discourse on the issue - the voice of downstream Indigenous communities.
- One Step Up, Three Steps Down
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In an interview with author Barbara Garson, Against the Current examines the economic meltdown surrounding the Occupy movement and the effect it has had on working-class Americans.
- One Who Raged Against the Machine
Remembering Gerald Berreman Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Remembering anthropologist Gerald Berreman on the occasion of his December 2013 death. Barreman became an important voice of dissent in the 1960s and 1970s, speaking out against anthropologists’ interactions with the CIA and other intelligence agencies and championing openness in science.
- An Online Tracking Device That’s Virtually Impossible to Block
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A new kind of tracking tool, canvas fingerprinting, is being used to follow visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.
- The Only People Making Money Off the Seal Hunt Are Anti-Sealing Campaigners
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Audla presents the perspective of Inuit communities who depend on the seal hunt.
- Open Letter by 50 Israeli Army Reservists on Why They Refuse to Fight in Gaza
Petition By Israeli soldiers and reservists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Operation Nazification
Of Empire and Government Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Annie Jacobsen’s new book is called Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. It isn’t terribly secret anymore, of course, and it was never very intelligent. Jacobsen has added some details, and the U.S. government is still hiding many more. But the basic facts have been available; they’re just left out of most U.S. history books, movies, and television programs.
- Opinion: Lakota values soar with the eagles
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the defense of eagles, people came together. In respect of them, they remembered their values. In sight of them, they felt the pride of a nation.
- Opinion: We must hear - and heed - the nightingale's warning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 These threatened species continue to sing, but their songs aren't poetic or musical -- they are alarm songs. The good news is that when we listen to the birds, when we notice their diminished presence and when we change our behaviour even slightly to accommodate their needs, they respond spectacularly.
- Optic Nerve
Millions of Yahoo Webcam Images Intercepted by GCHQ Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
- Organic certification - inorganic bureaucracy
Today's certifiers arrive in patent leather shoes and get no further than the office - and this is meant to be an improvement? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Organizers Worth Their Salt
"Let's drink to the hard working people; Let's drink to the salt of the Earth" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A few unions are recruiting salts these days, usually young people who apply for low-wage jobs in retail, hospitality, or logistics. But unions are reluctant to talk about salting, not wanting to alert management to look out for suspicious characters.
- Organizing Immigrant Labour
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Barriers to unionizing the smelter workers of Trail, British Columbia, during the Second World War.
- Organizing that Changed Mississippi
Book Review of Salter Jr.'s "Jackson Mississippi" and Moody's "Coming of Age in Mississippi" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of two books about the Mississippi's civil rights movement in 1965 from the perspectives of an African-American female student and a Native American male professor.
- Organizing "The Organized"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 For many years, American unions have been trying to “organize of the unorganized” to offset, and, where possible, reverse their steady loss of dues-paying membership. In union circles, a distinction was often made between that "external organizing" – to recruit workers who currently lack collective bargaining rights – and "internal organizing," which involves engaging more members in contract fights and other forms of collective action aimed at strengthening existing bargaining units.
- Osprey whisperers: Deciphering decades of clues from the sea hawk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ospreys tell a story, and Elliott, Lee and the other scientists who track them are trying to decipher their messages. For more than two decades in North America, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, the osprey has revealed disturbing tales about DDT, PCBs, pulp mill dioxins, flame retardants, stain-resistant compounds, urban runoff, mining wastes, prescription drugs, mercury and more.
- The Other 9/11
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Whether or not activists will ever mount a serious threat to U.S. hegemony and propaganda remains to be seen. One thing is certain, however: Without such organizing, action, and sacrifice, there will be many more wars and interventions and many more lies told to obscure the truth about them.
- The Other Public Humanities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Among the conclusions frequently drawn about the heavily reported "crisis in the humanities" is that humanities departments are woefully out of touch with today's students, with the new economy, with the public at large.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 A newsletter with news and articles about current issues, as well as news from the realm of grassroots archives and people's history. Also featuring selected items from the Connexions Calendar, Seeds of Fire, book, film and website of the week, and news about the Connexions project.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 3, 2014
Surveillance Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 The first issue of Other Voices, the Connexions newsletter. Topic of the week is Surveillance. Articles on climate politics, 21st-century land grabs, and the destruction of Canada's science libraries. Plus items from the Connexions Calendar and Seeds of Fire.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 17, 2014
Gaza Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 Topic of the week is Gaza, which was under attack by Israel as this issue appeared. Articles on surveillance capitalism, the tactics and successes of the movement for same-sex marriage in the United States, and profiles of alternative archives. Website of the week is Democracy Now!
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 31, 2014
Truth, justice and reconciliation Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 Articles on truth, justice and reconciliation efforts in countries affected by civil war or internal conflict; Bone Collectors: the fate of the remains of Australian aboriginal people stolen from their burial grounds and dispersed to museums; the Galway children's mass grave; and Which came first: Palestinian rockets or Israeli violence? The topic of the week is the Israeli military.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - August 21, 2014
Killings by Police Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 Topic of the week is Killings by Police. Articles on the way the Ebola crisis illuminates the moral bankruptcy of capitalism; Responding the capitalist crisis, in 1914 and 2014; Globaling Gaza: Israel's leading role in undemining international law; and Marinaleda, a town in Spain attempting to create alternatives based on democracy, co-operation, and mutual aid. Group of the Week is Librarians and Archivists with Palestine.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 4, 2014
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Information about the Connexions Alternative Media List and the Labor Film Archive. Articles on corporations spying on non-profits, workplace deaths, Monsanto and Ukraine, and liberal environmentalism. Topic of the week is Violence Against Journalists. Book of the week is Bold Scientists.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 19 2014
Spying, terrorism, and protest Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 Coverage of spying, terrorism, and protest. Articles on how the ISIS (Islamic State group) comes to be using American weapons; the U.S. government's secret plans to spy for American corporations; the insidious power of propaganda; how to spot and defeat disruption on the Internet, and steps to sustainable livestock production. Topic of the week is War Crimes; book for the week is Berkeley: The New Student Revolt, and website of the week is LabourStart.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 2, 2014
Climate Change Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 This issue of Other Voices looks at why so many people deny or ignore the very real and very near threat of climate change. We also look into the ways on how NGOs tame and undermine grassroots movements. Other Voices also shares an article detailing how a $182 billion bail-out of tax-payer money was not enough for one bank. Finally, in this issue, we look into the horrors of American slavery and how it shaped the United States into the economic power it is today.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 16, 2014
Arms Trade Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 Topic of the week is the Arms Trade. Featured resources include The No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade, an article on Israel's War Business, and the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade. A new feature in Other Voices is the Film of the Week: to start off, we spotlight The Corporation, an exploration of the dominant institution of our time. Plus: Lying to ourselves about the air war, Karl Marx's critique of modern agriculture, and a challenge to Montreal's anti-protest bylaw.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 30, 2014
Refugees Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 Topic of the week is Refugees. Featured articles look at migration, counter-surveillance resources, farmers in Ghana fighting to retain the freedom to save their own seeds, and rebuilding communities faced with mining companies in Ecuador. The website of the week is Mediamatters. From the archives we've got Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women's Movement.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 13, 2014
Libertarian Socialism Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 The topic of the week is Libertarian Socialism. Articles on no-state solutions in Kurdistan; right-wing dirty tricks used to attack labour and environmental groups; scientists unravelling the risks of new pesticides; the terrors faced by fishermen in Gaza; and bringing books and seeking peace in Colombia. Film of the week is Even the Rain, and book of the week is Adolph Reed's Class Notes.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - November 27, 2014
Climate Change Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 The theme for this issue, and the topic of the week, is Climate Change. Groups and websites engaged in the fight for action on global warming and climate justice are featured. Book of the week is Magdoff and Foster's "What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism." In addition to articles on climate change, there are articles on Ebola, corporate tax evasion, and state terrorism, as well as a 1971 interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 18, 2014
The Commons Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014 From its beginnings, one of capitalism's prime imperatives has been an all-out and never-ceasing assault on the Commons in all its manifestations. Common land, common water, public ownership -- anything rooted in the ancient human traditions of sharing and cooperation is anathema to an economic system that seeks to turn everything that exists into private property that can be exploited for profit. This issue of the Connexions Newsletter focuses on the Commons.
- Other Voices Introductions
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2014 Published: 2021 Introductions to the Other Voices newsletters from July 2014 through to the end of 2021.
- Otherwise Occupied / The genius of Israeli evil: It poses as concern
How to murder human beings without using an explosive or a knife, how to empty them from within Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli evil is not at all banal. Abundant in inventions and innovations as well as in age-old techniques, it trickles like water and bursts out from hidden places. But unlike floods, it does not reach an end, and it affects some while being invisible, undetectable and non-existent for others. The genius of Israeli evil is in its ability to disguise itself as compassion and concern.
- Our Lives are Militarised
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Sam Walton examines the PR strategy of placing soldiers at civil society events.
- Our Planet, Our Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In response to recent activist activity regarding climate change in New York City, the editors examine the dimensions of the global environmental crisis and how to confront it.
- Our Words Are Our Weapons
The Feminist Battle of the Story in the Wake of the Isla Vista Massacre Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It was a key match in the World Cup of Ideas. The teams vied furiously for the ball. The all-star feminist team tried repeatedly to kick it through the goalposts marked Widespread Social Problems, while the opposing team, staffed by the mainstream media and mainstream dudes, was intent on getting it into the usual net called Isolated Event. To keep the ball out of his net, the mainstream's goalie shouted “mental illness” again and again. That “ball,” of course, was the meaning of the massacre of students in Isla Vista, California, by one of their peers.
- Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014
- Overlooking the Obvious With Naomi Klein
Climate, Capitialism and the Left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The lesson that Naomi Klein overlooks seems clear. Climate chaos is just one DEVASTATING symptom of our dysfunctional society. To survive catabolic capitalism and germinate an alternative, movement activists will have to anticipate and help people respond to multiple crises while organizing them to recognize and root out their source.
- The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A global history of communisim in the twentieth century.
- Pakistan: Another young woman killed by her family for marrying without their consent - Stoned just a few yards from the Lahore High Court
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has expressed serious alarm and disgust over the murder of a young woman, who was killed by her family in a manner like stoning to death, close to the Lahore High Court for marrying without their consent.
- Palestine is not an environment story
How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel's war for Gaza's gas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale.
- Palestine, Israel and 'Rockets'
The Increasing Isolation of Israel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It is with increasing frustration that one hears about Israeli atrocities in the West Bank, only through the skewed lens of the corporate-owned media.
- Palestine Speaks
Narratives of Life Under Occupation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been one of the world’s most widely reported yet least understood human rights crises for over four decades. In this oral history collection, men and women from Palestine—including a fisherman, a settlement administrator, and a marathon runner—describe in their own words how their lives have been shaped by the historic crisis.
[From the Publisher]
- Palestine, War and the Lethal Role of Journalists
Two Films by John Pilger Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 John Pilger first made the film ‘Palestine Is Still The Issue‘ in 1977. It told how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. Twenty five years later, in 2002, John Pilger returned to the West Bank of Jordan and Gaza, to make another film, giving it the same title. The film asks why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo – refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.
- Palestine's Unfolding Horror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Weissman interviews Dr. Hisham Ahmed regarding the Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2014, its underlying causes, and possible impact on the political prospects for the future of Hamas and Israel.
- Palestinian Arrested After Filming Settlers Throwing Stones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Yesterday, August 17, 2014, at approximately 5:30 PM in the old city in al-Khalil (Hebron), settlers from the illegal settlement of Beit Hadassah threw rocks and water at Palestinians living on Shalala Street.
- Palestinians torn over contact with Israelis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A Palestinian university’s decision to bar from its campus an Israeli journalist and outspoken critic of the occupation has exposed a growing rift among Palestinian activists about the merits of contact with Jewish Israelis.
- Palm Oil company plan to slow deforestation 'another land-grab'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A palm oil company's 'forest conservation' programme in Indonesia has ended up being a second land grab, seizing resources from local communities' control.
- Paraguay: Women at the Center of Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The headquarters of Conamuri is a gentle place that combines work with intimacy, like the campesino life that in some way it reproduces. The experience of Conamuri is great. They make their own rules and follow them in an educated way, not aggressively, but responsibly and with commitment. Although it may hurt, they tell us things to our face.
- The Pariah State
A Short History of Israeli Impunity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Hasbara has elevated the manipulation of language to a new plateau. This is a qualitative leap. Moving beyond the difficulty of seeing the stye in our own eye, the Hasbara upends linguistic conventions. Black becomes white, evil is translated into righteousness. Victims of murderous ethnic cleansing become terrorists. The conventions of language go completely out the door. Mass murder is self defense. The Great Wall is a barrier or a mere fence. Land grabs are voluntary relocations into disputed territories.
- The Pattern (Musically Annotated)
From the Annals of Occupation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The war of words heats up. Israeli and US leaders are all over the airwaves, saying Israel has a right to defend itself and that Hamas is responsible for all deaths on both sides. The news organizations feel they have to have some reporters in Gaza for a change. They keep trying to spin the news in Israel’s favour, but once they’re showing even a little bit of the reality on the ground, it all starts looking really bad for the Israelis with each new dead Palestinian child buried beneath the rubble.
- Paul Burkett's Marx and Nature Fifteen Years After
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Revisiting the content and contributions of Paul Burkett's book 'Marx and Nature', considering the changes in historical context and perceptions of environmental issues since its original publication.
- Pay Any Price
Greed, Power, and Endless War Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The book examines what Risen calls the "homeland security industrial complex", the effects of the War on Terror and the resulting financial malfeasance during the American occupation of Iraq.
- PBS's Red Metal: The Copper Country Strike of 1913 commemorates Michigan's bitter labor past
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 One hundred years ago, a major strike by copper miners was continuing in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which protrudes into Lake Superior in northern Michigan. In the middle of the months-long battle against intransigent mine owners, at least 73 people, mostly children, were killed in a horrific incident at a celebration on Christmas Eve in 1913.
- A perilous journey: Seabird runs gauntlet of hazards on 40,000-mile annual trip
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Right around now, flocks of sooties are finishing up their summer vacations feasting in the rich, upwelling currents of the Northern Pacific and are heading south to breed. En route, they'll run a gauntlet of manmade obstacles in the ocean: fisheries that deplete their prey and snare them with hooks and long lines, drifting continents of trash and noxious industrial spume.
- Perpetuating the Abu Ghraib Culture
The Harrowing Abuse of Iraqi Women Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The phenomenon of kidnapping, torturing, raping, and executing women is shockingly widespread within the Iraqi criminal justice systm, which continues the policies of the US miliary administration. If such a reality were to exist in a different political context, the global outrage would have been profound.
- The Persecution of Julian Assange
The Farcical Siege of Knightsbridge Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.
- Peru: Amazon tribes sacrificed to gas project
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Peru has approved the highly controversial expansion of the Camisea gas project onto the land of isolated Amazon tribes - who will be put at risk of a massive death toll or extinction from introduced diseases.
- Pesticide safety research shouldn't be left to the pesticide companies
If the research is to command public confidence, independent controls need to be maintained at every step. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Pesticide companies are responsible for assessing the safety of their products - and this situation cannot continue. The research should be carried out independently, subjected to peer review, and published.
- Pete Seeger: a Troubadour for Peace and Justice
Farewell to a Great American Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Pete Seeger is a man who stood up, lived live on his own terms and never stopped speaking out.
- Peter Rosenthal’s passions for law and math make for a beautiful, if different, life
At 72, lawyer and professor is still in love with his two jobs and says he plans to work until he dies. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Peter Rosenthal has died several times. Once he died in court when his heart stopped. Each time doctors brought him back. Now he is dying a different death in front of a University of Toronto math class.
- Petition in Support of Letter: Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of Nazi genocide unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- The Picket of the Zim Piraeus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Piketty on Capital and Inequality
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty.
- Plant, Pick & Eat It
Wenn ein Garten wächst Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 A group of neighbours in Kassel, Germany come together to transform a public space into a community garden. The film explores both the positive human impacts of the initiative and the subsequent resistance by the city to allowing the garden to continue.
- Plant This Movie
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 A documentary which encourages people to use green spaces to grow vegetables instead of grass. The film explores urban gardening in cities including Havana, Shanghai, Calcutta, Addis Ababa, Lima, New York, New Orleans, and London.
- Playing the Long Game
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The 2014 midterms did not change the dominant reality we face - one of substantial ongoing political stalemate and decay - and this sets the terms of reference for those serious about long-term fundamental change.
- Poison Spring
The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Vallianatos and Jenkins, after a 25-year stint at the Environmental Protection Agency, pull back the curtain on the watchdog agency's failure to guard public safety and monitor land use due to steady erosion of its enforcement practices.
- Poisoned: A dying bald eagle and its healers fight for a second chance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Nearly three-quarters of the 22 lead-poisoned birds that had reached the Teton Raptor Center in recent years either died or were so far gone they had to be euthanized. But this eagle had so far survived what could have been a lethal dose.
- Police Militarism in America
In Many Communities Cops are the Terrorists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The apparent murder by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, of Mike Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black youth who was shot a number of times while he was allegedly on his knees with his hands up in the air, pleading “Don’t shoot, I’m not armed,” is exposing everything that is wrong with policing in the US today. What we need today is community resistance to police abuse, and a demilitarization of policing.
- Police Say Tasering 8-Year-Old Native American Girl Was Justified
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The mother of an 8-year-old Native American girl is suing police who maintain that they were justified in using a taser on the child. The family lives in Pierre, South Dakota and belong to the Rosebud Sioux community. Four police officers decided that this young girl who had a small paring knife was "a danger to herself," requiring them to taser her.
- Police State: US Government-Funded Database Created to Track "Subversive Propaganda" Online
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The creation of the Truthy database by Indiana University researchers has drawn sharp criticism from free-speech advocates and others concerned over government censorship of political expression.
- Police Terror in the Big Apple
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Scott exposes the realities of police brutality and the character of organized opposition in New York City.
- The political economy of hunger
Why is there hunger? It's nothing to do with a lack of food. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The fact there's enough food to feed everyone has slowly been acknowledged amongst the ruling institutions. The intuitive answer to this question is that there must be a lack of food. This explanation comes in two flavours. Chronic hunger is typically explained by the Malthusian argument that population growth perennially outstrips food production. Acute hunger, such as famines, is typically explained in terms of Food Availability Decline, such as crop failures due to drought.
- Political Prisoners in the Sacrifice Zone of Empire
Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jeremy Hammond Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Recently, two cases concerning the constitutional rights of people in prison came to public light. They involve two U.S. political prisoners: Mumia Abu-Jamal who is serving a life sentence at a facility in Frackville, Pennsylvania and Jeremy Hammond, who is serving a ten year sentence at a federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky.
- A Political Witch-Hunt in the Name of "Academic Freedom": In Defense of the American Studies Association
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Wald provides insight into the American Studies Association's decision to boycott Israeli universities and defends the group's decision against the backlash given by the media and academia.
- The Politics of Food and Poverty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The global food crisis is tightly connected to global poverty, climate change, ecological destruction, migrant workers, imperialism, health and the super-exploitation of workers.
- The Politics of Pachamama
Natural Resource Extraction vs. Indigenous Rights and the Environment in Latin America Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 While many economies and citizens have benefitted from the state’s larger involvement in the extraction of these resources, extractivism under progressive governments, as it had under neoliberalism, still displaces rural communities, poisons water sources, kills the soil, and undermines indigenous territorial autonomy.
- Poor West Virginia? Think Again
Resistance in the Valley of Death Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The chemical spill in Charleston, West Virginia has once again put Appalachia on the map. This is what it usually takes. People have to not just die at the hands of the coal and chemical industry, they have to die dramatically. The long slow death spiral West Virginia has been in for over a hundred years is not news unless they do.
- The Pope at Herzl's Grave
Patagonian Dreams Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 During his short visit to Israel, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl.
That was not a usual gesture. Foreign heads of state are obliged to visit Yad Vashem, as did the pope, but not the grave of Herzl.
- Popular Movements Toward Socialism
Their Unity and Diversity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The following reflections deal with a permanent and fundamental challenge that has confronted, and continues to confront, all popular movements struggling against capitalism. By this I mean both those of movements whose explicit radical aim is to abolish the system based on private proprietorship over the modern means of production in order to replace it with a system based on workers’ social proprietorship, and those of movements which, without going so far, involve mobilization aimed at real and significant transformation of the relations between labor and capital. Both sorts of movements can contribute, in varying degree, to calling capitalism into question; but they also might merely create the illusion of movement in that direction, although in fact only forcing capital to make the transformations it would need to co-opt a given set of working-class demands.
- Populism: What, Why, How?
Preface to European Populism and Winning the Immigration Debate Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Preface to a new book on European Populism and Winning the Immigration Debate.
- Porn, Women's Rights and the Left
A Response to Gail Dines Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I believe that government belongs in health, education, welfare, social services, environmental protection and transport; but I do not believe that it belongs in our bedrooms.
- Postcolonial Thought's Blind Alley
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Throughout the 20th century, the anchor for anti-colonial movements was, at least for the left, a belief that oppression was wrong wherever it was practised, because it was an affront to basic human needs for dignity, liberty, wellbeing. But now, in the name of anti-Eurocentrism, postcolonial theory has resurrected the cultural essentialism that progressives rightly viewed as the ideological justification for imperial domination. What better excuse to deny peoples their rights than to impugn the idea of rights, and universal interests, as culturally biased? No revival of an international and democratic left is possible unless we clear away these ideas, affirming the universalism of our common humanity, and of the threat to it from a universalising capitalism.
- Practical Approaches to Non-violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Quaker group Turning the Tide works with communities in the UK and Kenya to help different groups and organizations develop their own nonviolent approaches to radical change and social justice. Edward Dingwall catches up with staff member Steve Whiting on the Turning the Tide's aims and methods.
- Practicing Hope
He's Just 17 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It seems like teachers want to do the right thing and, along with most white people, they don’t want to say the wrong thing about race (or class or LGBT or adoption or disabilities) so they just don’t bring it up. Most white folks I know here don’t see any evidence of racism unless someone points to specific incidents or talks through the issues, like Driving While Black or Shopping While Black. Even then, some of my white friends, and many of my students, get exasperated, “Racism is so old-school,” I’ve been told. They don’t want to believe that racism exists. This essay is for them, and for my kids.
- The Price of Books, The Value of Civilization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I have come to think that books occupy this valuable position in our civilisation because they are the only medium for thick descriptions of the world that human beings possess. By ‘thick’ description, I mean an extended, detailed, evidence-based, written interpretation of a subject. If you want to write a feature or blog or wikipedia entry, be it about the origins of the first world war; the authoritarian turn in Russia; or the causes and effects of the 2008 financial crisis, in the end you will have to refer to a book. Or at least refer to other people who have referred to books. Even the best magazine pieces and TV documentaries – and the best of these are very good indeed – are only puddle-deep compared with the thick descriptions laid out in books. They are ‘thin’ descriptions and the creators and authors of them will have referred extensively to books to produce their work.
- The Price of Experience
Writings on Living with Cancer Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Writer and political activist Mike Marqusee was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, in the summer of 2007. At first, disinclined to share his misery with others, he was reluctant to write about his illness. But he then came to realize that doing so provided a precious continuity with his life as a writer before contracting the disease, and a way of reaching out to a wider world that the illness made physically less accessible. Writing allowed him to address what he saw as a variety of insidious platitudes that surround cancer, often connected to the individualistic idea that the sufferer must be brave in battling the disease, with the inevitable corollary that those who succumb have, in some measure, brought it on themselves. And so Marqusee begins to write about his illness. Not just his own symptoms and feelings, but the responses of friends to the news that he is ill and the way these reflect broader social attitudes towards the sick.
- The Price We Pay
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 This documentary, inspired by Brigitte Alepin's book La Crise fiscale qui vient, shines a light on the dark history and dire present-day reality of big-business tax avoidance, which has seen multinationals depriving governments of trillions of dollars in tax revenues by harbouring profits in offshore havens.
- Pride
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Based on a true story, the film depicts a group of lesbian and gay activists who raised money to help families affected by the British miners' strike in 1984, at the outset of what would become the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign.
- Principles for Troublemakers
How to Fan the Flames Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The authors outline some trouble-making movement-building principles that should be the hallmarks of the labour movement.
- The Pristine Coast
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Director Renyard has created a devastating account of how fish farms have upset the ecosystem on the West Coast. Styled like an essay, the film argues against unregulated aquaculture industries.
- Privatise Child Protection Services, Department for Education Proposes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Experts sound alarm over UK proposal to outsource children's services to private firms.
- Problem Isn’t 'Patent Trolls'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The problem isn’t “patent trolls.” The problem is patents.
- The problem of the one-day strike: a response to Sean Vernell
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An overview of the wave of strikes that took place over the issue of pensions across public sector trade unions between March 2011 and June 2012.
- The Problem With College Educated Revolutionaries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The political views of college-educated activists are shaped by their experiences in an educational institution. They unknowingly impose these particular experiences on the movement and on working class people. They have played a crucial role in preventing any working class leadership from developing.
- Product of Mexico: Child Labor
In Mexico's fields, children toil to harvest crops that make it to American tables Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 About 100,000 children under 14 pick crops for pay at small- and mid-size farms across Mexico, where child labor is illegal. Some of the produce they harvest reaches American consumers, helping to power an export boom.
- Product of Mexico: Company Stores
Company stores trap Mexican farmworkers in a cycle of debt Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The company store is supposed to be a lifeline for migrant farm laborers. But inflated prices drive people deep into debt. Many go home penniless, obliged to work off their debts at the next harvest.
- Product of Mexico: Harsh Harvest
Hardship on Mexico's farms, a bounty for U.S. tables Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Farm exports to the U.S. from Mexico have tripled to $7.6 billion in the last decade, enriching agribusinesses, distributors and retailers. But for thousands of farm laborers south of the border, the boom is a story of exploitation and extreme hardship.
- Product of Mexico: No Way Out
Desperate workers on a Mexican mega-farm: 'They treated us like slaves' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A raid exposes brutal conditions at Bioparques, one of Mexico's biggest tomato exporters, which was a Wal-Mart supplier. But the effort to hold the grower accountable is looking more like a tale of impunity.
- The 'Professorial President' And The 'Small, Strutting Hard Man'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Exactly what is happening in Ukraine is not easy to disentangle from corporate news media reports. The current crisis began in November 2014 when the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, withdrew from a cooperation agreement with the European Union to forge closer ties with Russia.
- Profiting from Christian Credulity
Manufacturing the Jesus Legend Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A brand-new book, entitled The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary the Magdalene, is receiving a lot of attention. How could it not? The authors of the book declare that it proves that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, with two children. The media eats this stuff up.
- The Promised Land
History and Historiography of the Black Experience in Chatham-Kent's Settlements and Beyond Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The Promised Land presents the everyday lives of individuals and families in the Chatham-Kent area of Ontario and highlights early cross-border activism to end slavery in the United States.
- Propaganda
'The Dominant Grand Narrative of Our Time' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Today, it is clearer than ever to a growing number of people that there is something seriously wrong with 'the news'. The current system of planet-crushing propaganda relies on a mere façade of overall 'balance', 'reasonableness' and 'range of views'. In the UK, BBC News is the crucial foundation stone of this propaganda system, with the Guardian playing an accompanying role.
- Protect our sacred water!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The curse of Uranium has fallen once again on the Black Hills of South Dakota, ancestral home to the Lakota Indians - now fighting a massive mining project that threatens land, rivers and groundwater.
- Protect Yourself from Electronic Spying with Surveillance Self-Defense
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched its updated "Surveillance Self-Defense" report, a comprehensive how-to guide to protecting yourself from electronic spying for Internet users all over the world.
- Protecting the Girl Child
Using the Law to End Child Marriage, Early and Forced Marriage and Related Human Rights Violations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The report states that child marriage of legitimizes human rights violations and abuses of girls under the pretense of culture, honour, and religion.
- Protest Inc. - The Corporatization of Protest (Book Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Review of "Protest Inc. - The Corporatization of Activism" by Peter Dauvergne & Genevieve LeBaron.
- Psychiatry's Manufacture of Consent
The Chemical Imbalance Theory and the Antidepressant Explosion Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Starting in the 1990s — despite research findings that levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin were unrelated to depression — Americans began to be exposed to highly effective television commercials for antidepressants that portrayed depression as caused by a “chemical imbalance” of low levels of serotonin and which could be treated with “chemically balancing” antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
- Public space - we must defend our freedoms!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Laws handing sweeping new powers to police and private security to restrict access to Britain's public space will extinguish the diversity of civic life. Time for us to rediscover and defend our freedoms.
- Publicity and the Canadian State
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A collection examining the state's relationship with public practices and the "permanent campaign," the constant search for politicians and their strategists for popular consent.
- The Punishment of Cuba
The USA as Judge, Jury and Executioner Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an "international pariah". We haven’t heard that for a very long time. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba".
- The Purpose And The Pretence - Bombing Isis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Traditionally, claims that an Official Enemy is uniquely Evil rise to a deafening crescendo just prior to an attack on that enemy.
- Putin on the Ritz
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Forgive the word-play; colossal demonization notwithstanding, I’ll go with Putin and Russia over Obama, the US, Rasmussen, Cameron, friends and allies everywhere. America has an unerring nose for smelling Fascism and quickly joining ranks. Today Putin used the political “F” word correctly, and for that I honor him.
- Putting the Arms Industry on Trial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Sean Douglas and other activists are prosecuting two companies that promoted torture equipment in the UK.
- Questions about Israel's attack on Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Why do these terrible outbreaks of violence keep happening? Written during the Israeli attack on Gaza in July 2014.
- Questions for the APA Board Regarding Claims in James Risen's Book "Pay Any Price"
Colluding With the CIA on Torture? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In his new book Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, James Risen, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter, documents apparent collaboration between (American Psychological Association) APA leadership and the CIA to support psychologist participation in torture.
- Racism Refusing to Go Away
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Miah analyzes the position of race and racism within American culture, history, and politics and how it has been continuously central in society from the beginning of Europe's colonial agenda to the present day, though it has taken on different manifestations.
- Radical Digressions 7
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2014 Published: 2017
- Rage, Race and Violence on the Western Range
The Origins of the Rancher Insurrection Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ranchers have openly defied federal environmental regulations, built private roads and water structures on public lands and used bellicose tactics to hold off enforcement actions by rangers from the Forest Service and the BLM.
- The Raid on Lawrence, Kansas
A Midwest Gothic Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Bizarre and gruesome moment in the life of Lawrence, Kansas should give pause to us all when we consider the small and the large of our own lives.
- Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Today, fewer than 7% of American private-sector workers belong to a union and public employee collective bargaining has been dealt devastating blows in Wisconsin and elsewhere. This book argues that labour can be revived with social movement unionism that involves raising worker's expectations.
- The "Ralph Nader" Illusion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ralph Nader (see his RT interview video here) is providing a kind of leadership to the many Americans who are fed up with our dictatorship of the rich and who want a much more equal and democratic society. Nader's main attraction today is his "convergence" theme, by which he means that the great majority of Americans, on the order of 80%, want a more equal and democratic society whether they currently consider themselves to be on the "right" or on the "left."
- A Range of Abuses
The Invisible Deaths of Lebanon's Migrant Domestic Workers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Migrant domestic workers generally get very little protection from the Lebanese government and remain under-reported in the media, while the deaths of these workers are rarely discussed in the news. Despite the high incidence, domestic workers’ deaths are not investigated or documented by the Lebanese authorities.
- Razor Wire, Prison Cells, And Black Panther Robert H. King's Life of Resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An interview with filmmaker Ron Harpelle.
- The Real Cost of a Cheap Burger
Fastfood Workers Go Hungry: Is that the American Dream? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 America’s fastfood outlets are not restaurants but food systems serviced by cheap labour in de-skilled jobs — employees so badly paid that they need state aid and charity. They went on strike in North Carolina last summer.
- The Real Cost of a Hamburger
The Ecological Consequences of Welfare Ranching Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Do you know what a Big Mac costs? If you say $2.50 or whatever the current price posted at the McDonald’s restaurant may be, you are vastly under-estimating the real price. That’s because $2.50 does not reflect the genuine cost of production. Every hamburger price tag should include a calculation of animal suffering, human health costs, economic and ecological subsidies. None of these bona fide costs is included in the price one pays for a hamburger (or other meats eaten by consumers for that matter).
- The Real Cost of Fracking: How America's Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Many fracking chemicals are known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors or other classes of toxins. Studies carried out during the ongoing fracking boom, uncovered serious adverse effects including respiratory, reproductive, and growth-related problems in animals and a spectrum of symptoms in humans that they termed “shale gas syndrome”.
- The Real Cost of Fracking: How America's Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food
How America's Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Across the United States, fracking -- the extraction of natural gas by hydraulic fracturing -- is being touted as the answer to energy independence and a fix for a flagging economy. Drilling companies assure us that the process is safe, politicians push through drilling legislation without a serious public-health debate, and those who speak out are marginalized, their silence purchased by gas companies and their warnings about the dangers of fracking stifled.
- Rear-View Mirror: A Snapshot of Toronto Activist Art (1976-1996)
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2014 A snapshot of Toronto activist art from the 1976 general strike to the 1996 Days of Action.
- Rebuilding communities: a type of resistance
Communities in the Amazon resort to constitutional rights to recover territories granted to mining companies. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In Tundayme, a parish located in the Cordillera del Cóndor in Ecuador's southern Amazon, the indigenous and peasant communities have decided to recover the territories of abandoned or forcefully evicted communities in order to oppose mining megaprojects. The first few steps have been successful, but they fear that the government and the affected companies will respond aggressively.
- The reckoning: the future of the Venezuelan Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 he core of Chávez’s programme was to achieve state control of the oil industry, negotiate for an appropriate level of royalties, and use that income for social and economic development. The rhetoric remains largely the same today; but the reality bears very little relation to that promised future.
- Reclaim the power! Democratic energy must replace corporate capture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Democratising energy would save thousands of lives a year in Britain alone -- releasing us from the clutches of corporate utilities, and building an energy commons in which we are all owners and participants, no longer captive, exploited consumers. More than that, it would be a big step forward in saving the planet.
- Reclaiming the Commons in Appalachia
Property is Theft Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The extractive resource industry has a firm hold on the wild, wonderful, but wounded Appalachians. The use of eminent domain and compulsory pooling has robbed communities of their cultural and natural heritage. Capital is the authority of the Appalachian coalfields, and has created systemic poverty and mono economies. Instead of prosperity in the commons, the mechanism of authority has spawned tragedy.
- Recruiting To Kill - It Is Not Just An Israeli War On Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 To some, US secretary of state John Kerry may have appeared to be a genuine peacemaker as he floated around ideas during a Cairo visit on 25 July about a ceasefire between Israel and resisting Palestinian fighters in Gaza. But behind his measured diplomatic language, there is a truth not even America's top diplomat can easily hide. His country is very much involved in fighting this dirty war on Gaza that has killed over 1,050, injured thousands more, and destroyed much of an already poor, dilapidated space that is barely inhabitable to begin with.
- Recyclers Battle Waste Management... and the Teamsters Union
With Friends Like These Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It’s 4 AM. The air is cold and damp on 98th Avenue in deep East Oakland, down along the San Francisco Bay’s industrial waterfront. This is a hard geography of concrete and dust and pot-hole riddled roads latticed by train tracks. Much of the earth is landfill, crowded for miles with scrap metal yards, bakeries, machine shops, and warehouses.
- Recycling is not enough! Sharing is the way to achieve a circular economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Mariale Moreno discusses how can we reduce our ever increasing throughput of raw materials. She suggests lowering consumerism and making things last.
- A Red Metamorphosis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The following essay has been written and published in response to increasing requests from researchers for information on the background and development of historian Terry Irving and his approach to history.
- Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America's most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics.
- Reflections on a violent day in Ottawa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 After a long day focused on these gripping events in the nation's capital, I have to wonder if this direct experience of fear and trauma will force us to examine our own addiction to violence as the solution to conflict. Last week's events provide us with an opportunity to reflect on our insidious contribution to the climate of hate, and the chance to disengage from our increasingly militarized culture.
- Regime Change in Ukraine and the IMF's Bitter "Economic Medicine"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the days following the Ukraine coup d’Etat of February 23, 2014, leading to the ousting of a duly elected president, Wall Street and the IMF -- in liaison with the US Treasury and the European Commission in Brussels -- had already set the stage for the outright takeover of Ukraine's monetary system.
- Reign of Error
The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, an incisive, comprehensive look at today's American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools.
- Reinterpreting the Cotton Kingdom
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book review of Walter Johnson's "River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom."
- Reintroducing Sarah Wright
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Karageorgos places Wright's novel "This Child's Gonna Live" about the experience of Black women's triple oppression within a historical context to analyze her critique of Black nationalism.
- Relevance of Hannah Arendt's "A Report On The Banality Of Evil" To Gaza
Self-Deception, Lies And Stupidity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Hannah Arendt, philosopher, writer, academic of Jewish heritage, went to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Eichmann, one of the actors in the Final Solution, for the New Yorker magazine. Her account of the trial became a basis for the book, Eichmann In Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil.
- RE/MAX Cashes in on Israel's Illegal Settlements
End the sale of Settlement Properties Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Israeli government’s recent announcement that it had authorized the building of another 1,000 settlement homes in East Jerusalem left the US government seeing red, with State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki calling the settlement activity 'illegitimate' and 'incompatible with the pursuit of peace.' But the announcement must have left the US-based real estate giant RE/MAX “seeing green,” ready to cash in on the sale and rental of more illegal settlement homes.
- Remembering Mississippi, 1964-65
Interview with Claudia Morcom Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Dianne Feeley and David Finkel from the ATC editorial board spoke with Judge Morcom about her work in Mississippi during Freedom Summer 1964 and subsequently from September 1964 through October 1965, as Southern Regional Director for the National Lawyers Guild’s program of legal assistance for civil rights workers.
- Remembering Mississippi, 1964-65
Interview with Claudia Morcom Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Feeley and Finkel interview Morcom about her work in Mississippi during Freedom Summer 1964 and subsequently from September 1964 through October 1965, as Southern Regional Director for the National Lawyers Guild's program of legal assistance for civil rights workers.
- Reproductive Rights Assaulted
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Feeley examines the lack of rights American women have in regards to reproduction, abortion, and access to contraceptives as legislations currently in place bar women from having full coverage or information regarding their options.
- Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Valerie Barr was 22 and living in New York City in 1979 when she became politically active. A recent graduate of New York University with a master’s degree in computer science, Barr handed out leaflets, stood behind tables at rallies, and baked cookies to support two left-wing groups, the Women’s Committee Against Genocide and the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence. Despite her passion for those issues, she had a full-time job as a software developer that took precedence.
- Resister
A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 An insider's account of the antiwar and student protest movements of the sixties and a look at the prison experiences of Vietnam-era draft resisters.
- Resisting State Violence
Justice Or Just Us Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 None of the ambiguities that surrounded Mike Brown’s killing are present in the grotesque spectacle of Eric Garner’s murder. By now the whole world has watched the man die at the hands of police without betraying a trace of belligerence. The failure to indict Pantaleo and the officers who pinned Garner down as he repeatedly yelled, “I can’t breathe” is a reminder that antiblackness is not a technical problem and therefore cannot be remedied with a technical solution.
- Resisting the New McCarthyism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Against the Current interviews Professor Abdulhadi regarding recent accusations by the rightwing McCarthyist AMCHA Initiative that she secured university funding on a false pretext of attending a conference in Beirut. It is believed that this accusation is part of a greater objective targetting pro-Palestinian activities.
- Resisting the Occupation with Olive Oil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 About Zatoun, which brings Plaestinian olive oil to Canada.
- Resisting the Occupation with Olive Oil - Arabic text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Resisting the Occupation with Olive Oil - Korean text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Responding to capitalist disaster, in 1914 and today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 World War I began 100 years ago. Today's ecosocialist movement has much to learn from the revolutionaries who campaigned to stop that catastrophe.
- Rest in Peace Pete Seeger, A True Progressive Hero
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the wake of his death, a look back at Pete Seeger's music and activism.
- Return of the Evil Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 You have to hand it to them. The United States media machine is unequaled at producing and disseminating misinformation. It begins in the bowels of the State Department or White House or Pentagon and is filtered out through the government’s front organizations, otherwise known as Mainstream Media (MSM).
- Reve/cauchemar: Allende's Chile and the Polarization of the Quebec Left in the 1970s
MA Thesis,Queen's University, 2014 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Review: Chris Rhomberg, The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor (2012)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Review on Chris Rhomberg's book 'The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor.'
- Review: Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves. The Real American War in Vietnam (2013)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Review of Nick Turse's book Kill Anything That Moves. The Real American War in Vietnam.
- Review of Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Vivek Chibber challenges the post-Marxist framework of the Subaltern Studies group.
- Review: Defying Fundamentalism
A review of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Concerned with the rising Jihadist fundamentalism on one hand, and increasing discrimination against Muslims following 9/11 on the other, and having in mind the question repeated by many commentators — “Why don’t Muslims speak out?” — Bennoune documents the voices of Muslims in various ways victimized by Islamic fundamentalists.
- Revolutionaries in the a Time of Retreat
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book review of "Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922" edited and translated by John Riddell.
- Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir
Volume 1, Canada 1955-1965 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The first volume of long-time Canadian revolutionary socialist Ernie Tate's memoir.
- Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir
Volume 2, Britain 1965-1970 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The second volume of long-time Canadian revolutionary socialist Ernie Tate's memoir.
- Revolutionary Medicine - A Story of the First Garifuna Hospital
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 The story of the building of a hospital in Ciriboya, Honduras -- an authentic, grass-roots, community development project, from the initial community meetings, the organized planning, the community defense committees, to the actual bricks, mortar and staffing. The viewer of Revolutionary Medicine is guided through the process in a series of compelling interviews with doctors, patients and community protagonists.
- Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Minneapolis Teamster strikes overlapped with a similarly hard-fought 83-day strike by West Coast longshoremen and maritime unions, a battle that culminated in a four-day general strike in San Francisco. Both strikes were part of a wave of labour struggle that swept the country as the working class, shaking off the paralysis that had accompanied the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, began to fight. What distinguished these two strikes, along with one by auto parts workers in Toledo, from other 1934 labor battles is that they won big, establishing union representation for masses of previously unorganized workers and opening the road to the upsurge later in the decade that forged the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Key to the victory of all three strikes was the leadership provided by "reds" -- labour militants who considered themselves socialist or communist.
- Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Minneapolis Teamster strikes overlapped with a similarly hard-fought 83-day strike by West Coast longshoremen and maritime unions, a battle that culminated in a four-day general strike in San Francisco. Both strikes were part of a wave of labour struggle that swept the country as the working class, shaking off the paralysis that had accompanied the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, began to fight. What distinguished these two strikes, along with one by auto parts workers in Toledo, from other 1934 labor battles is that they won big.
- Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934
A Review and Commentary by E. Tanner (Part One) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review and dicussion of Bryan Palmer's in-depth study of the truckers strikes in Minneapolis in 1934.
- Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934
A Review and Commentary by E. Tanner (Part Two) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review and dicussion of Bryan Palmer's in-depth study of the truckers strikes in Minneapolis in 1934.
- Richmond: Company Town or People's Town?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Feeley delves into the problematic dynamics surrounding the election campaign in Richmond, CA whereby the city's dominant corporation, the Chevron oil refinery which carries a long history of environmental concerns with it, could potentially have a greater hand in municipal decisions if one of its candidates are elected.
- Richmond and Eminent Domaine
The Stone That Brings Down Goliath? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown.
- Rick Berman Exposed in New Audio; Hear His Tactics Against Environmentalists and Workers' Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Rick Berman, the king of corporate front groups and propaganda, has been caught on tape detailing his attacks on public interest groups in the labor and environmental movements. Berman specializes in setting up pro-corporate front groups to attack grassroots citizen groups. Berman advocates and practises a range of dirty tactics and propaganda techniques.
- Rick Berman Exposed in New Audio; Hear His Tactics Against Environmentalists and Workers' Rights
Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2014 The king of corporate front groups and propaganda, has been caught on tape detailing his attacks on public interest groups in the labor and environmental movements, including on efforts to increase the minimum wage for workers.
- "Right to Life" Horror in Texas
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A Texas hospital keeps a corpse hooked up to machines.
- The Right-to-Farm Scam
Third Wave Corporatocracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When Monsanto’s home state of Missouri passed the “Right to Farm” on August 5, 2014 the third noose of corporate control tightened around the neck of the US. Unlike the first two steps of corporate domination of public life, this was a constitutional amendment that would block the state legislature or voters from passing future laws for environmental protection, animal welfare or labeling of contaminated food. This third wave corporatocracy could well spread across US and globally as it becomes a new form of mass disenfranchisement.
- Rio Tinto's 'sustainable mining' claims exposed
Rio Tinto uses its sustainability reporting to bolster the argument that it is a responsible company and therefore entitled to a license to Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Global mining giant Rio Tinto markets itself as a 'sustainable company'. But serious failures in its reporting, and its attempt to hold an Australian indigenous group to ransom, reveal a very different truth: the company is driven by a reckless pursuit of profit at any cost.
- RIP Tony Benn. Tireless and inspirational fighter for peace, justice and equality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The loss of Tony Benn is a loss for our whole movement. He was a good friend to the Stop the War Coalition, of which he remained president to the end. One of his last speeches was at the Stop the War international conference on 30 November 2013. He was a socialist, someone with a deep commitment to social change, who was principled to the end.
- The Rise of British Imperialism
Part I: The Protestant Reformation to the English Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Published: 2015 Russell Stroker of the Trotskyist League goes back to the origins of the world capitalist system in the 16th century to explain how imperialism emerged out of the political and economic logic of capitalism.
- The Rise of British Imperialism
Part II: Capitalism and Slavery Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On the ascent of Britain as the first modern imperialist power.
- The Rise of Vermont's Fracked Gas Battle: Communities Organize Against Pipeline Plans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Nate and Jane Palmer's farm sits in a clay plain basin adjacent to one of the many wetlands in Monkton, a rural Vermont community known for, among other things, its annual salamander migrations and amphibian road crossings.
- Rising suicide rate for Indian farmers blamed on GMO seeds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Monsanto, which has just paid out $2.4 million to US farmers, settling one of many lawsuits it's been involved in worldwide, is also facing accusations that its seeds are to blame for a spike in suicides by India farmers.
- Romania - a Peasants' Revolt against Fracking
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Earthquakes and poisoned wells are setting off a revolt against fracking in Romania, revealing deep fault lines between the rural heartlands and the urban political elite.
- Rosa Luxemburg: Economics for a New Socialist Project
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2014 Reading Marx’ Capital today leaves the same impression as reading Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. One wonders whether Marx and Luxemburg really wrote their books more than one hundred years ago. If not for their historical references to English industrialization and nineteenth-century imperialism, one might think they were written as analyses of neoliberal globalization from the late twentieth century until today.
- Rosa Luxemburg on the Socialist Civic Virtues
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 One of Rosa Luxemburg's most striking and least well-understood contributions was to draw on the classical "republican" notion of "civic virtue," as a vital part of her analysis of working-class democracy.
- The Ruins of War, Then and Now
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The editors provide an overview of the United States' involvement in WWI and how the country's imperialist dynamics have grown since then despite anti-war, labour, and socialist efforts.
- Russia Bashing: Hatred, Hysteria and Humbug
A Tale of Three Aircraft Tragedies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It’s OK for the US to shoot down an Iranian airliner and kill 290 people — there’s never been an apology to the Iranian people for that war crime — but when there’s an opportunity to claim, to shriek, to propagandise at cyclone-level, that a disaster has occurred in which there just might be the tiniest chance to blame Russia, then there is clamour for investigation.
- Russia Invades Ukraine: Again. And Again. And Yet Again
The Missing Burden of Proof Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- RWB publishes 2014 round-up of violence against journalists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Reporters Without Borders is today publishing its round-up of abuses against journalists in 2014. According to RWB’s tally, 66 journalists were murdered this year, bringing to 720 the number of journalists killed in connection with their work in the past 10 years. A total of 119 journalists were kidnapped this year. Forty journalists are currently being held hostage.
- A Saga of Revolution
Book Review of Reiss' "The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Tom Reiss' biography of Alexandre Dumas, a largely underemphasized figure in the French Revolution and the slave trade during the 18th century.
- The Saints Go Marching Out as the Face of Islam Hardens in Pakistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Sufi-influenced tradition of Barelvism, with its shrines, music and meditation, is reeling under an ideological assault from severe, Saudi-funded Wahhabism, religious leaders warn.
- The Salaita Affair
Lessons Heard and Lessons Learned Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Professor Steven Salaita was to begin his new faculty appointment in Fall 2014 as a tenured Associate Professor in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His appointment was vetted through the multi-layer levels that are a mainstay of North American universities faculty appointment process. However, on August 1, 2014, the chancellor of UIUC Phyllis Wise informed Salaita that he did not have a faculty job at UIUC. The storm this di-hiring created amongst North American academics was unprecedented.
- Sanctions & the Dollar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The recent round of sanctions aimed at Moscow over the crisis in the Ukraine could backfire on Washington by accelerating a move away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. While in the short run American actions against Russia’s oil and gas industry will inflict economic pain on Moscow, in the long run the U.S. may lose some of its control over international finance.
- Saudi Star To Restart Rice Project on Disputed Anuak Lands in Ethiopia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Saudi Star Agricultural Development plans to spend $100 million in a rice export project in Gambella region of Ethiopia despite allegations of human rights violations surrounding the "villagization" program.
- Save the Fat Cats
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Very few charities are in any sense independent any more. Save the Children Fund gets 176 million pounds – over half its income - in grants from various governments, including over 80 million from the British government. That compares to 106 million in donations from the public. In 2012 over 70 million pounds was spent by Save the Children UK on its own staff costs.
- Science and liberation
Science as human curiosity, as authority, and as business Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The conservative movement’s attack on science has several prongs. Where they can attain government office, as in Canada, they use the highly effective tools of funding and de-funding, and regulation and de-regulation, to control government scientists and embolden private interests. The goal is to transfer power and resources from public services and public science to private institutions, while often appealing to moral and religious doctrines in the process.
- Scientists Protest Canada's War on Science
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Harper government is closing libraries, trashing documents and firing thousands of scientists — while handing out billions in subsidies to oil companies.
- Scientists Write: EPA, Ban 'Agent Orange' Herbicide Mix and GMO Crops!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Thirty-five distinguished scientists urge the US-EPA not to register new mixtures of the herbicides 2,4-D and glyphosate, intended for use on herbicide-tolerant GMO crops. Approval of the herbicide mixtures would endanger both human and environmental health.
- Scrambling birds' brains: Could this toxic algae offer clues to human diseases?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In humans, researchers suspect that a neurotoxin may be linked to Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a lethal neurodegenerative disease that destroys parts of the brain. No one knows whether any human neurological diseases are related to the bird disease, but new clues about the poisoned birds are emerging.
- Searching for Sustainability
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Review of "State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?" by the WorldWatch Institute.
- Secrets of the UK Nuclear Bomb Tests Revealed
The "Forgotten" Uranium Isotope Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Secret documents released reveal valuable evidence about uranium in fallout.The documents show that fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing contains enormous amounts of uranium. This should be no surprise as nuclear bombs contain a lot of uranium, and most of it remains unfissioned after a nuclear explosion.
- Secwepemc Tribes Fight New Mines and Old Laws in British Columbia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Indigenous activists burned down a bridge in British Columbia, Canada, to prevent Imperial Metals from starting a lead and zinc mine on the lands of the Secwepemc peoples. Local tribes say that the mine may severely impact the one of the largest remaining sockeye salmon populations in the world.
- Selling the Silver
The Enclosure of the UK's Fisheries Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Fishing quotas were meant to conserve stocks and support fishing communities. But they have achieved the reverse - rewarding the most rapacious fishing enterprises and leaving small scale fisherfolk with nothing.
- Selling your Secrets
The Invisible World of Software Backdoors and Bounty Hunters Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the world of NSA mass surveillance involves close partnerships with a series of companies most of us have never heard of that design or probe the software we all take for granted to help keep our digital lives humming along.
- Selma (film)
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 A 2014 historical drama film directed by Ava DuVernay, based on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by James Bevel, Hosea Williams, and Martin Luther King, Jr. of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC.
- The Seminole-African Alliance
World News Trust Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Native American Indian people that comprised the Seminole Nation grew out of the Creek Nation in Florida. Multilingual and diverse, the Seminoles (from a word meaning “runaway”) became infamous for intermingling with runaway slaves from Georgia and the Carolinas… slaves that built prosperous, free, self-governing communities since 1738.
- Senegal Fears Its Fish May Be Off the Menu for Local Consumption
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Foreign fish processing factories are competing with traditional communities for a dwindling catch.
- Seven Reasons Police Brutality is Systemic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Darrin Manning's unprovoked "stop and frisk" encounter with the Philadelphia police left him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested in front of her young child for "trespassing" at her own apartment complex in Houston. A Georgia toddler was burned when police threw a flash grenade into his playpen during a raid, and the manager of a Chicago tanning salon was confronted by a raiding police officer bellowing that he would kill her and her family, captured on the salon's surveillance. An elderly man in Ohio was left in need of facial reconstructive surgery after police entered his home without a warrant to sort out a dispute about a trailer. These stories are a small selection of recent police brutality reports, as police misconduct has become a fixture of the news cycle.
- Book Review: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 David Harvey has three aims in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (SCEC). First and mainly he wants to schematically analyze the contradictions of capital, the 'economic engine' driving the particular social formation capitalism. Second, he seeks to draw-out that analysis's implications for anti-capitalist politics dedicated to creating a world substantially more democratic, egalitarian, and emancipatory than that which capital affords. Third, he aims to address what might cause the end of capitalism and, specifically, whether capital's internal contradictions progressively undermine its conditions of existence.
- Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 David Harvey examines the internal contradictions within the flow of capital that have precipitated recent crises. He contends that while the contradictions have made capitalism flexible and resilient, they also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe.
- Sex and Consent on Campus
"Yes Means Yes" Law: Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Amid an ongoing debate over sex and consent on college campuses, in September California passed "affirmative consent" legislation, which was followed by a slew of similar initiatives nationwide. The pretext is to curb a purported epidemic of sexual violence and have college administrations come clean on reporting sexual assault complaints. But legislating one form of consent as the only acceptable variant and branding all else as assault -- as these new policies do -- means that these administrations now have even greater power to enforce what is acceptable sexual activity among students.
- Sexuality and capitalism
The Italian Renaissance Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Revolutionary struggles against capitalism have raised, time and again, the issue of sexual liberation. Right at the start of capitalism, the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s involved what historian Christopher Hill has called a “sexual revolution” against the old order.
- Shadow Facts About Shadow Government
The Era of "Tiny Wars" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Tom Engelhardt keeps churning out great books by collecting his posts from TomDispatch.com. His latest book, Shadow Government, is essential reading.
- Shadow Government
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014
- A Shameful Situation
Millions of Soldiers and Veterans in Serious Trouble Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Millions of US soldiers and veterans are in serious trouble, in the areas of suicide, homelessness, unemployment, poverty, disability, medical care, and mental health.
- 'Shariafication by stealth' in the UK
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Access to justice is being denied in the UK in the shadow of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism. Minority women are being denied the right to participate in the wider political community as citizens rather than subjects.
- Sharing as our common cause
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A call for sharing underpins many existing initiatives for social justice, environmental stewardship, true democracy and global peace. On this basis, STWR argues that sharing should be more widely promoted as a common cause that can help connect civil society organisations and social movements under a united call for change.
- She's Beautiful When She's Angry
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 She's Beautiful When She's Angry resurrects the buried history of the outrageous, often brilliant women who founded the modern women's movement in the United States from 1966 to 1971. She's Beautiful When She's Angry takes us from the founding of NOW, when ladies wore hats and gloves, to the emergence of more radical factions of women's liberation; from intellectuals like Kate Millett to the street theatrics of WITCH (Women's International Conspiracy from Hell!)
- Shirkers and Conchies
How Governments Tried to Silence WWI Resisters Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Peace activists faced enemy treatment but left a legacy of perserverance, writes Tim Gee.
- Shock and Awe in Gaza
How the Media and Human Rights Groups Cover for Israeli War Crimes Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2014 This assualt on Gaza, like the earlier ones, will leave hundres of Palestinians dead, a majority of them civilians. It will end neither the siege nor the resistance to it. It will outrage public opinion around the globe. But our elities will carry on giving Israel financial, military and diplomatic cover, as they have now done for more than six decades.
- The Shoot First Mentality of American Police
Ferguson, Reconsidered Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The US justice system is no longer concerned with justice, but with the careers of prosecutors, punishing the powerless, and protecting the powerful. As justice has largely departed the justice system, it is hardly surprising that police lack any concept of justice.
- A Short History of Spam
Coming to an Inbox Near You Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Objects can talk in cartoons and fairy tales: toys tell their stories. Now our domestic appliances have begun to speak, and they would like to sell us pills and porn, and for us to give them our bank details.
- A Short History of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party
Challenging the Two Parties of Capital Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party was the most successful labor party in United States history. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Association, a grouping of associated unions and farmers, provided the organic connection between labor and the party.
- The siege of Julian Assange is a farce - a special investigation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Article on Julian Assange's ongoing persecution by the US government.
- Silvertown
The Lost Story of a Strike That Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 In 1889, Samuel Winkworth Silver's rubber and electrical factory was the site of a massive worker revolt. The factory was notorious for oppressive working conditions and its largely unorganized, unskilled workers. Eventually they aligned themselves with the socialist-led "New Unionism" movement. This book narrates those events.
- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 An examination of how we have come to understand the concept of extinction and how we have come to recognize our role in it.
- Slavery, Cotton and Imperialism
When Slave-Owners, Tied to a Globalized Economy, Turned to Empire Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Whitney reviews River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson, on cotton production and slave ownership in the Mississippi River Valley prior to the U.S. Civil War.
- Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism - Book Review
Edward E. Baptist’s "The Half Has Never Been Told" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of Edward E. Baptist’s examination of slavery, presented in an entirely new way, extensively through the voices of the slaves themselves.
- Slavery's Harrowing Reality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A review of the film "12 Years as a Slave" in the context of the literary genre of slave narratives.
- The Sledgehammer Worldview
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq was a textbook example of aggression. Apologists invoke noble intentions, which would be irrelevant even if the pleas were sustainable. The destructive consequences of such aggression are clear, as evidenced in numerous historical examples of violent imperialism.
- Small is the New Big
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Vandana Shiva reminds us that the very future of food security in India (and indeed worldwide) lies in protecting and promoting the country's small farmers.
- Smartphone Game Data Targeted by NSA
Angry Birds Cited Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Millennial Media, a Baltimore based ad company, creates “intrusive” profiles of users of smartphone applications and games like Angry Birds, according to documents leaked to the media by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Such profiles have been exploited by intelligence authorities like the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), say investigative journalists.
- The So-Called Scientific "Consensus": Why the Debate on GMO Safety is Not Over
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Biotechnology seed companies, aided by advocates from academia and the blogopsphere, are using their substantial resources to broadcast the myth of a "scientific consensus" on the safety of GMOs, asserting that the data is in and the debate is over. The public relations campaign, helped along by industry groups, has caught the attention of some of the most visible news outlets in the country, with biotech advocates portraying GMO critics as akin to climate change deniers, out of step with science.
- The Sochi Games, Homophobia and Western Media Hypocrisy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Alastair Stephens looks at the hypocritical response of the Western media to the Sochi Games.
- The Social Cost of GMOs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ecological economists such as Herman Daly write that the more full the world becomes, the higher are the social or external costs of production. Social or external costs are costs of production that are not captured in the price of the products. For example, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that result from chemicals used in agriculture are not included as costs in agricultural production. The price of food does not include the damage to the Gulf.
Food production is a source of large social costs. Indeed, it seems that the more food producers are able to lower the measured cost of food production, the higher the social costs imposed on society.
- Socialist Feminism in the 21st Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the 21st century, women of the working classes -- employed in the formal economy, the informal economy, working in the countryside or doing unwaged labour -- have entered the global political stage in an astonishing array of movements.
- Socialist Feminism in the 21st Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Brenner analyzes socialism in the 21st century, with a new discourse of gender equality that focuses on transnational feminism, community alliances, the mobilization of members, and overcome the divisions between social classes.
- Socialist Register 2014
Volume 50, Registering Class Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2014
- Solidarity Economies: A Guerrilla War against Capitalism
An Interview with Nicolás Cruz Tineo Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Capitalism is based on the philosophy that man is inherently evil and selfish. But solidarity economies suggest something different: that we are human, we cooperate with one another, we love, we struggle for the love of humanity, and that the future of our planet, our life, is based on our having a culture of brotherhood, sisterhood, collaboration, cooperation. It is an economy of love.
- Some Basic Propositions about Sex, Gender, and Patriarchy
New Books Highlight the Debate between Radical Feminism and Transgender Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Within feminism there has been for decades an often divisive debate about transgenderism. With increasing mainstream news media and pop culture attention focused on the issue, understanding that feminist debate is more important than ever.
- Some Deaths Really Matter
The Disproportionate Coverage of Israeli And Palestinian Killings Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli deaths matter much more than Palestinian deaths. This has long been a distinguishing feature of Western news media reporting on the Middle East. The recent blanket coverage afforded to the brutal killing of three Israeli teenagers highlights this immutable fact.
- Some deaths really matter - The disproportionate coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Killings
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Documening that the deaths of Israelis is far more heavily weighted than those of Palestinian deaths, garnering more media coverage.
- Son of Stuxnet: The Digital Hunt for Duqu, a Dangerous and Cunning U.S.-Israeli Spy Virus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Songbirds dying from DDT in Michigan yards; Superfund site blamed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The neighbourhood's songbirds are being poisoned by DDT, a pesticide that was banned in the United States more than 40 years ago. Lethal concentrations were found in the birds' brains, as well as in the worms they eat.
- Soon, the Battle for Venezuela
Open Letter to President of Venezuela Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 They are already sewing your funeral gown, Venezuela. They are now ready to welcome you back to that world of the lobotomized, destroyed nations that are fully submissive to Western political and economic interests – Indonesia, Philippines, Paraguay, Uganda, Kenya, Qatar, Bahrain, and almost the entire Eastern Europe. There are so many places like that – it is impossible to list them all.
- SOS Alternatives to Capitalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 An investigation of the alternatives to capitalism, including socialism, anarchism and deep ecology.
- SOS Alternatives to Capitalism: A discussion with Richard Swift
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Montreal Serai had the opportunity to discuss SOS: Alternatives to Capitalism – a handy, slim compendium of vital, essential thoughts and discussions on the concept of an alternative economy and society – with Richard Swift.
- South America: How ‘Anti-Extractivism’ Misses The Forest ForThe Trees
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A recent spate of high-profile campaigns against projects based on extracting raw materials has opened up an important new dynamic within the broad processes of change sweeping South America. Understanding their nature and significance is crucial to grasping the complexities involved in bringing about social change and how best to build solidarity with peoples’ struggles.
- The South's Inner Civil War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The best kept secret in US history is the resistance of southerners, and especially southern non-slaveholding whites, to the slaveholders during the Civil War. W.E.B. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction in America, told the story of black resistance.
- Special Report: Truth, Justice and Reconciliation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An examination of how countries around the world affected by civil war or internal conflict have approached justice.
- Spokes on the Anti-Austerity Wheel: Building Movements That Can Move Beyond Reform
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When it comes to fighting the crisis of austerity cuts and financial recession, we need to focus on how to build fighting communities rather than simply reacting to the attacks.
- Spotlighting Inequality and Injustice
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Swerdlow reviews Naison's "Badass Teachers Unite!", Heckman's "Giving Kids a Fair Chance", and Marsh's "Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality" in order to discuss whether more education is the solution to income inquality in the United States.
- 'Stable' NE Greenland ice sheet is melting away
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A new study has found that the NE section of the Greenland ice sheet - thought to be stable due to the extreme cold - has been losing ice since 2006 with increasing speed. And that has huge implications for global sea level rise.
- State Banks Would Mean Jobs, Credit and Investment
Why Don't We? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 One of the many problems with the current banking system is that your tax money helps fuel speculation. Unless there is a public bank that your local government can place deposits into, revenues are the playthings of big banks.
- State of Power 2014
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A report with iinfographics and essays that expose and analyse the principal power-brokers that have caused financial, economic, social and ecological crises worldwide.
- State of the "Recovery"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The editors provide an overview of current issues in American politics, such as the debate over minimum wage, Wall Street, immigration reform, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the need for economic recovery.
- Steady Hands for Freedom
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book Review of "Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC" by Faith S. Holsaert, et. al
- A Step Toward Justice in the Long "War on Terror": Uruguay Offers to Welcome Guantanamo Detainees
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Under the Presidency of José “Pepe” Mujica, Uruguay has made a number of international headlines in recent years for progressive moves such as legalizing same sex marriage, abortion and marijuana cultivation and trade, as well as withdrawing its troops from Haiti.
- Stop hate rape!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Hate crimes, homophobia and discrimination against queer people are global phenomena that are common practice. This situation is especially experienced in Africa and the Middle East where harsh and punitive legislation and policies are authorised and endorsed. The lack of democracy, or the protection thereof, also perpetuates extreme human rights abuses, which often takes the form of physical assault.
- Stop, Thief!
The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 A collection of fifteen chapters on many different aspects of the commons, mostly from a historical perspective.
- The Story of Hurry
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Fictional Story of Donkey who helps children in Gaza
- The Strategy of the Venezuelan Opposition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The strategy and tactics of the Venezuelan opposition is a replay of events that took place leading up to the coup against Hugo Chávez on April 11, 2002 and is similar (although in some ways quite different) from the script that has been used in the Ukraine and elsewhere.
- Striking a Blow for Disarmament in Maine Shipyard
Fury Punches Out Early Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Hundreds of thousands of Americans have protested America’s bloated, out-of-control military, and millions more are outraged that the US spends upwards of $1 trillion a year on war and preparing for war.
- The Struggle of the 'Mill Girls'
Class Consciousness in Early 19th Century New England Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This article traces the development of class consciousness of and the antagonism between capitalists and the Lowell and Lawrence "Mill Girls" in the earlier half of the 19th Century in New England.
- Studies About Workplace Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A few published studies about workplace violence.
- Superheroes for the Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Estébanez examines the parallels between pop culture superhero fiction and contemporary politics as writers are inspired to make implicit statements about current ideologies.
- Surprise: U.S. Drug War In Afghanistan Not Going Well
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A new report has found the war on drugs in Afghanistan remains colossally expensive, largely ineffective and likely to get worse. This is particularly true in the case of opium production, says the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
- Surveillance Capitalism
Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A massive corporate sales effort and military-industrial complex constituted the two main surplus-absorption mechanisms in the U.S. economy in the first quarter-century after the Second World War, followed by financialization after the crisis of the 1970s. Each of these means of surplus absorption were to add impetus in different ways to the communications revolution, and each necessitated new forms of surveillance and control. The result was a universalization of surveillance, associated with all three areas.
- Swimming in Shit
Against the Current Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Why is it the case that in a city that is almost entirely built on islands – a city literally surrounded by water – are there so few places to swim and cool off?
- System Change Not Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Stopping climate catastrophe and winning a world of climate justice is a critical task of our generation -- and it will require a radical transformation of society and of our relationship with nature. This pamphlet examines the climate crisis, Canada's contributio, and the development of colonialism and capitalism that led us here.
- Take This Job and Shove it
Authentic Journalism Draws a Line in the Sand in the Alamo City Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On May 1, International Workers’ Day, I walked into my publisher’s office mid-afternoon, after he finally came into work that day, and resigned as editor-in-chief of the San Antonio Business Journal, a position I had held for 20 years.
The Alamo, located in the heart of downtown San Antonio, is an old, rather small former Spanish mission that has been around for some 300 years. The San Antonio Business Journal, by contrast, was launched a little more than 25 years ago — with Bill Conroy serving as editor-in-chief for 20 of those years.
During that period, the newspaper was always profitable and I never had to fire a single person. Consequently, I had a kickass veteran reporting staff, most of them there at least 10 years — a rarity in the news business today. Ironically, then, I was the first person I ever fired, and it was due to two primary reasons.
The first is as old as the newspaper industry itself, and baseball for that matter. When a coach of even a winning baseball team has a philosophical disagreement with a new general manager, over players or strategy, the coach almost invariably loses, and is out of a job. The same scenario holds true in the newspaper industry.
- Taking Back What's Ours
The Struggle of the Townspeople of Venustiano Carranza, Chiapas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The morning sun was just above the horizon when San Cristóbal’s cobblestone streets and colonial houses gave way to crumbling pavement and deep green cornfields. Our combi, a small minibus bursting with passengers, wound its way downwards out of the highlands of Chiapas, down into the warmer climate of the lowland valleys.
- Talking About Organizing
A Series Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is an active online archive of commentaries and stories, first published in Our Times, about the experience of union organizing: what works and what doesn't. It's also the place where you'll find Our Times' columnist Derek Blackadder's WebWork series archived -- articles about online resources for union activists.
- A Taxonomy of Racism from Alvarado to Zimmerman
Thoughts on Hearing About the Jordan Davis Verdict from Guatemala City Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Last week our delegation from School of the Americas Watch made a visit to the Casa de la Memoria, or House of Memory, a new museum here in Guatemala City. What first caught my eye was a poster of early Spanish classifications of racial castes. It is the museum’s answer to the racist notion taught in schools here, that after the Spaniards arrival there was a ”mixing of cultures”, kind of like peanut meets chocolate, or hip-hop meets jazz, to produce something new and beautiful – Guatemalan, or at least Ladino, culture.
- Teaching Workers
Education in the Name of Social Transformation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Karl Marx’s famous dictum sums up my teaching philosophy: “The philosophers of the world have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” As I came to see it, Marx had uncovered the inner workings of our society, showing both how it functioned and why it had to be transcended if human beings were to gain control over their lives and labour.
- The Telegenic Dead
A poem Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Ten Illegal Police Actions to Watch for in Ferguson
Crackdown on the Constitution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 When the Michael Brown verdict is announced, people can expect the police to take at least ten different illegal actions to prevent people from exercising their constitutional rights. The Ferguson police have been on TV more than others so people can see how awful they have been acting. But their illegal police tactics are quite commonly used by other law enforcement in big protests across the US.
- Ten Principles to Guide the Young Activist
Finding Happiness in Helping Others Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Tips for young activists. They say people who live for a higher cause are happier than those who don’t. May you always find your happiness in alleviating the pain of others by standing up for what is right and honorable.
- Tensions in the Arctic
The Big Chill Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Tensions in the region arise from two sources: squabbles among the border states -- Norway, Russia, the U.S., Canada, Denmark (representing Greenland), Finland, Iceland, and Sweden -- over who owns what, and efforts by non-polar countries-- China, India, the European Union and Japan -- that want access. The conflicts range from serious to somewhat silly.
- Terrifying tweets of pre-Army Israeli teens
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On Thursday, July 10, 2014, I entered the Hebrew word for "Arabs", ARAVIM, into Twitter and searched for uses of the word over the previous few hours. What I found was young Israelis proclaiming their desire for all Arabs to die and in some cases be tortured to death.
- Terrorism, COINTELPRO, And The Black Panther Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Then and Now
1934 Strikes, Class-Struggle Leadership Made the Difference (Part One) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Today, six years after the onset of the biggest economic crisis since the Depression, what remains of organized labour in the U.S. continues to be a one-sided class war while strike action is at a historic low. What accounts for the difference between then and now?
- Then and Now
1934 Strikes, Class-Struggle Leadership Made the Difference (Part Two) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Second part of an analysis on the differences between strike action today and that of six years ago during the onset of the economic crisis.
- Then and Now Part One
1934 Strikes- Class-Struggle Leadership Made the Difference Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In 1934, four years into the Great Depression, the victory of three city-wide strikes -- centered on the Teamsters in Minneapolis, auto parts workers in Toledo and longshoremen in San Francisco -- would open the door to a mass upsurge of working-class struggle and the organization of powerful industrial unions.
- Then and Now Part Two
1934 Strikes -- Class-Struggle Leadership Made the Difference Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In 1934, four years into the Great Depression, the victory of three citywide strikes -- centered on the Teamsters in Minneapolis, auto parts workers in Toledo and longshoremen in San Francisco -- would open the door to a mass upsurge of working-class struggle and the organization of powerful industrial unions.
- Thermonuclear Monarchy
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Nuclear weapons as fundamentally anti-democratic power.
- They poisoned the river for a 'clean coal' lie
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Thousands of gallons of a toxic chemical used to produce “clean coal”, spilled into Elk River, leaving 300,000 with no water supply.
- Thinking The Right Thoughts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There are always convenient news-hooks on which corporate journalists can hang their power-friendly prejudices about the West being 'the good guys' in world affairs. The authors provide examples from the British media.
- 31 Years After the U.S. Invasion of Grenada
A Lovely Piece of Real Estate Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As I'm sure everyone knows, we're fast approaching the 31st anniversary of a truly momentous American victory — a crucial military operation that not only warmed Ronald Raygun's cold, cold heart but was also deemed film-worthy by the former mayor of Carmel, California.
- This Changes Everything
Capitalism vs the Climate Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Klein says that climate change cannot be confronted unless we confront capitalism. She says that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed system and build something radically better.
- This is about systems – the food system, the capitalist system and the socialist system
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is about systems – the food system, the capitalist system and the socialist system.
- This is Genocide
On Israel/Palestine Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 To call what is going on in Israel and Palestine a “conflict” is to partake in the racist and blatantly false narrative that is being pushed by Israel. When one side fights with stones and homemade rockets, and the other side fights with a military backed by the full force of the United States military industrial complex, it is not a “conflict.” When civilian casualties – including hundreds of children – amass on only one side, it is not a “conflict.” When one side sets up with lawn chairs and popcorn to watch and cheer as their government bombs another country, it is not a “conflict.”
- This is NOT Recognition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As the recognition by European countries of a so called "State of Palestine" continues, it is becoming obvious that this is nothing but an old colonial trick dusted and reused. In the triangular relations between the Europeans, the colonial regime in Palestine – Israel, and the Palestinians, all remains the same.
- This is Your Ocean on Acid
The Big Picture Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 More than 40 percent of the world’s oceans are heavily impacted by human activities with few areas — if any — left unaffected by anthropogenic factors. This means we humans (and what we deem civilization) have played a primary role in the despoiling of the waters of the earth. The relentless quest for profit, however, has distracted us from the plight of the deep blue sea and how it impacts all forms of life.
- This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Charles Cobb, a veteran civil rights activist who served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the American South, unfolds a powerful narrative about Southern grass-roots black individuals and groups who played essential roles in African-American resistance. He reveals how they acted to protect black people and their allies throughout the ages with the careful use of violent self-defense methods.
- This video and article are essential to understanding Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli police shot 22-year-old Kheir Hamdan, and subsequently published a false statement about the details of the incident. Cameras that documented the incident reveal that their account was a lie.
- Thousands imprisoned, some executed, based on false FBI lab reports
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A major inquiry conducted by the US Justice Department (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has found hundreds instances in which FBI forensic units charged with gathering data on cases involving violent crimes provided false information. The doctored FBI lab reports led to the imprisonment of thousands of innocent people, some of whom were executed, according to a report in the Washington Post.
- The Threat of Just-in-Time Scheduling
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 One of the most unnoticed labour trends in the past few decades has been the rise of "just-in-time scheduling," the practice of scheduling workers' shifts with little advance notice that are subject to cancelation hours before they are due to begin.
- Thunder on the Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The paradox of the present situation is that capital is weak—but the radical left is much weaker. Alternatively, capital is economically weak, but much stronger politically, less because of mass ideological commitment to the system than because of the weakness of credible anti-capitalist alternatives.The present moment — a protracted crisis of the capitalist system — should offer a more favourable terrain for the anti-capitalist left to put forward alternative perspectives.
- Time to Unfence our view of Migration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Instead of pretending that fence-building will solve anything, it is high time that we 'unfence' our views of migration. On the one hand, this means seeking other, more humane responses to human movement, including orderly refugee resettlement. On the other, it means not seeing migration as a self-contained 'problem' in need of a security response - but rather as an intrinsic part of a world inexorably on the move.
- Tim's + BK = $ for Canada right? Wrong! (in one table)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Big news today that Burger King, a US company, is planning to buy Tim Horton's, a Canadian one. This is another in a string of 'tax inversion' deals where US corporations move their corporate headquarters from the US to elsewhere to avoid US taxation. They don't actually change anything or move anyone outside of their accounting fairyland. Instead, they just check some different boxes on their income tax forms and 'poof' save millions in taxes.
- To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Many of us have come to believe that any complex situation can be solved by finding the right algorithm to fix it. Morozov argues that real-world problems can rarely be solved with technological solutions.
- To the family of the one thousandth victim of Israel's genocidal slaughter in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is 2014 — the destruction of Gaza is well documented. This is not 1948 when Palestinians had to struggle hard to tell their story of horror; so many of the crimes Zionist committed then where hidden and never came to light, even until today. So my first and simple pledge is to record, inform and insist on the truth. But surely this is not enough. I pledge to continue the effort to boycott a state that commits such crimes.
- Toddler suffers severe burns from Atlanta, Georgia police raid
A police raid on a home in Atlanta resulted in the serious injury of a 19-month-old child Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A police raid on a home in Atlanta, Georgia early Wednesday morning has resulted in the serious injury of a 19-month-old child. Police entering the home threw a stun grenade that fell in the playpen of the sleeping child and exploded in his face.
- Top Ten Examples of Welfare for the Rich
Making a Killing Off the Tax Code Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Here are the top ten examples of corporate welfare and welfare for the rich. There are actually thousands of tax breaks and subsidies for the rich and corporations provided by federal, state and local governments but these ten will give a taste.
- Top 10 Proofs People Can Be Completely Manipulated Without Hypnosis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Toronto Talks Transit with Herman Rosenfeld
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Herman Rosenfeld speaks about transit issues in Toronto, and the campaign for good affordable public transit
- Torture, Democracy and Memory in Argentina
No Sugarplums for Christmas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014
- Torture Report Reveals CIA's Manipulation of US Media
Agency Used Classified Information As Currency For Deception Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In essence, the CIA operated as a propaganda machine, utilizing classified information as part of a larger effort to deceive the American public about the shortcomings of its torture program.
- Torture: Thou shalt not bear honest witness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 To date, only one person has been jailed in connection to the US torture program - the man who blew the whistle. His sentence must now be quashed and this true American hero set free and compensated.
- Torture and the Violence of Organized Forgetting
A Form of Moral Paralysis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture, it becomes clear that in the aftermath of the loathsome terrorist attack of 9/11, the United States entered into a new and barbarous stage in its history, one in which acts of violence and moral depravity were not only embraced but celebrated.
- Toward Energy Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As energy systems are beginning to transition towards greener alternatives to fossil fuels, a debate surrounding its production emerges.
- Toward the Agro-Police State
You'll Need an iPad if You Want to be a Farmer Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The main problem with precision agriculture -- and the hype that surrounds it -- is the faulty assumptions that it rests on. The problems of agriculture are not caused by a lack of technology, or even by a lack of productivity (overproduction has as a matter of fact been a more frequent problem for farmers). The root problems are political and economic in nature.
- Towards a Marxist Critique of 'Privilege Theory'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A contribution by Tad Tietze to an ongoing debate on Marxism and 'privilege theory.'
- Toxic gulls: Quebec's contaminated bird colony offers clues about flame retardants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Research on Deslauriers and in Canadian laboratories indicates that flame retardants are altering birds’ thyroid hormones, reducing their clutch sizes, damaging their eggs, changing their behavior, shifting their gender ratio toward males and weakening their bones.
- Trade in Ecosystem Services. When payment for environmental services delivers a permit to destroy
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 The payment and trade of ‘environmental services’ is a trend promoted by the financial sector, the multilateral banks, conservationist organizations, governments and other institutions under the false argument that calculating the monetary value (or price) of natural functions like water purification, storage of carbon in vegetation and soils, the scenic beauty or biological diversity of a place will somehow help conserve Nature. This new advance of capital seeks to make visible for financial markets new aspects of Nature not yet dominated by capital. This publication looks at the concept of ‘Payment for Environmental Services’ in its current cloths; examines some of the claims made by those who argue that putting a price on Nature is the only way to save Nature; shows who some of the actors are, and what motivates their interest
- TransCanada hires controversial PR firm to derail opposition to Energy East pipeline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There are now multiple news articles that report Calgary-based TransCanada hired the controversial public relations firm Edelman in an attempt to derail growing public opposition to its proposed 1.1 million barrels per day Energy East tar sands pipeline.
- Transgender oppression and resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Miles discusses how socialists approach the question of fighting oppressions like transphobia is not an abstract matter. It goes to the heart of how we work with oppressed groups and individuals such as trans people and how we persuade them to become part of building a mass united working class movement to overthrow capitalism and create a socialist society.
- Transit Irony: The More You Rely on It, the More They Cut
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Transit ridership is at its highest since 1956, with 10.7 billion trips in 2013, according to the American Public Transportation Association. This is despite widespread cuts to bus and rail service -- and rising fares. The 2008 economic crisis started the pinch, but federal and local officials have continued to squeeze.
- Transit Irony: The More You Rely on It, the More They Cut
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Winslow discusses the transit situation in Pittsburgh, where officials are implementing a series of budget cuts and fare hikes without improving service to the large number of riders who depend on the service.
- Tribune of the People
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of "Jean Paul Marat: Tribune of the French Revolution" by Clifford D. Conner.
- Tricks of the Trade
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 They are everyday brand names, products and services we all know and use -- but where does all the money go and how much tax do these companies pay? Find out some of the strategies many corporations use to drastically cut their tax bills.
- A "Trot of the milder persuasion": Raymond Challinor's Marxism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This essay aims to give a sense of Challinor's creativity as a Marxist historian and political activist. It suggests that The Origins of British Bolshevism perhaps reveals some of the limitations of Challinor's own slightly abstract and propagandist model of what "Bolshevism" represented. But it also signifies his distinctive and outstanding contribution.
- The True Gaza Backstory
It's About Land, Stupid Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 How come all those Palestinians – all 1.5 million – are crammed into Gaza in the first place? Well, their families once lived, didn’t they, in what is now called Israel? And got chucked out – or fled for their lives – when the Israeli state was created.
- 20 Years Since the Chiapas Rebellion
The Zapatistas, Their Politics and Impact Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Chiapas rebellion led by the Zapatistas took place 20 years ago this month. What was the importance of the rebellion and of the Zapatistas? What was the impact at the time? And what has been its political legacy? What is the role of the Zapatistas in Mexico today?
- Twiga Farm: The story of a Kenyan land grab
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On Tuesday, September 23, 2014, the residents of Twiga Farm marched through the streets of Nairobi to hand in a petition to the National Assembly. Their demand was an investigation in the unlawful eviction from their lands, the Twiga Farm, and recognition of their right to return.
- Twisted beaks: Scientists exploring mysterious deformities focus on new virus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Today, deformed beaks have been discovered in more than 2,500 of Alaska's chickadees, or 6.5 percent of captured adults, and in 29 other species in south central Alaska. For crows, the disfigured beaks are even more prevalent, at 17 percent, the "highest rate of gross deformity ever documented in a wild bird population," according to the USGS.
- The Two Apartheids
What are the similarities and differences between South African apartheid and the Israeli system? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Published: 2015
- Two Years After the CTU Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In light of the Chicago Teachers Union's strike that changed the discourse on education in the United States, Bartlett analyzes the persisting problems with public education systems, such as school closings, privitization, and poor allocation of funding.
- U.S. Firms Accused of Enabling Surveillance in Despotic Central Asian Regimes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 U.S. and Israeli companies have been selling surveillance systems to Central Asian countries with records of political repression and human rights abuse, according to a new report by Privacy International. The U.K.-based watchdog charges that the American firms Verint and Netronome enable surveillance in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
- UK 'aid' is financing a corporate scramble for Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The corporate power-grab will be disastrous for the small-scale farmers who feed at least 70% of Africa's people.
- Ukraine, a Fascist Coup?
A Photo Essay Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The 2014 Ukraine coup and aftermath, in photos.
- Ukraine and the Great Asian Enclosure
Russia Crosses an Important Rubicon in the Crimea Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Cornerstones of Eurasia - When Pravy Sektor’s Dmitry Yarosh called on the Chechen liberation fighters to join Ukrainian nationalists in global struggle, he accented the North Atlantic’s energy politics better than anyone before him.
- Ukraine and Yugoslavia
When Will Americans Come to Their Senses? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Much of public opinion seems to accept the notion that the villain of the Russia-Ukraine story is the Russian president, who is accused of engaging in unprovoked aggression against Crimea – even though he was responding to one of the most blatant provocations in history. Johnstone outlines why this is not the case.
- Ukraine Between 'Popular Uprising for Democracy' (Canadian Government) and 'Fascist Putsch' (Russian Government)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 That movement is characteristic of the present period which has seen a series of similar popular uprisings – in the Arab countries, but also in the former Soviet territory – (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kirgizstan 2005). An atomized population is fed up with the political regime. It mobilizes through the social media, but without a clear programme. The fruits of the mass mobilization are then reaped by forces that are organized and that have a clear programme. The lack of a clear analysis and programme explains the role that fascist forces were able to play in the events. These forces rejected any compromise with the contested government, presenting themselves as unyielding adversaries, not only of the current leaders, but of the ‘system’ itself. And they call for a ‘national revolution.’ This intransigent position attracted demonstrators who were aware of the bitter fruits of the Orange Revolution and who did not understand the real meaning of the proposed ‘national revolution.’
- Ukraine, Intervention, and America's Doublethink
High-Motor Propaganda Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With the deployment of Russian forces into Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the US-NATO propaganda machine has kicked into high gear. Putin has been portrayed as a tyrannical aggressor, while the Obama administration and its European allies have attempted to stake out the moral high ground, declaring that peace, respect for sovereignty and international law should be the guiding principles. Naturally, such rhetoric warrants closer analysis.
- Ukraine: Lies and Realities
Will the Government Listen? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Two beautiful Slavic sisters, Ukraine and Russia, pitched against each other: long hair flying in the wind, gray-blue eyes staring forward accusatively, but in the same time with anticipation and love
- Ukraine and the Rebirth of Fascism
The Menace Across the European Continent Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The violence on the streets of Ukraine is far more than an expression of popular anger against a government. Instead, it is merely the latest example of the rise of the most insidious form of fascism that Europe has seen since the fall of the Third Reich.
- Ukraine: the Ugly Truth
Kiev's War Against Freedom of Speech Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The US State Department has given its support to the military operation undertaken by Kiev in Donbass.
- Ukraine Turmoil
Capitalist Powers in Tug of War Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The ongoing aim of the Western imperialists is to establish a client state on the border of Russia, which under the rule of capitalist strongman Vladimir Putin has increasingly become a thorn in their sides. And Ukraine would be a big prize. Its industrial base supplies the Russian market, and its Black Sea and Crimean peninsula territories are of strategic importance to the Russian military.
- Ukraine's IMF Deal
Heading Toward a Greece-like Depression? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On March 27, 2014, the IMF released the broad outlines of its terms and conditions for loans and other measures for the Ukrainian economy. What those terms and conditions mean is less a rescue of the Ukrainian economy than the onset of a Greece-like economic depression for the Ukrainian populace.
- Ukraine's Protest Movement
Is a 'Left Sector' Possible? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A conversation about the necessity and possibility of a "Left Sector" and its struggle for hegemony in the 2013-2014 Ukrainian protests is important not only in the contemporary Ukrainian context, but also for the future.
- Ukrainian Hangovers
Russia, Crimea and the Consequences of NATO Policy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Russia’s incursion (invasion if you prefer) into Crimea, with prospects for movement into Eastern Ukraine, is the culmination of US/NATO policy since 1991.
- Ukrainian putsch creates economic and political turmoil in Russia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The intensifying conflict between Russia and the West over the US-backed, far-right coup in Ukraine is creating economic and political turmoil within Russia. The economy faces growing pressures as the Kremlin attempts to rally popular support and suppress opposition in its confrontation with the West.
- Ultra-Zionists protest Muslim-Jewish wedding saying miscegenation is 'gravest threat to the Jewish people'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 As even mainstream Israeli politicians threaten the Palestinians of Gaza with ethnic cleansing and genocide, Israel's far-right figures take to the street to rile up racist supporters and to chase Palestinians out of public spaces and enforce racial-religious separation.
- UN urged to recognize cultural significance of Palestine posters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An interview with Palestine Poster Project founder Dan Walsh, recorded by the Institute for Palestine Studies, gives a in-depth look into the history and contents of this collection of 10,000 posters.
- Under An African Sky
A Journey to Africa's Climate Frontline Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Author has been spending time in southern Mauritania for 20 years. This book is travel writing and commentary on how geo-politics and economics can affect individual lives.
- Under Israeli Apartheid, Palestinians Cannot Ride Israeli Buses
Never Equal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has officially banned Palestinians from traveling on Israeli-run public transportation in the West Bank. The new apartheid law dictates that Palestinians cannot take buses that go from central Israel to the West Bank.
- Understand the Israeli – Palestinian Apartheid In 11 Images
Resource Type: Unclassified First Published: 2014 All the graphics are from the site Visualizing Palestine, a site dedicated to creating informative and impactful graphics about the troubled region.
- Undocumented Labour: Changes to refugee health care put women and babies at risk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Pregnant refugee and non-status women are facing growing difficulties in accessing pre & post-natal care. Some doula's in Montreal are helping to fix that situation.
- Unfriendly fire: The casualty of war Ottawa would rather forget
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 On this Remembrance Day, I am remembering one Canadian peacekeeper in particular — someone the Harper government probably prefers to forget. Major Paeta Hess von Kruedener was killed (along with three other UN observers) by the Israelis in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war
- The United States and Torture
We Tortured Some People and Probably Still Are.... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Two of the things that governments tend to cover-up or lie about the most are assassinations and torture, both of which are widely looked upon as exceedingly immoral and unlawful, even uncivilized. Since the end of the Second World War the United States has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders and has led the world in torture; not only the torture performed directly by Americans upon foreigners, but providing torture equipment, torture manuals, lists of people to be tortured, and in-person guidance and encouragement by American instructors, particularly in Latin America.
- The University & the Security State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Gasser examines the implicit political agendas behind the offers of funding given to American universities by the Department of Homeland Security to research the "cognitive science of terrorisim."
- Unrecognized in the Negev
The Plight of Israel's Bedouin Citizens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 At the break of dawn on 27th July 2010, the unrecognized village of Al Araqib was surrounded by 1,500 police officers clad in riot gear. Helicopters circled overhead as bulldozers razed homes and animal pens to the ground. It took 4 hours to demolish a village that was home to around 300 people, hundreds of sheep, dozens of goose, hens, pigeons and horses.
- Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Nader discusses areas of convergence where liberals and conservatives can start working together for the public good.
- Until the Rulers Obey
Voices from Latin American Social Movements Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Collection of Interviews dealing with the wave of social movements throughout Latin America at the turn of the 21st century.
- Update on Detroit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Feeley provides an update on the economic situation in Detroit as the city declares bankruptcy and is suffering from foreclosures, evictions, pension and funding cuts.
- Uruguay's legalization of marijuana leads the world
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Next year Uruguay will create a state marijuana monopoly. Supplying high quality product in limited per person quantities, and at controlled prices that undercut the black market, the initiative will safeguard public health, cut off funds from criminals, and finance social programs. So why don't we all do it?
- US drone strikes kill 28 unknown people for every intended target
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have killed as many as 1,147 unknown people in failed attempts to kill 41 named individuals, a report by human rights charity Reprieve has found.
- US-EU sanctions against Russia: A barely veiled threat of war
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In his speech on March 17, 2014 announcing sanctions against Kremlin officials in retaliation for the Russian-backed referendum in Crimea supporting secession from Ukraine and affiliation with Russia, US President Barack Obama made clear that the United States and its European Union (EU) allies would use all means necessary, not excluding military action, to humiliate and crush Russia.
- US farm fatalities: An unpublicized epidemic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Hundreds of agricultural workers, including many child labourers, die in farming accidents across the US each year. With an official workplace fatality rate of more than 21 per 100,000, farming is the most dangerous occupation in America. It is also among the lowest paid and least regulated.
- US food industry: labelling laws are 'unconstitutional'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A leaked document reveals plans by the US's Grocery Manufacturers Association to sue the first state that passes a GMO labeling law.
- The U.S. Government's Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Throughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China's infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. Turns out that isn't true.
- US Intimidated by Its Own Mercenaries
A Silence on Atrocities Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 So much for transparency, civil liberties, and prosecuting the crimes of a predecessor (the cardinal rule of presidents, at least this one, cover-up WAR CRIMES past and present, a solemn command of the National Security State). Silence and deniability, in all matters large and small, characterize the responses of United States government and private principals.
- US Military Globalization
Interlocking Spheres of Influence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Americans are implicated in deceit and denial, purchasing their comforts and self-righteousness at the expense of the collective human privation their military and paramilitary forces, their CIA operatives and private contractors, their support of repressive regimes and death squads have brought to much of the world’s population.
- US Provides Israel Weapons Used on Gaza
Blood on American's Hands Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The United States exported to Israel a substantial amount of the same types of weapons Israel is using to kill Gazans. For example, in 2013, the United States sent Israel at least $196 million in parts for military airplanes and helicopters, a category that includes F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters, both of which Israel is currently using to attack Gazan homes, offices and farmland. Between January and May 2014, the United States had already exported $92 million in parts for military airplanes and helicopters.
- US-Sponsored Drug-Plane Operation Had Global Reach
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The ongoing investigation into the Gulfstream II jet that crashed in Mexico in the fall of 2007 with a cargo of 3.7 tons of cocaine onboard points to a corruption problem within the US bureaucracy and US intelligence agency complicity in the drug trade.
- USA: Stop arms transfers to Israel amid growing evidence of war crimes in Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The US government must immediately end its ongoing deliveries of large quantities of arms to Israel, which are providing the tools to commit further serious violations of international law in Gaza, said Amnesty International, as it called for a total arms embargo on all parties to the conflict.
- The U.S.’s Terrorism Double Standard
The Vicious Campaign Against Cuba Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 During the last 50 years, the United States has suffered from a constant stream of vicious terrorist acts.
- Utopia
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Drawing on John Pilger's long association with the first people of his homeland Australia, Utopia is both an epic portrayal of the oldest continuous human culture, and an investigation into a suppressed colonial past and rapacious present.
Utopia tells a universal story of power and resistance in the media age driven by old imperatives and presented as liberalism.
- Utopia: A confronting but politically flawed documentary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Utopia, the latest documentary by veteran journalist and filmmaker John Pilger has shown at selected venues across Australia with a television screening on SBS. The feature-length work, which exposes shocking social conditions in Australia’s remote indigenous communities, opened last November in Britain to mostly praiseworthy reviews.
- Utopia and Anti-Utopia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In response to the recent popularity of dystopian series "The Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins, Hubler examines the genre of dystopian and utopian fiction.
- VA Care is for Data
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Data production takes priority over concrete patient care itself in the new healthcare assembly line, as evidenced in the Veteran's Administration scandal.
- The Vanishing of the Aral Sea
From Lake to Wasteland Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Aral Sea has reached a new low, literally and figuratively. New satellite images from NASA show that, for the first time in its recorded history, its largest basin has completely dried up.
- Venezuela and the Imperial Script, 2004 Edition
The Coup Last Time Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The minute some halfway decent government in Latin America begins to reverse the order of things and give the have-nots a break from the grind of poverty and wretchedness, the usual suspects in El Norte rouse themselves from the slumber of indifference and start barking furiously about democratic norms. It happened in 1973 in Chile; we saw it again in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and here’s the same show on summer rerun in Venezuela, pending the August 15 recall referendum of President Hugo Chávez.
- Venezuela: The Political Economy of Inflation and Investment Strikes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This paper adopts a Marxian class analysis to dispute the orthodox critique of high inflation in contemporary Venezuela. It draws a parallel between the 2002-03 oil industry lock-out and the capital strike in the Venezuelan foodstuffs industry today. In each case, capital has suspended production to bid up the price of basic goods and create widespread shortages.
Orthdox inflation-targeting conceals the class antagonism of capital strikes and highlights the class interests that underpin monetarism. The paper concludes that socialised production is a viable alternative to neoliberal austerity.
- Venezuela Threatened by Far-right Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A statement by the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network condemning the recent violent actions instigated by far-right sections of the opposition in various cities across Venezuela.
- Venezuela Under Attack Again
Economic Sabotage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A highly organized attack is once again being carried out against the democratic and popular government of Venezuela. It has involved monetary manipulations, economic sabotage, international media campaigns against the economy despite excellent economic indicators, defamation of the state run oil company, and deadly riots on the street.
- Video shows unprovoked, cold-blooded killing of Palestinian boys by Israeli forces
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This shocking video shows the unprovoked, cold-blooded killings of two Palestinian teenagers, 17-year-old Nadim Siam Nuwara, and 16-year-old Muhammad Mahmoud Odeh Abu al-Thahir on 15 May near Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank city of Beitunia. Both boys were fatally shot with live ammunition.
- Videos and Photos of the Odessan Massacre
Why It Was Done Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 For the first time in history, an organized massacre of civilians has been filmed by many people from many different angles and perspectives while it was happening, and is documented in extraordinary detail in “real time,” the perpetrators having no fear of any negative consequences from their endeavor, and even cheering and celebrating the tortures and deaths as they were being imposed upon the helpless victims. The perpetrators were unconcerned, because what they were doing was what the government (which the U.S. had imposed upon their country and which U.S. taxpayers had spent more than 5 billion dollars to bring about there) had wanted them to do, and had helped to organize them to carry out. These people were just having fun, like a party to them, nothing really serious at all.
- A View from Gaza
This Is a Brutal Attack, Not a "Military Operation" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In Gaza, recent Israeli military attacks by sea, air and via artillery shells are not part of a war or a military operation though it may look so. It is collective punishment and it is a brutal attack against all Palestinian people, and mainly civilians are paying the price.
- Violent, Genocidal Anti-Palestinian Rhetoric Moving to US?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Earlier this week the Times of Israel published a post, written by American Yochanan Gordon, titled "When Genocide is Permissible," which concludes with the following question:
"If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?"
- Virtual Economy's Phantom Job Gains are Based on Statistical Fraud
And More Fraud Is in the Works Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Washington can't stop lying. Reports of job gains are more fiction than reality.
- Vodafone Reveals Existence of Secret Wires that Allow State Surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a 'nightmare scenario'.
- Voluntary Simplicity And The Steady-State Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Voluntary simplicity is most basically characterized by the practices of mindfulness and material sufficiency. Through bringing mindfulness to our daily lives, we seek the maximum of well-being achievable through the minimum of material consumption. Well-being applies to all life forms on Earth, not just people.
- Voter Suppression in Canada
Harper's (Un)Fair Elections Act Could Spark Voter Surge Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Harper government seems intent on proving to its detractors that things can always get worse. They’ve one-upped themselves with the farce called the Fair Elections Act.
- The Walls the West Won’t Tear Down
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall, lethal borders remain. We must dismantle them.
- War by media and the triumph of propaganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war -- with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003. The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
- 'War crimes': Israeli bombs wiped out entire families in Gaza, Amnesty says
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel used disproportionate military force during its summer operation in Gaza. Entire Palestinian families were killed when their homes were leveled by Israeli bombs falling with no warning and for little military gain, Amnesty International said.
- War Photography at the Tate Modern
Receding into Memory Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 If photography is a record of suspended death, a suggestion that the subject is both frozen in time and rendered lifeless in the broader sense of things, then the nature of war is, in many ways, a perfect medium to capture it. It delves into a grim subject more fitting of the dry morgue than the lively art studio.
- War and Women's Rights
What Does the Future Hold for Afghan Women? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A discussion of the history, current status, and future of women's rights in Afghanistan.
- Warrant Canary Frequently Asked Questions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. The following are some frequently asked questions about warrant canary.
- Washington and the Oil Industry Know the Truth About Climate Change
Short-Term Profits Trump Survival Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Climate skeptics in Congress, and oil and coal industry lobbyists like the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Coal Council (ACC) may be preventing any significant action in the US on reducing this country’s emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, but at the Pentagon, and in the executive suites of the oil industry giants, there is no doubt about the reality of climate change.
- Washington Piles Lie Upon Lie
One After Another After Another Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The latest Washington lie, this one coming from NATO, is that Russia has invaded Ukraine with 1,000 troops and self-propelled artillery.
- Washington Plays Russian Roulette
Seeing Red Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The propaganda attack against Putin equating him with Hitler is so extreme that you have to think that the Russians cannot believe their ears and cannot trust the United States anymore under any circumstances.
- Washington Seeks Regime Change in Venezuela
Agents of Destabilization Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Both the ongoing protests in Venezuela and the economic problems that the demonstrators are protesting against appear to have been orchestrated by the opposition in order to destabilize the country and bring down the government. Unable to gain power through the ballot box, the Venezuelan opposition has turned to unconstitutional means to oust President Nicolas Maduro.
- Washington Threatens The World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The consequence of Washington’s reckless and irresponsible political and military interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria has been to unleash evil. The various sects that lived in peace under the rule of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad are butchering one another, and a new group, ISIS, is in the process of creating a new state out of parts of Iraq and Syria.
- Washington’s Frozen War Against Russia
Frack the EU! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 For over a year, the United States has played out a scenario designed to (1) reassert U.S. control over Europe by blocking E.U. trade with Russia, (2) bankrupt Russia, and (3) get rid of Vladimir Putin and replace him with an American puppet, like the late drunk, Boris Yeltsin.
- Washington’s Secret Agendas
Imperial Rot Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas.
- Watch: Al Jazeera’s "Massacre at Dawn" Gives Glimpse of Horror in Shujaiya
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Thinking that the footage contained in Massacre at Dawn is just a fraction of the horror makes it even worse. No wonder Israel prevented media from covering the brutality that our people endured there.
- Water Apartheid in Palestine
A Crime Against Humanity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ayman Rabi on the 2.1 million Palestinians who suffer an artificial water scarcity deliberately created and sustained by Israel’s military occupation and the private Israeli water company Mekorot.
- 'We are not from another planet': Justice 4 Cleaners campaign and the struggle for recognition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The ongoing struggle of the SOAS Cleaners for acceptable working conditions and equality in the workplace.
- We Are The Soil
The Asian Age Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We are made up of the same five elements — earth, water, fire, air and space — that constitute the Universe. We are the soil. We are the earth. What we do to the soil, we do to ourselves. And it is no accident that the words “humus” and “humans” have the same roots. This ecological truth is forgotten in the dominant paradigm because it is based on eco-apartheid, the false idea that we are separate and independent of the earth and also because it defines soil as dead matter. If soil is dead to begin with, human action cannot destroy its life. It can only “improve” the soil with chemical fertilisers. And if we are the masters and conquerors of the soil, we determine the fate of the soil. Soil cannot determine our fate.
- We Blocked the Boat: Oakland 2014
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Blocking Israel's ship from unloading in Oakland, California.
- We Blocked The Boat - Oakland 2014
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 For four days straight the San Francisco Bay Area community blocked the Israeli ZIM ship from unloading at the SSA. And today, we salute the rank and file workers of ILWU local 10 for standing with us against Israeli Apartheid by honoring our pickets.
- We must keep the Arctic clean, wild and free!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The Arctic is a special place, teeming with life, but it is under threat like never before -- not just from climate change, but from oil drilling, industrial fishing and shipping, as receding ice creates now commercial opportunities. We must designate an Arctic Sanctuary where nature can reign undisturbed.
- We Must Support Detroit's Fight for the Right to Water
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Detroit is shutting off water to 40% of residents to prepare the water system for a corporate buyout. Residents are organizing to resist the water shuttoffs, anti-democratic rule and the demands of Wall Street - but they need our help.
- We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The black freedom movement is framed in popular memory as distinguished by nonviolent civil disobedience. Yet in multiple southern towns, black people used armed self-defense to protect their communities and lives.
- We've got our eye on you
US wants to control, and own, the world online Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Edward Snowden not only told the world about US state surveillance of national and personal secrets, he reminded us that almost all the companies surveying us for commercial gain are American.
- Welcome to Resisterville: American Dissidents in British Columbia
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 During the Vietnam War years, thousands of Americans fled north to seek refuge in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. While some of these migrants were draft dodgers avoiding conscription into the United States army, most were part of an emerging counterculture in search of a more egalitarian, humble, and peaceful society.
- Ida B. Wells
A Black Woman's Fight Against Lynch Terror Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Born a slave in 1862 in the middle of the Civil War, Ida B. Wells was in the forefront of the fight for black rights in the post-Reconstruction era -- a time of widespread lynch-rope terror when black people, although not returned to slavery, were being solidified as a race-colour caste at the bottom of American society. She refused to accommodate racist reaction in any way and so was anathema to those like Booker T. Washington and his apologists who repudiated militant struggle against the racist status quo.
- We’re A’ Jock Tamson's Bairns*
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A nation is not a natural community that existed before the state, but that it's the other way round: the state existed first and then proceeded to impose on those it ruled over the idea that they formed a “nation”.
- The West's Looting of Ukraine Has Begun
Shackled by the IMF Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It is now apparent that the "Maidan protests" in Kiev were in actuality a Washington organized coup against the elected democratic government. The purpose of the coup is to put NATO military bases on Ukraine's border with Russia and to impose an IMF austerity program that serves as cover for Western financial interests to loot the country. The sincere idealistic protesters who took to the streets without being paid were the gullible dupes of the plot to destroy their country.
- What 'Democracy' Really Means in U.S. and New York Times Jargon: Latin America Edition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 One of the most accidentally revealing media accounts highlighting the real meaning of "democracy" in U.S. discourse is a still-remarkable 2002 New York Times Editorial on the U.S.-backed military coup in Venezuela, which temporarily removed that country’s democratically elected (and very popular) president, Hugo Chávez.
- What If the Children Dying in Gaza Were Jews?
They Made Them Do It.... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that the Arabs had gotten the better of the Israelis in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and after years of conflict, all that was left of Israel was the Gaza strip. Assume for a moment that instead of Palestinians, over 1.8 million Jews were crammed into the 11 mile Gaza strip and the state of Palestine, subsidized and supported by a superpower, was administering the calories to the Jews in Gaza, keeping them to a limit of 2,300 a day.
- What Is the Common Good?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Humans are social beings, and the kind of creature that a person becomes depends crucially on the social, cultural and institutional circumstances of his life. We are therefore led to inquire into the social arrangements that are conducive to people's rights and welfare, and to fulfilling their just aspirations - in brief, the common good.
- What needs to happen to save and rebuild the CBC
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Can the CBC be saved and restored? Probably. But it will take some time and some good luck, as well as some heavy duty political lobbying. It is important that CBC supporters, including those who have fallen by the wayside during the destructive Harper years, unite behind some common goals and pressure the two opposition leaders to commit themselves to restoring the Corporation to its proper role in the country.
- What Really Happened to the Wobblies
Macho Bravado, Disunity and Repression Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Many young radicals find the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) the most congenial available platform on which to stand in trying to change the world.
- What the Mainstream Misses: Observations on the Ukraine Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Observations on the Ukraine events of February-March 2014 leading to the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych.
- What the Tamiflu Saga tells us about Drug Trials and Big Pharma
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We now know the government's Tamiflu stockpile wouldn't have done us much good in the event of a flu epidemic. But the secrecy surrounding clinical trials means there's a lot we don't know about other medicines we take, says Ben Goldacre.
- What We Owe the Oak Ridge Three
Memo to Judge: Really?? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We’ve heard it from the bench in Oak Ridge city courtrooms and from state judges in Clinton, Tennessee. And on February 18 we heard it from a federal judge.
- What Will the World Inherit From GE Salmon?
Uncharted Waters Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It’s true; about 50 percent of the fish we eat are farmed. There is good reason for this as, one by one, the world’s commercial fisheries collapse through overfishing. According to FAO (2010), 70% of the world’s large commercial fisheries have either failed or are not far from it.
- What's Really Happening in Venezuela?
Shadows of the Weimar Republic Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 An analysis of the 2014 civil unrest in Venezuela.
- What's up with Bosnia?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since the beginning of recent struggles in Bosnia, many questions came from Western comrades about their character and what is actually going on. A lot of comrades were dissatisfied with media coverage which didn’t provide enough information.
- What’s wrong with privilege theory?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This article takes a critical look at some of the theories of privilege and concepts of intersectionality (the interaction of multiple oppressions) that increasingly dominate battles for liberation. These ideas are not new, but have grown in influence in recent years.
- When BBC Calls, Don’t Answer..
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In any event, my advice to the media savvy, is that if you have caller ID, and you can tell that it is BBC calling, don’t bother answering. I hope I have the good sense to follow my own advice should the phone ever ring again!
- When Clearcuts Kill
Logging and Landslides Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn on the linkages between corporate logging and deadly landslides and the broader corporate mantra of privatizing profits and socializing the losses.
- When Deep States Collide
Turkey's Hesitancy Exposes Its Agenda Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It's no secret that members of the so-called coalition against ISIS have been less than enthusiastic about substantive military action as the bulk of the airstrikes so far have been executed by the United States.
- 'When I Go to Work, I Expect to Be Killed:' The Terror of Being A Fisherman in Gaza
Palestine Speaks: Voices from the West Bank and Gaza Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Approximately 4,000 Gazan fishermen rely on access to the open waters of the Mediterranean to make a living. Because of punitive restrictions imposed by Israel, the Gazan fishery has virtually collapsed. Over 90 percent of Gazan fishermen are living in poverty and dependent on international aid for survival. To pursue fish beyond the permitted range means to risk arrest, the confiscation of fishing boats, or even shooting by the Israeli navy.
- When Joan Baez Listened
Do Try This at Home Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 I have a bat in my belfry about reaching out to people who dislike us and with whom we disagree but without whom no serious “grass roots movement” is possible. That is, by talking to anti-choice zealots, Obamacare haters, Tea Party crazies, racists etc. The notion of our crossing over the ideological abyss seems odious to a lot of people I know who see The Other Side as a bunch of RedNeck Ignorant Morons. That rigid mindset will get us far, yes? On the other hand there’s the “Joan Baez tactic”.
- When oil is more important than life
Oil exploitation leaves trail of pollution and death in the Peruvian Amazon Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The dumping of oil waste into the waters of the Marañón, Corrientes, Pastaza and Tigre rivers and the Amazon forest is producing fatal consequences for the local population, mostly to the Kukama ethnic group. The responsible are well-known oil companies, but the Peruvian authorities have not acted with timeliness, making them responsible as well. For years, victims have protested against pollution and violence, but the oil business has always had the upper hand.
- When Pete Seeger Faced Down the House Un-American Activities Committee
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Amid all the tributes and accolades to Pete Seeger today, it’s easy to paper over the extent to which his career was almost destroyed by associations with communism and his refusal to testify to Congress about his time in the Communist Party.
- When Water is a Commodity Instead of a Human Right
The Agony of Detroit Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The shutoff of water to thousands of Detroit residents, the proposed privatization of the water system and the diversion of the system’s revenue to banks are possible because the most basic human requirement, water, is becoming nothing more than a commodity.
- Where Was God When Israel Deported African Refugees?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 After 60,000 sub-Saharan Africans, Christian and Muslim, sought refuge in Israel from political persecution and ethnic cleansing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a multi-pronged campaign to expel them all.
- Which came first? Palestinian rockets or Israeli violence?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Since US media are reporting the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza as though it is a defensive action, I thought I would set the record straight. Israeli forces shelled and invaded Gaza BEFORE the rockets began. Rockets were fired only after numerous Palestinians, including many children, had been killed.
- Which Way the Wind Blows
The Conditions of Power Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Billions of tons of air, moving relentlessly over the ground at 10 to 30 miles an hour (and at times gusting to higher speeds) shapes the new growth twigs, the twigs grow into limbs, the limbs become the secondary trunks and all bend to the direction of the wind. Where does the wind come from – this universally shaping presence?
- The Whistle-Blower as Deep Mole
Spying on Malfeasance Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There’s an intriguing idea based loosely on the turn-of-the-century union practice of "salting" a workplace. Salting consists of union activists secretly hiring into an anti-union shop in order to promote unionism from within.
- White privilege masquerades as anti-racism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Why does a demonstration of hundreds of people against "anti-Semitism" in Toronto seem more like a march for white supremacy than a rally against racism?
- Who Supported the Khmer Rouge?
How the US Backed a Regime of Unrivaled Barbarism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 With the conviction of former Khmer Rouge officials Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea for crimes against humanity, the subject of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 received a small amount of attention in the Western mass media. What the media failed to mention was how the Khmer Rouge was maintained as a military and political force long after its fall from power.
- Why a Killer Cop is Not Arrested
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Miah analyzes the grand jury system and police conduct in the United States to explain why the large number of African Americans killed by police are considered justifiable homicides in court.
- Why American Financial Markets Have No Relationship to Reality
An Economic House of Cards Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The bullion banks (primarily JP Morgan, HSBC, ScotiaMocatta, Barclays, UBS, and Deutsche Bank), most likely acting as agents for the Federal Reserve, have been systematically forcing down the price of gold since September 2011. Suppression of the gold price protects the US dollar against the extraordinary explosion in the growth of dollars and dollar-denominated debt.
- Why Do Banks Really Want Our Deposits?
Hint: It's Not to Finance Loans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Many authorities have said it: banks do not lend their deposits. They create the money they lend on their books.
- Why Does It Matter If Heidegger Was Anti-Semitic?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The publication of the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s “Schwarzen Hefte” (“Black Notebooks”), written between 1931 and the early nineteen-seventies, is likely to cause an uproar.
- Why Green Capitalism Will Fail
Staying in the Environmental Frying Pan Only Gets Us Hotter Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns. Such a change will not come without costs — but the costs of doing nothing, of allowing global warming to precede is far greater.
- Why History Makes Us Important
Back to Bachima Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 History has been important to me for as long as I can remember. As a child I loved hearing my relatives tell stories about the past. However, it was not until I was older that I realized that the stories meant something; they were key to understanding the present; and why we are what we are. As my awareness increased, I became serious about the past so serious that it often got me into trouble.
- Why I'm on the Picket Line
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Teacher Tara Ehrcke talks about why she voted to strike in Greater Victoria, British Columbia: The "public" in public school shouldn't mean just providing a building, with some tired teachers to deliver a curriculum, the success of which is measured by standardized tests. A good public school system should provide high quality opportunities to every single child. While our public schools have many wonderful programs and many dedicated teachers, the sad truth is that there are also overcrowded classrooms, children falling behind, and a workforce exhausted from trying to fill in the gaps.
- Why Israel Needs Anti-Semitism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It would be ironic indeed if fear of Muslim neighbors in Paris suburbs should lead French Jews to move to a country totally surrounded by millions of hostile Muslim neighbours.
- Why Not Jail for Corporate Criminals?
When Regulation Fails to Restrain Corporate Villainy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 It's time to focus on corporate criminal prosecution. Get rid of deferred and non prosecution agreements. Criminally charge corporations and their top executives.
- Why Not Jail?
Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Analyzes five industrial catastrophes that have killed or sickened consumers and workers or caused irrevocable harm to the environment. Steinzor recommends innovative interpretations of existing laws to elevate the prosecution of white-collar crime at the federal and state levels.
- Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Is our inability to tackle climate change the fault of politicians? Corporations? Governments? Or is it because that's the way our brains have evolved, able to hold six contradictory ideas at once, and believe them all?
- Why Pro-War Pundits Are Always Wrong
Always Erasing the Victims Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 There is no shortage of men and women – but mostly men, typically white – willing to write 800- to 1,000-word editorials on the need for Decisive Action or Continued Resolve in Whereverthehellistan. Some of these people are historians, some are journalists, but all have attained material success in the field of arguing about war without ever once having to go through the trouble of being right.
- Why Sharing is a Common Cause that Unites Us All
The Common Cause Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The demand for sharing wealth, power and resources is at the heart of visions for a better world. In fact, the principle of sharing is often central to efforts for progressive change in almost every field of endeavour. But this basic concern is generally understood and couched in tacit terms, without acknowledging the versatility and wide applicability of sharing as a solution to the world’s problems.
- Why the Guardian axed Nafeez Ahmed's blog
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Nafeez Ahmed’s account of the sudden termination of his short-lived contract to write an environment blog for the Guardian is depressingly instructive – and accords with my own experiences as a journalist at the paper.
- Why the War on Terror Went Wrong
Al Qaeda's Second Act Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Al-Qa’ida-type organisations, with beliefs and methods of operating similar to those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, have become a lethally powerful force from the Tigris to the Mediterranean in the past three years.
- Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia's orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU's expansion eastward and the West's backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too.
- Why US Fracking Companies Are Licking Their Lips Over Ukraine
From climate change to Crimea, the natural gas industry is supreme at exploiting crisis for private gain Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so the industry would have us believe.
- Why US Journalists Have Blood on Their Hands
Turning Ukrainian Fascists into "Freedom Fighters" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Hey U.S. mass media journalists: A large number of you writing in outlets like CNN, Fox News, New York Times, and Washington Post have blood on your hands.
- Why we must Never Forget
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Lindsey German charts how the Nazis were able to perpetrate their crimes by eliminating all effective and organised opposition.
- Why we must stop this gay witch-hunt now
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 President Yoweri Museveni has done it. Against widespread expectation raised by his earlier pledge, the Ugandan leader turned around this week and signed into law the contentious Anti-Homosexuality Bill passed last December by a parliament his ruling party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), controls.
- Why We Need A "No Compromise" Climate Movement
Between Empire And Its Subjects Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Successful campaigns against strip mining in the Appalachians have included peaceful legal tactics like petitioning, letters to the editor, education, marches and protests, as well as civil disobedience, industrial sabotage, armed defense of Appalachians’ property and other tactics that are viewed as insurrectionary and violent by today’s mainstream environmentalists.
- Why We Reject the "Constituent Assembly" Demand
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Our rejection of the call for a constituent assembly reflects both the historical experience of the proletariat and the extension of the Marxist program over the years.
- WikiLeaks: Conspiracy of Governance to the Courage to Inspire
The Moral Math of Our Time Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 WikiLeaks emerged into the limelight like a call to the conscience of humanity. They released secret documents revealing Kenyan government corruption, Iceland’s financial collapse, the criminality of US wars in the Middle East and more. Their very existence and what they revealed called into question the legitimacy of imperial power structures around the world.
- WikiLeaks, Corruption and the Super Injunction
Suppression and Information Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In Australia, whose institutions still pride themselves on an antiquated obsession with aspects of English gagging, suppression orders do retain a certain mystique. They certainly do in the Australian state of Victoria, which is said to throw “suppression orders around like confetti”.
- WikiLeaks, Ukraine and NATO
A Relentless March to Russia's Doorstep Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Is the Russian occupation of the Crimea a case of aggressive expansionism by Moscow or aimed at at blocking a scheme by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to roll right up to the Russia’s western border?
- Will GM Crops Collapse the Food System?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Often when a technology is introduced one never considers why it was introduced or what future events and connections may be put in motion. Clearly the trend to global crop production and marketing has changed the face of agriculture. Now we are left to decide if it was a good thing, this world changing shift in crop production brought about by GM crops.
- Will the Iran Deal Hold?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Finkel explores the underlying reasons behind Israel and Saudi Arabia's disapproval over the United States' nuclear weapon deal with Iran.
- Wind offers a healthy way to generate power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 To reduce global greenhouse gas emissions at a pace and scale that experts agree is necessary to avoid increasing catastrophic effects of global warming, we need a mix of renewable energy. Wind power will play a large role.
- Winged Warnings: Built for survival, birds in trouble from pole to pole
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Globally, one in eight -- more than 1,300 species -- are threatened with extinction, and the status of most of those is deteriorating, according to BirdLife International.
- Winstanley’s Ecology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Largely forgotten for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the communist thought of Winstanley was rediscovered by German and Russian Marxists in the late nineteenth century.
- A Witness to Destroying Schools
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Book Review of "Schoolhouse Shams: Myths and Misinformation in School Reform" by Peter Downs.
- The Wobblies in Their Heyday
The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 During World War I, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) rose to prominence as an effective, militant union and then was destroyed by a devastating campaign of repression launched by the federal government. This book documents the rise and fall of this important industrial labour organization.
- Women and the Pakistani Left: Can the Awami Workers' Party imagine a new basis for struggle in the cause of women's liberation?
Can the Awami Workers' Party imagine a new and more concrete basis for struggle in the cause of women's liberation? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We condemn the co-option of the question of women’s emancipation by neo-liberal forces through the de-contextualized celebration of Women’s Day as another opportunity to further the neo-liberal development agenda.
- Women's Oppression and the Struggle for Liberation
A Marxist Analysis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Society's mores and culture-on questions of marriage, the family, the roles of men, women and children-are not preordained, but must be studied in their man-made historical context. Emancipation means putting an end to the economic system of capitalism. Thus, for Marxists, the liberation of women cannot be separated from the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed.
- Worker Cooperatives and Revolution
History and Possibilities in the United States Resource Type: Book First Published: 2014 Wright believes that the 'solidarity economy', fits within a Marxist understanding of what is needed to bring about a grassroots transformation of the economy.
- The Workers United Are Not Always Defeated
We Should All Learn From It Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Working people around the world are in worse straits than they have been for decades. Unemployment is rampant and real wages are stagnant.
- Working for The Man
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The author describes her brief experience at a now infamous language school in London, where she encountered blatant sexism.
- The Working-Class Mini-Revolts of the Twenty-First Century
Low-Level Insurgencies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 The start of the twenty-first century has seen a continuing decline in union membership and strikes. But it has also seen the emergence of unpredicted mini-revolts.
- The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Huge global sporting contests, their boosters promise, will transform the nature of the host country. The billions South Africa poured into hosting the World Cup were touted by some as a form of development. The result? The month-long euphoria of the contests was followed by the hangover of dealing with an expensive unused or underused stadium infrastructure scattered across that developing country. Host countries pay FIFA for the privilege of hosting the competition, then foot the bill for most of the tournament, while FIFA takes most of the revenues.
- World War I and Its Century
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Ruff anaylzes the effect that WWI had on the world's imperial powers, shifting the hold on dominance between countries and transforming economies into different forms of war state capitalism.
- A World War is Beckoning
Break the Silence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”.
- World War One and the rehabilitation of slaughter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Damaged by Iraq, ground down in Afghanistan, defeated over Syria, the jingoistic right are determined to rewrite the history of the First World War in an effort to rehabilitate imperialist war in the early 21st century.
- Would as Many as 1 Million Be Alive if the Media Had Done Its Job
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 This is a transcript of John Pilger's contribution to a special edition of BBC Radio 4's 'Today' program, guest-edited by the artist and musician PJ Harvey.
- Would Saul Alinsky Break His Own Rules?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 In the wake of Occupy, some community organizers are interested in questioning the old divide between "movements" and "organizations" — and in harnessing the power of both. On the life and evolving legacy of the late Saul Alinsky, founding father of modern community organizing in the United States.
- Wrenched
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 Wrenched captures the passing of the monkey wrench from the pioneers of eco-activism to the new generation who are carrying Edward Abbey's legacy into the 21st century. The fight continues to sustain the last bastion of the American wilderness - the spirit of the West.
- The X-Rated Free Market
On Pornography, Royal Spermatozoa and the Free Market Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Is the pornography market the only free one? The question might seem provocative. Or a gross oversimplification. But it might also shed some light on certain points, namely those related with the political shaping of markets.
- The Yes Men Are Revolting
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2014 A documentary film about The Yes Men, a culture jamming duo who use the aliases Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. The film follows their exploits as they prank various organizations and corporations who engage in climate change denial.
- Yes, There is an Alternative!
A review of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, by Peter Hudis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Peter Hudis has written a valuable analysis of what Marx said on a critical issue. In this sense it reminds me of Hal Draper’s volumes on Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Hudis’s subject matter differs from Draper’s in that it deals with what comes after the revolution, rather than with how we get there. It also differs in method: While Draper was centrally concerned with Marx’s politics, Hudis, writing in what’s called the Marxist-Humanist tradition, sees engagement with Hegel’s dialectic as an essential part of creating a Marxism adequate to ever-changing times.
- Yes, There is an Alternative!
Book Review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Review of "Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism" by Peter Hudis.
- "You Can't Kill a Revolution"
Book Review of Bloom and Martin's "Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 A book review of Bloom and Martin's "Black Against Empire" and a look at the interpersonal relationships between the members of the Black Panther Party that allowed the group to gain support.
- You Can’t Force-feed Occupation to those who Crave Freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Israel wants to believe that through force of will it can keep the tide of accountability at bay in the occupied territories. But belligerent occupations – especially ones where no hope or end is in sight – engender evermore creative and costly forms of resistance. A physical act of resistance can be temporarily foiled. But the spirit behind it cannot be so easily subdued.
- Your investment in Chevron will never be safe!
Humberto Piaguaje traveled from Ecuador's rainforest to Texas to deliver this Open Letter from Texaco's victims to Chevron-Texaco shareholde Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 We are those who Chevron is constantly trying to silence. We come to you, the shareholders, looking for the most basic empathy and respect we deserve as human beings. We ask but a minute of your time to read this brief letter in its totality.
You have been told - and will be told again and again - that the trial in Ecuador is but a fraud. However, no one has been able to deny the damage oil drilling has done to our land and lives. A great many of us are sick; others have already passed away.
- The Zero-Sum Game of Perpetual War
Why the Deep State Always Wins Resource Type: Article First Published: 2014 Readers with a morbid sense of curiosity can visit a web site called NukeMap that allows visitors to witness the devastation caused by nuclear weapons of varying yields on a city of their choosing.
2013
- Aaron Swartz and the Assault on Open Information
Malicious Government Prosecution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The great corporate-supported push to hide essential, publicly funded information behind private firewalls and government secrecy, represents a breathtaking breach of the basic tenets of democracy.
- Aaron Swartz and the Fight for Information Freedom
They Can't Stop the Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Aaron Swartz was a target of a deliberately vicious, sadistic government campaign in which the federal government wanted to make his pain an example to the entire progressive techie community. What's more, his death was the outcome of a policy that is a threat to human freedom.
- Abandoned in the Cold and Dark
Living Under Siege people of Gaza Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The world has forgotten Gaza, its women and children. The people of Gaza are being crushed under the Israeli blockade which severely restricts essential supplies coming into the strip. The blockade is as bad as the war; it’s like a slow death for everyone in Gaza.
- Abbie's Road 1936-1989
Twenty-Three Years After His Passing, We Republish Abbie Hoffman's 1989 Obituary by His Student and Co-Conspirator Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 "There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning," he wrote while he was on the run. Of all his accomplishments, he would probably like to be remembered as the guy who levitated the Pentagon. But the real miracle of Abbie Hoffman was how he raised the collective spirit of our nation, and of the human race.
- An account of my involvement with Solidarity - Bob Potter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Bob Potter's previously unpublished 2004 recollections of his involvement in the libertarian socialist group Solidarity in the 1960s and 70s and some of its key figures like Ken Weller and Chris and Jeanne Pallis.
- Activist archiving in Toronto
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 People gather in Toronto to discuss what many hope will grow into a movement for archiving grassroots histories.
- ADL Spies
The Strange History of the Anti-Defamation League Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of the exposure of a nation-wide spying operation run by the ADL that went back at least five decades.
- Ads are coming to get you
Billions of pieces of data crunched to target your screen. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The amount of personal information we donate to the Internet giants, and their ability to monitor our every move, are now being fed to ad exchange sites that bid within milliseconds for the space on our screens.
- L'Affair Miliband
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The demonization of Ralph Miliband raises a few issues avoided by both the Tory and the liberal press. These relate to Miliband’s own political views on Britain, its political institutions as well as the world at large; the context of the first Lord Rothermere’s addiction to Mussolini and Hitler and their English offspring in Britain (Oswald Mosley and gang but not them alone) right up till September 1939 and the question of patriotism and its compatibility with leftwing views.
- African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Story of the collection of African American folk music compiled by Lawrence Gellert. Compiled between the World Wars, the recordings were adopted by the American Left as the voice of the American proletariat, or "songs of protest."
- African Americans Ignored in the Age of Obama
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A truly equal and diverse United States is not possible unless all Americans come to grips with the origins of the race issue, its centrality to U.S. politics, and why African-American issues must be central to revitalizing the civil rights and labour movements — which also requires rebuilding the dream for full equality by direct action.
- After Typhoon Haiyan: The true face of the capitalist state
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In times of disaster, the capitalist state shows its true face. In the Philippines, in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, thousands are dead, bodies lie uncollected in the streets, tens of thousands of homes and buildings have been destroyed, and survivors are without food, water, shelter, medical care, or essential supplies. Meanwhile the police and the military are guarding stores "to prevent people from hauling off food, water" and other supplies.
- Against Anarchism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A critical theory of the public sphere should incorporate neo-anarchism’s best insights, while rejecting wholesale anarchism. Neo-anarchism fails to sustain the tension between fact and norm required by a critical theory.
- AIPAC's Doomsday Conference
It's the End of the World Again Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Iran, Israel, and the improbability of nuclear attack.
- Airbrushing Barbarity
The Warped Language of Public Policy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Couching moral/political matters in technocratic language helps us forget the unpleasantness of the underlying incivility and brutality of political measures. Political discourse is fundamentally dishonest in that it airbrushes barbarity.
- Al-Nakba
A series on the Palestinian 'catastrophe' of 1948 that led to dispossession and conflict that still endures. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 For Palestinians, 1948 marks the 'nakba' or the 'catastrophe', when hundreds of thousands were forced out of their homes. But for Israelis, the same year marks the creation of their own state. This series attempts to present an understanding of the events of the past that are still shaping the present.
- Alice in Migraland
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 The story of how undocumented students organized creatively and strategically and got the Federal Government to grant them legal status.
- All Journalism Is 'Advocacy Journalism'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The claim that journalism 'traditionally' involves 'the dispassionate reporting of facts', that journalists are typically not 'advocates', was advocated by a paid employee of a media corporation, the Washington Post.
- Always with the Oppressed
A Farewell to Akiva Orr 1931 - 2013, Humanist, Radical, Heretic Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In February 2013 I participated with a small group of Israelis and Arabs in bidding farewell to Akiva Orr.
- Amazon - the future of retail?
A smile is the logo: we're not smiling Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Amazon's warehouses are run like colonial enterprises - the staff are treated with contempt, paid badly, disciplined brutally, and set in competition against each other, often as temporary workers or on short-term contracts.
- America is a Smuggler Nation
Why Legal Trade is a Greater Threat to National Security Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Smuggler Nation is not the oft told, routinely taught story of America’s emergence as a major nation and a global power, rather we come to see U.S. history as “the story of how smuggling – and the attempts to police it – have made and remade America, from the illicit molasses trade in colonial times to drug trafficking today,” as Peter Andreas observes in the book’s introduction.
- America Soon to Become a Corporate North Korea?
Stacking the Deck Against Working People Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Given the power American corporations have, anyone who believes he couldn’t be turned into a North Korean is lying to himself.
- American Blowback
Cop-on-Cop Crime in LA Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- American Military Power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An interview with William Blum, a long-time critic of U.S. imperialism and the author of Killing Hope and Rogue State.
- The American Way of Torture
The Rule of Law Went and Never Returned Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians.
- America's Deadliest Export: Democracy
The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Since World War II, the world has believed that US foreign policy means well, and that America’s motives in spreading democracy are honorable, even noble. William Blum, a leading non-mainstream chronicler of American foreign policy, argues that nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, unless this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never be able to stop the monster.
- America's Descent Into Madness
The Politics of Cruelty Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible. Anti-public intellectuals promotes a culture of consumerism.
- America's Own Political Prisoners
From Mandela to Oscar López Rivera Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Nelson Mandela's death has elicited a predictable outpouring of accolades. Glowing praise is now coming from American politicians as disparate as Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. But this praise comes with the recasting, perhaps rebranding, of the amazing man that was Nelson Mandela.
- And the Secret Word Is
The Deep Meaning of "Relevant" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Senators Mark Udall and Tom Wyden's secret about the operations of the N.S.A. was an interpretation of one word "relevant" in the Patriot Act by the FISA Court.
- An anniversary that Ottawa would prefer not to celebrate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A look back at Operation Ham with an op-ed piece and a reprinted article from 1978.
- Another Vote on Washington's Anti-Cuba Policy at the United Nations
The Politics of Isolation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Resolution A/68/L.6, sponsored by Cuba, passed this year, for the 22nd year in a row, with Washington once again in humiliating political loneliness. The vote this year was 188-2 in favor, with 3 abstentions. Washington’s formal political isolation over its anti-Cuba policy can hardly be more complete. Is it possible to imagine any significant political issue in world politics uniting so many disparate entities often in significant conflict with each other.
- Anti-Capitalist Demonstration of May 1, 2013 in Montreal
Journée des Travailleurs et Travailleuses: Manifestation Anti-Capitaliste Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 Montreal 2013: police state. Montreal's municipal goverment passes a bylaw that suspends the right of citizens to assemble unless they have received advance permission from police. Citizens who assert their right to assembly are kettled by police and arrested.
- Apathy and Our Totalitarian Future
Watching Everything, Everywhere, All the Time Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The implication of the NSA scandal is this: encroaching totalitarianism can move slowly, in stages.
- Apocalypse and the Left
Endgame or Business as Usual? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Arab Uprising & Women's Rights: Lessons from Iran
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The aftermath of the ''Arab Spring" revolutionary activity is bringing forth changes that run counter to the ideals and visions of the original change-seeking forces. Most notably, the swift turn in favor of Islamist parties in the wake of these uprisings -- for example, in Egypt and Tunisia -- while not unexpected, is worrisome indeed. For women in particular, a revolution whose mobilizing demands were freedom, democracy and social justice turned into a huge prison under the self-appointed guardians of Shari'a.
- Arabs and Muslims After 9/11 - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of "Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11" by Evelyn Alsultany and "Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism" by Nadine Naber.
- The Arc of Justice and the Long Run
Hope, History, and Unpredictability Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults. Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.
- Archaeology and the Atom
The Nuclear Fallacy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We have all heard of the city of Idu. Right? Thousands of families living there, carrying out their normal lives, government housed in lavish buildings, written documents, trade, religion, etc. Well, it was lost. A whole city lost. Idu flourished in the 13th century B.C. We knew it had existed from some ancient Assyrian records, but had no idea where it was. Archeologists finally found it last year, buried in northern Iraq.
- Archiving With May Day Rooms
From the Marx Memorial Library to Cold Bath Fields Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In our day, as the traces of our radical movements are being thrown into rubbish pits, as state sponsored “austerity” demands the commodification of every inch of space, and with sinister intent destroys the evidence of our past, its joys, its victories. Clear out the closets, empty the shelves, toss out the old footage, shred the underground press, pulverize the brittle, yellowing documents! Thus neo-liberalism organizes the transition from the old to the new; they must silence alternatives.
- The Art of Lying
"Yes, That Was My Penis" and Other Ticklish PR Challenges Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 People in the public eye should have learned enough from past blunders to come up with a different strategy when asked potentially damaging questions.
- Asia's Unknown Uprisings Volume 2
People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947-2009 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 A detailed history of uprisings in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, which place them in a global context.
- At the Dark End of the Street - book review
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance — A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle McGuire.
- At the Escuelita Zapatista, Students Learn Community Organizing and Civil Resistance as a Way of Life
The Class Was Stopped Twice: The First Time to Emphasize the Importance of Discipline in Their Organization Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 From August 11-17, the Zapatistas brought more than 1,500 people into their communities to attend the Escuelita Zapatista, the Little Zapatista School. According to a February comunicado by the EZLN, in a class entitled Liberty According to the Zapatistas: Autonomous Government I, "our compas from the Zapatista bases of support are going to share the little we have learned about the struggle for freedom, and the [the students] can see what is useful or not for their own struggles."
- Austerity American Style (Part 1)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Obama’s signing a token “Fiscal Cliff" tax agreement on January 1, 2013 raising taxes on only the wealthiest 0.7% households while effectively removing the Bush tax cuts from the deficit debate; the Obama administration and Republican radicals in the House jointly allowing the $1.2 trillion in 'sequestered' spending cuts to take effect on March 1; and then Obama's unilateral offer to the Republicans, within days of the sequestered cuts taking effect, to cut an additional $630 billion from Social Security and Medicare lead to a convergence between the Obama administration and House Republicans.The article looks into deficit cuttings negotiations and its results.
- Austerity American Style, Part 2
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An article on American ecomony and politics.
- Austerity chokes Canada's down-and-out, as Harper, Flaherty look the other way
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The exceedingly aggressive austerity cuts carried out by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty over the past seven years have come home to roost as millions of Canadians, depressed and without hope, are succumbing to its worst consequences.
- Austerity Is Not Colorblind
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The myths about austerity convey that it solves deficits and debts, leads to economic growth and brings business confidence, but real statistics shows that, as an ideological tool, it is not colorblind.
- Australian government orders ASIO raids to suppress East Timor spying evidence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Abbott governmen ordered Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and Australian Federal Police (AFP) raids on the homes and offices of a lawyer and former intelligence agency whistleblower involved in an international legal challenge to Australia’s spying on the East Timor government during maritime border talks in 2004.
- An Awkward Silence - Burying The Hersh Revelations of Obama's Syrian Deceit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 All governments lie, the US journalist I.F. Stone once noted, with Iraq the most blatant example in modern times. But Syria is another recent criminal example of Stone's dictum.
- Back to the Fragments
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Beyond the Fragments began life in 1979, as a pamphlet, and soon became the classic statement of socialist feminism in the form it took in Britain following the political explosion of May 1968. Its three authors — Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright — had spent much of the decade as members of organizations of the “libertarian” left such as the International Socialists, which in 1977 became the Socialist Workers Party. They were also centrally involved in the women’s liberation movement, and grew utterly frustrated by the male-dominated politics of both the Labour Party and Leninist groups.
- Bakken Business
The price of North Dakota's fracking boom Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Manning the widespread fracking in the Bakken formation (North Dakota), and the environmental and social repercussions it causes.
- Bangladesh's exploitation economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Before the collapse of Rana Plaza, which killed over a thousand people, most of them textile workers, there was the fire that killed a hundred at the Tazreen factory. A major cause is western companies' greed for profits.
- Bangladesh's exploitation economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Before the collapse of Rana Plaza, which killed over a thousand people, most of them textile workers, there was the fire that killed a hundred at the Tazreen factory. A major cause is western companies’ greed for profits.
- The Bankruptcy of the West's Syrian Policy
Factions on the Run Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The final bankruptcy of American and British policy in Syria came 10 days ago as Islamic Front, a Saudi-backed Sunni jihadi group, overran the headquarters of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at Bab al-Hawa on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey.
- The Battle of the Titans
Who is Pulling the Strings? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This is not merely a fight between Israel and the US. Nor is it only a fight between the White House and Congress. It is also a battle between intellectual titans. Intellectual theories can seldom be put to a laboratory test. But this one can. It is happening now. Between Israel and the US a crisis has developed, and it has come into the open.
- The Bay of Pigs and Chronic Hubris
The Same Mistake for 52 Years Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 April 17-19 marks the 52nd anniversary of the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles, our proxies to try to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.
- The BBC's 'Bogeyman' Narrative on Hugo Chavez
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The changes in Venezuela, and throughout Latin America, over the past decade: the development of peaceful, democratic alternatives to the policies of neoliberalism; standards of living improved for millions of people following a process that has had popular, democratic support, are at risk of being written off as simply the actions of another 'anti-American' 'bogeyman' due to the media's relentless negative treatment of the Venezuelan government.
- BDS Campaign Sweeps UC Campuses
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The 2012-2013 academic year has seen seven University of California campuses launch campaigns to divest university funds from corporations enabling oppression of Palestinians. The article outlines the roots of the campaign, its progress, and the pressures facing activists working to support Palestinian rights.
- Beating the blacklisters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A police raid exposing the scale of worker surveillance within the construction industry galvanised workers to take action. Ewa Jasiewicz speaks to those organising against the blacklisters.
- Beckoning Committed Climate Activists
Extreme Weather and Even More Extreme Greenhouse Gas Emissions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It is evident the climate crisis is far more severe than most scientists had anticipated.
- Before Ontario
The Archaeology of a Province Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 An accessible introduction to Ontario's Aboriginal past, from the province's leading archaelogists, before Ontario bridges the gap between the modern world and a past that can seem distant and unfamiliar, but is not beyond our reach.
- Being an Organizer and Being an Activist is not the Same Thing
Community Organizers are the "Brain" that Injects Strategy into the Heart of a Successful Social Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There is a lot of confusion surrounding the role that organizers and activists play in social movements. Both roles have profound differences regarding their goals and the way they face problems within social movements.
- Beyond a Boundary - 50th anniversary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This year marks the 50th anniversary of CLR James’ wonderful, groundbreaking work Beyond a Boundary. Beyond a Boundary blends politics and memoir, history and journalism, biography and reportage, in a manner that transcends literary, sporting and political boundaries.
- Beyond the Veil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The question of the Muslim veil seems never to leave the headlines for long. The latest controversies have erupted in Britain after a defendant in a criminal trial demanded the right to wear a niqab in court and a college attempted to proscribe it.
- The Bias of Human Rights Watch
Promoting Injustice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The reports issued by Human Rights Watch over the past decade have increasingly exhibited a bias towards certain rights over others. More precisely, Human Rights Watch repeatedly focuses on political and civil rights while ignoring social and economic rights.
- Bicycle Use Booming in Latin America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 “I ride 43 km a day and I love it,” said Carlos Cantor in Bogotá, Colombia. “Five years ago I switched my car for a bike,” explained Tomás Fuenzalida from Santiago, Chile. They are both part of the burgeoning growth of cycling as a transport solution in Latin America.
- A Big Victory for Labor in Mexico
How Mexican Workers Won Ownership of a Tire Plant with Three-Year Strike Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Collective ownership of a factory in Mexico.
- Biggest criminals write laws that make their crimes legal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Giannina Segnini discusses her bribery investigations that helped put two former presidents of Costa Rica in jail, and offers advice to aspiring investigative journalists.
- The Biggest Lie
From Hiroshima to Syria, the Enemy Whose Name We Dare Not Speak Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Whether or not Bashar al-Assad or the “rebels” used gas in the suburbs of Damascus, it is the US not Syria that is the world’s most prolific user of these terrible weapons.
- Black against Empire
The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party.
- Black against Empire
The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party.
- Black History and the Class Struggle
#23 Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2013
- Black Humanity on Trial in America, Again
The Killing and Trial of Trayvon Martin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case of the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, was one such incident that brought out the entire history of racism, racial profiling, white vigilantism and the realities that black people and their allies have to organize to change the system.
- Blasphemy: Information Sacrificed on the Altar of Religion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There are far too many countries where news and content providers constantly face a very special and formidable form of censorship, one exercised in the name of religion or even God. And with increasing frequency, this desire to thwart freedom of information invokes the hard-to-define and very subjective concept of the “feelings of believers.”
This is a minefield. Reporters Without Borders has analysed it and offered its recommendations in a report entitled “Information sacrificed on altar of religion.”
- The Blockade Against Cuba: An Assault Upon Humanity's Conscience
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On 29 October 2013, for the 22nd consecutive year, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) called for an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba. 188 states supported the Resolution, 2 voted against it, namely the US and Israel.
- Blockade Halts Megaload at Port of Umatilla
The Darkest Hour Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Fifty activists with Rising Tide and members of the Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes held together to stop a megaload from embarking on its treacherous path. The struggle against the megaloads is a struggle against the tar sands and expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.
- Book Review: Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Book Review: The Condition of the Working Classes in England
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Reveiw of Nicholas Comfort, Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up the Ghost, 1952–2012 (2012) and Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (2011).
- The boss is spying
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The data mining by large U.S. corporations gets less attention than U.S. government surveillance. It goes beyond the tracking of every mouse-click, purchase and "like" registered by every consumer on the internet, and relies not only on sophisticated electronic devices, but on the currency of fear and sheer intimidation which would make a Big Brother tyrant proud, the kind depicted in George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984.
- Bradley Manning and Adolf Eichmann
Are We All Really Bradley Manning? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Manning succeeded in accomplishing what Eichmann was tried and executed for failing to do; Manning refused to participate in the commission of crimes against humanity.
- Brazil 2013: Mass Demonstrations, the World Cup, and 500 Years of Oppression
Bread, Circuses and Discontent Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Deep inequality lies in Brazil where the masses lack basic public goods. Billions of dollars being spent on the upcoming 2014 World Cup have triggered nation-wide mass demonstrations.
- Brazil: Balance Sheet and Prognosis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The government is taking advantage of recent events to invoke the danger of the right and to reinforce the left wing of the ruling group. Ten days after the “Rebellion of the Coxinhas” we can now draw up a balance sheet.
- Buddhist Pogropms and Religious Conflicts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Most observers would, rightly, reject the idea that there is something inherent in Buddhism that has led to the violence. Rather, most would recognize that the anti-Muslim violence in both Myanmar and Sri Lanka has its roots in the political struggles that have engulfed the two nations. The importance of Buddhism in the conflicts in Myanmar and Sri Lanka is not that the tenets of faith are responsible for the pogroms, but that those bent on confrontation have adopted the garb of religion as a means of gaining a constituency and justifying their actions.
- The Budget/Deficit Deal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Some serious ruling class intervention finally presented John Boehner an instruction he couldn't refuse: Get the Harry Reid-Mitch McConnell Senate deal to the House floor for a straight vote to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling.
- Building a Solidarity City
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2013 A Solidarity City is the creation of a community that rejects a system that engenders poverty and anguish, not solely for immigrants and refugees, but also for other Montrealers confronting these same realities.
- Bulgarian fascists run nightly patrols targeting immigrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, groups of fascists in paramilitary uniforms are conducting what they describe as ‘civil patrols’. The purpose of the patrols is to stop people in the street and then demand to see their identification or immigration documentation.
- Burning History in San Salvador
Destruction of Historical and Human Rights Archives Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On Thursday, Nov. 14, three armed men broke into the offices of Pro-Búsqueda. The attack on Pro-Búsqueda was not a random crime. We should be worried about what is happening in El Salvador.
- Business journalists go on the attack; demonize Atlantic seasonal workers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 National business journalists and columnists have bought into Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s demeaning view that folks in the Atlantic region are backward and have a defeatist attitude. Framed in disrespectful language, they’re promoting untested economic ideas that, if adopted, would seriously damage the economy – and the people – of the region.
- "Calm Reflection" or Justice?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Afterthoughts on Justice and racism after the movie Fruitvale Station.
- Can People Get What They Want?
An interview with Gilbert Achcar Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An interview with Gilbert Achcar.
- Canada facilitated NSA spying on 2010 G8 and G20 summits
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) briefing notes leaked by the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden reveal that Canada’s Conservative government permitted the NSA to spy on the June 2010 G8 and G20 summits held in Huntsville, Ontario and Toronto.
- Canada's Forgotten Slaves: Two Centuries of Bondage
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Trudel discusses slavery as a part of colonial Canada since 1629, its continuation under the British regime and its official abolition.
- Canary Islands vs. Big Oil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Thousands of Canary Islands residents and activists have begun campaigning against Spanish oil company Repsol, and the potential oil spill that could devastate the wildlife and tourist and fishing industries.
- Cancer is Capitalist Violence
Anthropology Against Oncology Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It’s been two decades since the publication of Martha Balsham’s landmark study, “Cancer in the Community: Class and Medical Authority (1993).” Balshem, a hospital-based anthropologist, documented how a Philadelphia “lay community” rejected medical advice to stop smoking, eat fruits and vegetables and schedule regular screening tests. The working class community of Tannerstown (a pseudonym) instead blamed air pollution from highway traffic and nearby chemical plants, as well as fate, for their cancers.
- Capitalism's violence, masses' revolt show need for total view
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 News and Letters' Draft Perspectives Thesis. Our age is in such total crisis, facing a choice between absolute terror or absolute freedom, that a revolutionary organization can no longer allow any separation between theory and practice, philosophy and revolution, workers and intellectuals, “inside” and “outside.”
- Capitalist Surveillance State: Everyone's a Target
Threatening Reporters, Spying on Public Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There is an inherent tendency for the state, which governs on behalf of a minuscule, ruthless class of obscenely wealthy exploiters, to attempt to amass ever greater power to control the population because it hates and fears the working people.
- Career advice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Career advice given by George Monbiot for those who have a genuine choice of careers, which means, regrettably, that it does not apply to the majority of the world’s workforce.
- The Case for Critical Support
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Not all support need be unqualified, and Milton Fisk is supporting some cases critically.
- The Century of Rosa Parks
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Rosa Parks was a veteran militant of many civil rights battles long before she became an icon.
- Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and the Question of Unions in Contemporary Capitalism
Review of Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out The Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Bardacke tells the story of one movement’s evolution from grassroots obscurity to such (relatively little-known) successes as the Salinas Valley (California) general strike of lettuce pickers in 1979—a veritable mass strike in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense—and from there to the collapsed shell of a union nonetheless administering fourteen non-profits with millions in assets.
- Challenging the Mississippi Fire Bombers
Memories of Mississippi 1964-65 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 With a firsthand account of the details and thoughtful descriptions of key people on the front lines, author Jim Dann brings the historic period, the June 1964 civil rights struggle to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi, back to life. He places those 15 months in Mississippi in the overall history of the struggle of African Americans for freedom, equality, and democratic rights in the South, the country, and throughout the world.
- Changing Ecology and Coffee Rust
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 From Guatemala to Panama, governments are boosting aid to fight the fungus and keep workers from migrating to cities or north toward the United States. The article looks into the causes of the coffee ecosystem crisis and its consequences.
- The Charlatanism Of Palestine-Denial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Here we go again. On Israel and the US losing their UNESCO voting rights, ‘Israel's ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, ‘said in an interview that his country supports the U.S. decision [to suspend contributions], "objecting to the politicization of UNESCO, or any international organization, with the accession of a non-existing country like Palestine.
- The Chavez Legacy
The Revolution Within the Revolution Will Continue Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Chavez was a leader who, in unity with the people, was able to free Venezuela from the grips of US Empire, brought dignity to the poor and working class, and was central to a Latin American revolt against US domination.
- The Check-the-Box Loophole
The Great Corporate Tax Shift Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Corporate taxes in America have been in decline now for more than three decades. Contrary to the drumbeat of corporate media throughout this year, and their false claims that US corporations are paying far more than their foreign capitalist cousins.
- The Chemical Weapons Pretext for War on Syria
The Latest Pack of Lies? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Washington is digging deep to conjure up a pretext for yet another war of aggression in the Middle East. The White House claims that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against rebel fighters.
- China's Cyber-War: Don't Believe the Hype
Net Threat Inflation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Addressing cyber-theft, U.S hypocrisy, and China.
- China's Rise: Strength and Fragility
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Loong Yu examines in detail the road from the revolution in China, from a largely rural peasant country in 1949 to the present huge capitalist economy.
- China's stolen children: parents battle police indifference in search for young
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Tens of thousands of children are snatched and sold into slavery every year, but parents say they get little help with their search.
- The CIA's Memory Prison
A Perverse Logic Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The U.S. government has ruled that the prisoners kidnapped and tortured by the U.S. cannot talk about their experiences because those experiences are the property of the U.S. government, which has classified them as secret national security information. This means the prisoners’ personal stories, recollections and experiences cannot be told in any open court, recounted to journalists or human rights groups, nor can they be heard by international bodies like the United Nations.
- Class Struggle at the Waistline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The obesity rate has soared not because lower income earners lack the knowledge to eat wisely, but because they have lost power over the economic conditions of their lives.
- Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 The problem with secrets is that they are eventually unearthed, resulting in uncomfortable revelations about the past. This is particularly upsetting when violence, abuse, and murder are involved -- but it's a necessary step in facing the truths of the present.
- Climate Change as a Class Issue
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Protesting PNC Bank in Pittsburgh financing of mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining across Appalachia. MTR causes increased cancer rates and birth defects, as well as massive environmental degradation.
- Climate change: how a warming world is a threat to our food supplies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Global warming is exacerbating political instability as tensions brought on by food insecurity rise. With research suggesting the issue can only get worse we examine the risks around the world.
- Climate politics must be as radical as the climate crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 If the climate action movement allows its goals to be shaped by what is permissible in a capitalist economy then it has already failed. To respond to the climate emergency, our politics must be as radical as our reality. Revolutionary changes needed for humankind to survive and thrive.
- C.L.R. James's Conflicted Intellectual Legacies on Mao Tse Tung's China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On the evolution of C.L.R. James’s thoughts about Maoism.
- Colombian Workers Injured and Fired
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The General Motors subsidiary in Colombia, Colmotores, fired over 200 workers who were injured on the job, ranging from spinal fractures to cancer.
- Committees Of Correspondence: To Defend Freedom And Secure Good Government
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Two hundred and fifty years ago the people of America were subject to an unrepresentative government controlled by powerful commercial interests. They rebelled and formed their own government, which has now come to be controlled by powerful commercial interests. Once again, "these are the times that try men's souls." What lessons can we learn from history to help us through this crisis?
- Communist Writing in Anti-Communist Times
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of 'American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.'
- Complaints filed against telecom companies for their role in UK mass surveillance programme
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On 5 November 2013, Privacy International filed formal complaints with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the UK against some of the world's leading telecommunication companies, for providing assistance to British spy agency GCHQ in the mass interception of internet and telephone traffic passing through undersea fibre optic cables.
- The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I
Economic Writings 1 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 This first volume in Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, contains some of Luxemburg's most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labour, imperialism, and pre-capitalist economic formations.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2013
Resource Type: Unclassified First Published: 2013
- Connexions Quotations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Published: 2017 A selection of quotations about social change, resistance, solidarity, and many other topics. Compiled by Ulli Diemer. Each quote has been turned into an image file.
- A Contest of Ideas
Capital, Politics, and Labor Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Collected essays and provocations from the preeminent labour historian.
- A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics and Labor
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Compilation and updates of many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. The author offers perspectives on the relationship of labour and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life.
- Conversations with Lee Lorch
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 Interviews with mathematician and civil rights activist Lee Lorch.
- Cops Are Now Less Cautious Than Soldiers In Iraq
Shooting Mirian Carey Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Police militarization is a hot topic lately, but American police are beyond anything contemplated by the American military. American police today appear unwilling to accept any risk whatsoever and seem willing to kill anyone and anything that could possibly be seen as a threat.
- Corporate Corruption And The Special Interest State
Regulatory Capture at the FCC Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With Tom Wheeler's nomination, expect pro big-telecom policies such as ending net neutrality, further industry consolidation, limiting meaningful competition and increasing user fees, among other policies.
- Corporate India Versus Indigenous People
Violent in the Name of Development Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The state has more or less abandoned rural people (70% of the population) and turned the countryside over to corporate India. Mineral extraction, dam building, infrastructure projects, water appropriation and industrial farming make up their burgeoning business portfolios.
- The Corporate Invasion
Government by Big Business Goes Supranational Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A new treaty being negotiated in secret between the US and the EU has been specifically engineered to give companies what they want -- the dismantling of all social, consumer and environmental protection, and compensation for any infringement of their assumed rights. Under the treaty, foreign companies could sue governments directly for cash compensation over earnings lost because of strict labour or environmental legislation.
- Corporate money preventing all-out campaign to stop global warming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Highly-regarded former Toronto Mayor David Miller says he is "very excited" about becoming the new President and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund-Canada in September. But there are questions about whether the WWF is effective in its work and, moreover, why the WWF and other members of the global environmental movement have made such little progress combatting the most serious threat to earth - climate change.
- Corporate Spying on Environmental Groups
We Are Being Watched Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The surveillance of moderate environmental groups like GDAC comes at a pivotal time for the environmental movement.
- The Corporate State and Manufactured Dependence
Sure, It Can Get Worse...It's Happening Right Before Our Eyes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The 'resistance is futile' mindset that supports plutocrats and the global corporations they own assumes the existing order is the only possible order and the costs of resistance are too great because 'they' have state power and unlimited economic resources on their side.
- The Corporate State of Surveillance
Opting Out Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 America was founded on the ideals of personal liberty, freedom and democracy. Now mass spying, surveillance and the unending collection of personal data undermine civil liberties and our privacy rights. We find ourselves in the midst of an all-out invasion on what’s-none-of-their-business and its coming from both government and corporate sources. Snooping and data collection have become big business. Nothing is out of their bounds anymore.
- Corporate Terrorism in West Texas
The Full Weight of Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Make no mistake, if it becomes clear that the Texas explosion was triggered by a terrorist attack, a la the Oklahoma City bombing, then Obama will begin talking about “the full weight of justice.”
- Corporate Welfare in the Forest
Post-Fire Logging Loses Money and Damages the Health of the Ecosystem Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Forest Service is under extreme political pressure to log our national patrimony, whether it makes any economic or ecological sense. A good example of a needless, ecologically damaging, and economically wasteful logging proposal is the proposed $1.4 million Pole Creek post-fire logging sale.
- Counter-Terrorism and Imperial Hypocrisy
Lessons from the Kidnapping of Abu Anas al-Libi in Tripoli Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Western governments word closely with 'terrorists' when it suits them, and then turn on them when the wind shifts.
- The Coup
1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 In 1953, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency organized the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader and installed Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in his place. Over the next 26, the U.S. backed the unpopular, authoritarian shah and his secret police; in exchange, it reaped a share of Iran’s oil wealth. The blowback was almost inevitable, as this new and revealing history of the coup and its consequences shows.
- The Coup of Coups
Putting the Shah of Shahs on the Peacock Throne Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Crimes and Punishment (or Not)
Manning Get's Slammed; A Mass-Murderer Got Sprung Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 William Laws Calley, a second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, was convicted of slaughtering 22 innocent men, women and children, including babies, during a day-long slaughterfest in which he and his men massacred over 500 unarmed Vietnamese.
- Criticism: An Abandoned Process
Blame the Greeks! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The art of criticism is yet another casualty of television, the Internet and individualism. The objective of criticism should be to improve something. That is the only way that changes and transformations take place. Formal and informal criticisms have been the centerpiece of every advanced society.
- Dangerous Liaisons: The marriages and divorces of Marxism and Feminism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 The political and theoretical history of the relationship between feminism and Marxism.
- The Dangers of Journalism 101
Journalists who don't run with the pack routinely face difficulty and danger Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Journalists who cover cutting edge material, the politics of repression or wars or covert operations have always been at risk. It’s part of the job and part of the joy of the job. The risk, the danger is all part of the rush that makes some journalists work.
- Daughters of India Violated and Abused
A Woman's Lot Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Widespread sexual abuse rapes the land and inflicts harm upon the women of India who are isolated from the emerging "New India".
- Day of Mourning Statement From Leonard Peltier
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It is yet another year. It seems like a thousand years ago but only a year in time in reality from the last time I dictated one of these statement for the day of mourning so, again, I want to say as last time, that I am honoured that you would want to hear my words.
- Death of a Hero
The General, The Media Adulation And The Forgotten Victims Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 If all this glorification of a military commander had happened in the North Korean or the Soviet-era press, lavishly praising an 'original' who'd given years of 'patriotic service' in wars abroad, it would have rightly elicited scorn and ridicule amongst commentators here.
- Debunking Obama's Chemical Weapons Case Against the Syrian Government
Fact and Fiction Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The "U.S. Government Assessment of the Syrian Government's Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013" is a poorly constructed attempt to justify the politically, militarily, and morally unjustifiable war against Syria.
- Deep Sea and Foreign Going
Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 A voyage through the shady world of international shipping, the hidden industry upon which our world turns and our future depends.
- Defending Public Education in Philadelphia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Philadelphia has a proud tradition of struggle around its schools dating back to the civil rights and Black Power movements. The African American churches also played a critical role. But this alliance proved short lived. While education organizing groups, advocacy organizations and, less frequently, unions have sought to work together on some campaigns, there has been no effort to develop a shared strategy and organizational vehicle for realizing it.
- Deformities, sickness and livestock deaths: the real cost of GM animal feed?
Deformities, Sickness and Livestock Death Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Feeding animals a diet containing genetically modified (GM) ingredients or more specifically feed made from GM soya and sprayed with the controversial herbicide glyphosate is responsible for deformities and other defects in pigs.
- Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Doussard demonstrates that the decline in wages and working conditions is anything but the unavoidable result of competitive economic forces. Rather, he makes the case that service sector and other local-serving employers have boosted profit with innovative practices to exploit workers that go far beyond wage cuts.
- Delusions of the Tech Bro Intelligentsia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With employees of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system on strike, the Silicon Valley tech elite has reminded us all that despite their enlightened Bay Area lifestyles, they are still, at root, a bunch of rich dudes. Corey Robin ably documents the reactionary politics and moral degeneracy of people who see themselves as heroic entrepreneurs and the people who get them to work as greedy parasites.
- Denying health coverage to injured migrant workers is shameful
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Imagine getting injured at work, and instead of going to a hospital or seeing your health-care provider, you are deported from Canada.
- Deputation Opposing Island Airport Expansion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It is absurd to have a major airport on a city's waterfront. The negative impacts -- air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, massively increased traffic, the risk of planes taking off and landing with a few hundred meters of homes and schools -- are clear and unacceptable.
- Deranging America
Drugged, Indebted, Armed-to-the-Teeth Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A question worth asking: Who benefit from a more compulsive, hence more violent, population? Well, if you’re pushing eternal warfare, which we are, you’ll need a pool of nutcases who are willing to shoot anyone for any reason, or none at all, and more deranged oafs at home to go “Rah! Rah!” over any bombing run or drone hit. Are we going into Mali next? Why not? Where is it, by the way? There has never been a country fighting so many wars without a serious debate about any of them. And if you want people to buy first, think later, to rack up life-wrecking debts to satiate all ephemeral cravings, then you ply them with poison, flickering television and thumping music. You don’t want a population capable of deliberating, reflecting, thinking clearly or even listening attentively, much less reading, but one that can be jerked around by any sexy come-on or dumbed down slogan.
- Viola Desmond
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The story of Viola Desmond's refusal to accept an act of racial discrimination, a stand that provided inspiration to a later generation of Blacks in Nova Scotia and in the rest of Canada.
- Detroit: Restructured or Ravaged?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Apponted by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R), Kevyn Orr became Emergency Manager (EM) over the city of Detroit this March 28, 2013. The media repeat that he has 18 months to "turn the city around," but it's unclear whether anyone believes that's possible.
- The Devil's Breath: The Story of the Hillcrest Mine Disaster of 1914
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013
- The Dialectic of Monstrosity - review
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism' by David McNally.
- Diaspora Jews Must Speak Out
Law in the Service of Discrimination Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 No democracy, in today’s world, should have the “right” to speak for persons who are not its citizens, live thousands of miles away, and have not given their direct consent to be spoken for or “represented.”
- Digital Disconnect
How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 The author argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems and massive indirect subsidies and other policies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism.
- Digital Revolutions
Activism in the Internet Age Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Symon Hill on the role of the Internet in activism and social change.
- Dirty South
The Foul Legacy of Louisiana Oil Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On the workings and effects of the oil industry in Louisiana, including a particular focus on legacy lawsuits, through which landowners have sued companies for contamination of properties leased to produce oil and gas.
- The Disappearance of Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The idea that a financial lifeline – whether Kerry’s plan or Netanyahu’s economic peace – is going to smooth the path to the conflict’s end is an illusion. Peace, and prosperity, will come only when Palestinians are liberated from Israeli control.
- Disinherited Generations
Our Struggle to Reclaim Treaty Rights for First Nations Women and their Descendants Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 This oral autobiography of two remarkable Cree women tells their life stories against a backdrop of government discrimination, First Nations activism, and the resurgence of First Nations communities.
- Dismantling of Fishery Library 'Like a Book Burning,' Say Scientists
Harper government shuts down 'world class' collection on freshwater science and protection Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Harper government has dismantled one of the world's top aquatic and fishery libraries as part of its agenda to reduce government as well as limit the role of environmental science in policy decision-making.
- Django Unchained, or, The Help: How "Cultural Politics" Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On reflection, it's possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; it's that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts.
- Don't Blame Mandela for Our Failure
Believing the Champions of Neoliberalism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 South Africa believed the promises made by the champions of neoliberalism, and found itself ensnared in its web with no way out by the beginning of the next millennium.
- Down Where Apartheid Lives
Where are the Condemnations of Australia? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 John Pilger documentary Australia - “discover what lies behind the sunny face” . Aboriginal people comprise barely three per cent of the Australian population. Unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand, which have made treaties with their first people, Australia has offered gestures often wrapped in the law.
- The Dreadful Legacy of UN Resolution 181
Sixty Years Later Global Support for a Palestine Grows Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Approximately three quarters of a million Palestinians are refugees, offspring of the families who were forced into Syria and Lebanon when Zionist terrorists depopulated and destroyed Palestinian villages.
- Dreaming of What Might Be
The Knights of Labor in Canada 1880-1900 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 A comic book history of the Knights of Labor in Canada.
- The Drug Companies' Expansion Into Emerging Markets
Profit, Drugs, and International Markets Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Faced with declining prescription drug sales in the U.S., and having lost patent protection for many profitable drugs, the drug industry is relying increasingly in new markets such as China and other fast developing countries, such as those in Africa. That expansion, however, is oftentimes tainted by unsavory commercial practices.
- East St. Louis As Detroit's Mirror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 East St. Louis, Illinois, in many ways a smaller Detroit.
- Eavesdropping on the Planet
The Inalienable Right to Snoop? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex … satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links … voice, text, images … captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed by high-powered computers … if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena …
- The Economic War Against Cuba: A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Salim Lamrani explains the U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba: their origins, their provisions, how they contravene international law, and how they affect the lives of Cubans.
- Ecosocialism as a Human Phenomenon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Two focal points configure this talk. The first denotes the structure of the world as it is, hurtling toward the abyss; the second concerns the world as I would have us struggle to bring about.
- The Ecoterrorist and me
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Marie Mason is five years into a 22-year sentence for participating in non-violent - but highly destructive - actions with the Earth Liberation Front. David Rovics met with her at the Carswell Federal Women's Prison in Fort Worth, Texas.
- Edward J. Snowden and the Exposure of Voyeuristic Fascism
Self-Pacification of the American Citizenry Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Snowden make a difference in the affairs of state in an environment where individuals do not appear to matter.
- Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage
Whistleblowing in the Name of the Constitution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 29-year-old former technical assistant to the CIA and employee of a defense intelligence contractor admitting to disclosing top secret documents about the National Security Agency’s massive violation of the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
- El Salvador: Labor vs. P3
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An interview with Jaime Rivera about the Public-Private Partnership (P3) law that was proposed in early 2012l.
- Elements of a Concept of Socialist Transformation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The concept of transformation, with the elements developed up to now, could be capable of advancing the process of creating a left that is up to the challenge of the great crisis of financial-market capitalism and today’s civilisation. Just like the Zapatistas, we will progress while learning - with the objective of overthrowing the total mode of production and life, of power and property relations, in order to go toward a solidary, socialist society, which puts an end to the exploitation of human beings and nature. The transformation of our very way of thinking is part of this progress.
- The Emperor's New Penis
The Same Sexual Threats, the Same Silence for Women Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Right now the gender fundamentalists are doing their best to shut down dialogue. They've damaged books — books that don’t even mention their concern — pressured bookstores, and silenced speakers scheduled at universities. It should come as no surprise that they are using the final tactics of all fundamentalists: bullying, threats, assault. And they've done this with increasing frequency and intensity. How long does it take to see the pattern?
- Empire Building, the Debt Ceiling, the Budget Deficit, and the Samson Solution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Raising the debt ceiling allows the State to keep borrowing and pay its billionaire creditors.Financing the budget deficit requires borrowing, which involves the sale hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US government bonds through Wall Street — but at a cost to the taxpayer. The common denominator is that the entire edifice of finance capital and all of its support structures depend on debt financing by the State. By borrowing and then taxing its citizens the Treasury extracts wealth from the vast majority of Americans.
- Empire of the Comanche
The Passing of Comancheria Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The period of Comanche domination of Texas, New Mexico, Northern Mexico, and much of the American West between 1750 and 1850 is just a passing footnote in American and Mexican history, but it provides an interesting perspective on many important historical questions, notably the history of the Eurasian steppe and the role of violence in long-distance trade.
- The Empire's Shill
The Real Mission of the New York Times Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Empty Lectures About the Sanctity of the 'Rule of Law'
Washington Has No Sense of Shame Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 US is threatening Hong Kong, China, Russia and now little Ecuador with all manner of reprisals if they don't respect the "rule of law" and hand over whistleblower Edward Snowden to the US national security apparatus.
- Emptying the World's Aquarium
The dismal future of the global fishery Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Essay on the fishery at the Sea of Cortez, Mexico and the implications of environmental conservation policies on the local fishermen's economy.
- The End of Night
Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Paul Bogard illuminates the problems caused by a lack of darkness. We live awash in artificial light. But night's natural darkness has always been invaluable for our spiritual health and the health of the natural world, and every living creature suffers from its loss.
- The End of the "Leaderless" Revolution
A Global Fallacy and the Military Intervention in Egypt Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 When movements don't have (or claim not to have) ideologies, agendas, demands and leaders, they can go in two directions: they can dissipate (as did Occupy), or serve the agendas of others. The end of the leaderless revolution does not mean the end of the Egyptian revolutionary process. But it spells the end of the fallacy that the people can take power without an agenda, an alternative platform, an ideology, and leaders.
- The Enthronment of Illogic
Daring to Know Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It is not that the average U.S. citizen is incapable of critical thinking, but that there is little incentive to exercise it. He is suppressed, blocked from the free exercise of his principles and values.
- The Environmental Movement at the Crossroads
Gang Green or New Green? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There is a growing culture of resistance in the environment movement
- E.P. Thompson: Feminism, Gender, Women and History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Winslow reflects upon her experiences working with E.P. Thompson at the University of Warwick in 1969, especially in relation to his support for the women's liberation movement.
- Ethiopian Migrants Victimized in Saudi Arabia
Racism and Hate Running Through the Streets Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The recent appalling events in Saudi Arabia have brought thousands of impassioned Ethiopians living inside the country and overseas onto the streets. This powerful worldwide action presents a tremendous opportunity for the people to unite, to demand their rights through peaceful demonstrations and to call with one voice for change.
- Ethiopia's stolen land.
'A common property of the nations and peoples' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Government plans to reform Ethiopia’s agriculture failed to consider the country’s peasant culture, subsistence farming and basic needs such as water to drink. Instead, it let the agrifood and financial giants take much of the most fertile land from peasant farmers.
- Eugene Genovese (1930-2012) - obituary
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 After his death last year at the age of 82, most obituaries of Eugene Genovese — the historian of American slavery whose masterpiece, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, was published in 1974 — stated that he traveled from left to right, from Marxism to conservatism.
- European Labour History Network - working group on Factory History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The founding meeting of the ELHN took place at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) on 12 October 2013. The forty scholars who gathered in Amsterdam, belonging to research institutions, archives and journals based in various European countries, felt the need to increase the cooperation among labour history scholars, share knowledge and (digital) material, create a platform for future collective research, and organize conferences and seminars.
- European Socialism, A Concise History with Documents
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 An introduction to European socialism, which arose in the maelstrom of the industrial and democratic revolutions launched in the eighteenth century. Striving for sweeping social, economic, cultural, and political change, socialists were a diverse lot. However, they were united by principles asserting the social and political equality of all people.
- Everyone can be an investigative journalist. Everyone!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Inge Springe is the founder and director of the Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism. Her stories have resulted in action against public officials and helped bring about changes in Latvian economic and tax policy.
- Everyone can be an investigative journalist. Everyone!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Inge Springe is the founder and director of the Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism. Her stories for the center, which is also known as Re:Baltica, have resulted in action against public officials and helped bring about changes in Latvian economic and tax policy.
- Evil Takes the High Road
Wrapping a Policy of Global Domination in the American Flag Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 No heavens for those who live in one of the Muslim countries in which the United States is waging its preemptive global “war on terrorism.”
- Evil Traffickers and Innocent Children?
It's Not So Simple Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 One of the most pressing reasons why teenagers like Adri need to migrate for work is because there’s no other way for them or their families to access the money that is essential to life in any capitalist economy.
- The Evolution of Evolution - review
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Darwin’s Ghosts' by Rebecca Stott.
- The Exchange - Issue #3
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2013 The third issue of The Exchange focuses on ongoing struggles to build effective resistance to austerity, and the attempts to build unity across the left. The exchanges here try to look to the problems of the left and wider social movements – to ask how we might go forward, how we might contribute to the enrichment and revival of communist ideas, and how our work, in the here and now, can help to develop the left as a strong and serious force.
- Exile Islands, Then and Now
Histories of Exploitation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The increasing number of asylum seeker arrivals to Australia – more than 15,000 in 2013 alone – has become such an issue that in July former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took a new “hardline” stance, saying that no one arriving by boat would ever be allowed to settle there.
- Exiting the Vampire Castle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing.
- The extraordinary range of people using offshore hideaways
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Secret records obtained by ICIJ represent the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organisation, and lay bare an extraordinary range of people using offshore hideaways. The leaks illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has aggressively spread around the globe.
- Extraordinary Violence at 500 Pearl Street
The Sentencing of Jeremy Hammond Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On Friday, November 15, 2013, extreme violence with malicious intent was meted out by Federal District Court Judge Loretta Preska in the sentencing phase of 28 year old hacktivist Jeremy Hammond before a chamber packed with friends, family, supporters and others.
- Eyes Like Blank Discs
The Guardian's Steven Poole On George Orwell's Politics And The English Language Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Published: 2014 Poole's review of Orwell is itself a textbook example of the kind of alienated response described by Orwell, Fromm and Schmidt. Whereas Orwell's essay is the work of an impassioned, outspoken individual opposing 'the machine society’, Poole's article is the work of a corporate professional operating ‘within the confines of an assigned ideology’.
- Eyes Wide Open
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The recent revelations, made possible by NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the reach and scope of global surveillance practices have prompted a fundamental reexamination of the role of intelligence services in conducting coordinated cross-border surveillance.
- 'Factivism' and Other Fairytales from Bono
The 'Inner Nerd' Gets It Wrong, Again Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A rebuttal to U2 singer Bono's claims regarding the 'imminent eradication of extreme poverty'.
- Fair Shares of Food
Agriculture in an Age of Gadgets Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Concern over lagging production has prompted a search for technological tricks that might revolutionize food production.
- Farming Under the Wall
Stories of Palestinian Farmers in the West Bank Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The difficulties of Palestinian farmers as their lands are placed behind the Wall.
- The FBI and the Myth of the Fingerprint
The Real Crime is in the Crime Lab Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Decade after decade people have been sent to prison for years or dispatched to the death cells, solely on the basis of a single, even a partial print. However the lab scandals threw a shadow over the FBI’s forensic procedures
- Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 The fact that French and British settlers colonized Quebec is part of what makes it an interesting location for the discussion of race and social politics -- even more so because Montreal was a prominent site for the black power movement in the 1960s.
- Fear of the People's History
England's Two Countries Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 England is two countries. One is dominated by London, the other remains in its shadow. They were another nation with a different history, different loyalties, different humour, even different values. At the heart of this was the politics of class.
- Federal police and New Brunswick government assault First Nations anti-fracking protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The RCMP launched a violent assault on a blockade protest against shale gas fracking in New Brunswick.
- Feminism's March from Nation to Home - interview
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Johanna Brenner interviews Ninotchka Rosca.
- 15 Benefits of the War on Drugs
Training Your Kid to be a Snitch (Against You) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mocking the government's 'War on Drugs'.
- Fifteen minutes of online anonymity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Making sure that your communications and data are confidential is not easy. Jean-Marc Manach, a journalist specialized in digital privacy and security, has an interesting alternative – how to have 15 minutes of online anonymity.
- Fight the Power!
A Visual History of Protest Among the English-Speaking Peoples Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Throughout history, ordinary people have risen up against oppression and injustice. Fight the Power visualizes 14 key moments in the last 200 years when people across the English-speaking world stood up and fought for a better life for all.
- Fighting impunity, but only in some cases
Is the International Criminal Court too Politicized? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 So far all the 20 prosecutions in the 11 years of the ICC’s existence have been brought over African conflicts. The US, China, Russia and Israel haven’t even signed up to the court, and actively seek exemption from it.
- Fighting Secrecy and the National Security State
An Interview With Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Co-Producer of WikiLeaks's "Collateral Murder" Video Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An interview with Iceland Member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir of the Pirate Party on the status of the international struggle against government secrecy and surveillance.
- Fighting the poachers on Africa's thin green line
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Underpaid, ill-equipped and outnumbered, park rangers fight a one-sided war against vicious gangs of poachers. Hundreds have been murdered in the defence of endangered wildlife, and their deaths leave their own families in jeopardy. David Smith reports from Zambia.
- Filipino women take lead in resolving Mindanao conflict
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Teresita Quintos Deles and Miriam Coronel Ferrer won over Islamic leaders who initially balked at dealing with women.
- Five years since Canada's constitutional coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Five years ago today, Canada’s Conservative government used the arbitrary powers of the un-elected governor-general to shut down Canada’s parliament so as to prevent the opposition parties from defeating the government in a non-confidence vote.
- A Flame Gone Out - obituary
The Legacy of Stephane Hessel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Obituary for Stephane Hessel.
- A Flawed Conception of Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A critique of E.P. Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class.'
- The Flint Sitdown Comic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Is organized labour going extinct? Is the power of working class people a relic from a bygone era? The article looks into workers' "legal right" to organize and strike.
- The Flint sit-down strike, 1936-1937
Jeremy Brecher Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 210,000 auto workers joined the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.) to take part in the strike but the A.F.L leadership however wanted no part in a strike, and managed to postpone it again and again. The workers won control over the rate of production, despite a union contract that conceded this authority to management.
- 'Flooding the Zone' with Bullshit on Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In recent weeks, the Obama Administration has been embarked on a massive propaganda campaign they call “flooding the zone.” We hope to provide the most direct and systematic refutation of the Administration’s case for war in Syria.
- A Focus of Anti-capitalist Struggle?
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won't Change the World
- Food Justice: Monsanto, Factory Farming, And Beyond
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It starts with alternative vision: While the dominant hierarchy drowns in its own hypocrisy, fear, and greed let’s use our energy and passion to create -- occupy -- a whole new cultural model.
- The Forest Mafia: How Scammers Steal Millions Through Carbon Markets
When the product is invisible, the cons are endless. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 International law enforcement authorities and environmental advocates say that the carbon markets are extremely vulnerable to financial fraudsters, especially when it comes to forest projects. Their shell games can also be hard to spot. Authorities have concluded that up to 90% of all carbon trading in some countries was a result of fraudulent activities.
- Forget One Direction - We Need a New Direction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 If people think equality and social justice are unrealistic, then we really are lacking in imagination. When they try to tell you that our better-world ideals are unrealistic, tell them it's unrealistic to allow elite bankers to send tens of millions of people into starvation.
- Forging the Capital Security State
Book Review of Panitch and Gindin's "The Making of Global Capitalism" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 "The Making of Global Capitalism" recounts how the United States came to rule and continues as the primary architect, coordinator and essential guarantor of the present empire of capital.
- The Founding Fables of Industrialised Agriculture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Governments these days are not content with agriculture that merely provides good food. In line with the dogma of neoliberalism they want it to contribute as much wealth as any other industry towards the grand goal of economic growth. High tech offers to reconcile the two ambitions – producing allegedly fabulous yields, which seems to be what’s needed, and becoming highly profitable.
- Fracking hell: what it's really like to live next to a shale gas well
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Published: 2014 Nausea, headaches and nosebleeds, invasive chemical smells, constant drilling, slumping property prices – welcome to Ponder, Texas, where fracking has overtaken the town.
- Fracking Indigenous Country
Big Green, Sun Media and Elsipogtog Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Police attack the Mi’kmaq community of Elsipogtog in New Brunswick.
- Free public transport: from social experiement to political alternative? - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of M. Giovannangeli and J. L. Sagot-Duvauroux's "Voyageurs sans ticket. Liberté, égalité, gratuité : une expérience sociale à Aubagne".
- Free transit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A pamphlet which gathers together a number of essays on the struggle for public transit. It emerges especially out of the urban context of Toronto. But the essays speak also to the wider crisis of public transit in North America, and the importance of this demand to an eco-socialist vision of feasible futures.
- A Freedom Budget for All Americans
Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 While the Civil Rights Movement is remembered for efforts to end segregation and secure the rights of African Americans, the larger economic vision that animated much of the movement is often overlooked today. That vision sought economic justice for every person in the United States, regardless of race. It favored production for social use instead of profit; social ownership; and democratic control over major economic decisions.
- Freedom indivisible: Gays and Lesbians in the African American Civil Rights movement
PhD Thesis, University of Nebraska, 2013 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Freedom is a Constant Struggle
The Civil Rights Movement in the Rural South Reconsidered Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Is it possible to both win substantial benefits for people who are on the lower rungs of the socio-economic status ladder while at the same time building forms of democratic people power that can continue to challenge the present political oligarchy and the economic plutocracy whose interests it generally serves?
- Freedom of Information Takes Another Hit in the United States
Keeping Americans Safe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The United States is a land of ill-informed sheep and the home of a bunch of cowards — cowards in government who are afraid of the truth and the open debate over facts and ideas, and cowards among the broader public who willingly allow these steady encroacments on our freedom in the name of “fighting terror.”
- From mobilisation to resistance: Portugal's struggle against austerity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Portugal has been subjected to increasingly harsh austerity policies that have led the country into a recession of historic proportions, the result being mass impoverishment.
- From the Red Power movement to Idle No More
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Red Power stands for mass, united, militant action. Red Power, like Black Power, set off a wave of action and a level of consciousness in both the indigenous and non-indigenous communities, which has never really ended.
- From "Triple Oppression" to "Freedom Dreams" - reviews
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Reviews of 'Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995' by Cheryl Higashida, 'Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War' by Dayo F. Gore, and 'Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism' by Erik S. McDuffie.
- Gaza Calling
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 For over six years, two Palestinian families are split between the West Bank and Gaza; mothers and sons are forbidden from travelling the one-hour road that separates them. Witness the personal cost of Israel's illegal occupation.
- Gaza: Life and death under Israel's drones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There are many things to fear in Gaza. Drones are increasingly being used for surveillance and extra-judicial execution in parts of the Middle East, especially by the US. There are no statistics that detail the effect of the drones on Palestinians in Gaza.
- Gaza wrecked by storm, floods, acute cold, sewage overflows and power cuts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The UN has described the Gaza Strip as a 'disaster area' following the onslaught of Storm Alexa and called on the international community to lift the blockade and allow recovery efforts to proceed.
- GCHQ and European spy agencies worked together on mass surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies.
- Germ War: the US Record
Who Will Intervene? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The United States has exposed of hundreds of thousands of unwitting US citizens to an astonishing array of germ agents and toxic chemicals, killing dozens of people.
- Giving Kids a Fair Chance
A Strategy That Works Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Argues for a refocus of social policy toward early childhood interventions designed to enhance both cognitive abilities and such non-cognitive skills as confidence and perseverance.
- Glass buildings kill birds - architects must act!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Horrified at the giga-scale death of birds caused by collisions with trendy expanses of plate glass in modern buildings, James Fischer calls on architects to bring an end to the needless slaughter - and "save a billion birds"!
- Global Wealth Inequality, Illustrated
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 A video for those who think capitalism is the way to end poverty.
- Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Stratfor
Sellout Exposed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Using his celebrated activist status, Popovic opened many doors for Stratfor to meet with activists globally. In turn, the information Stratfor intended to gain from Popovic’s contacts would serve as “actionable intelligence”— the firm billed itself as a “Shadow CIA”—for its corporate clients.
- The Globe and Mail as corporate apologists: behind the love affair with Barrick Gold
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In the rural highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), a Canadian gold mine operates amongst the Ipili people, who were one of the last major ethnic groups to be contacted by the Australian colonial administration of New Guinea, or "white man", in 1939. Since that date, Porgera was known for its rich gold deposits and eventually became the site of one of the largest gold mines in the world. Today, Porgera is a site of controversy, as it riches are overshadowed by stories of gang rapes and killings of the Ipili people at the hands of Barrick security and police.
- GM crops: Hunger as the key to world domination
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Weapons and energy resources are apparently insufficient for total control over the world's nations, power-hungry globalists like David Rockefeller have come up with the idea of using people's daily need for food as a means to achieve global dominance.
- Golden Rice ignores the risks, the people and the real solutions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 'Golden Rice' is being promoted by GM advocates as a solution to malnutrition. But Daniel Ocampo says it is for the 'target populations' in the Philippines and elsewhere to decide whether to accept the technology - and they don't want it!
- Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Blumenthal depicts a portrait of Israeli society under the siege of increasingly authoritarian politics as the occupation of the Palestinians deepens.
- The Good Intentions That Pave the Road to War
R2P and Genocide Prevention Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- The Good War, Revisited
The Bombing of Pearl Harbor: What FDR Knew Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Each Pearl Harbor day offers a fresh opportunity for those who correctly believe that Franklin Roosevelt knew of an impending attack by the Japanese and welcomed it as a way of snookering the isolationists and getting America into the war.
- The Googlization of the Far Right: Why Is Google Funding Grover Norquist, Heritage Action and ALEC?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Google, the tech giant, has been funding a growing list of groups advancing the agenda of the Koch brothers. The policies advocated by some of the Google’s grantees are in stark contrast with the progressive image that Google has worked to promote.
- Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Whistle-blowing is vital, even more broadly than in government spying. Whistle-blowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in power. What's important here are government programs and methods, not data about individuals.
- Government Spying Aims to Silence Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 What the ruling class is aiming at, with these occasional "leaks" about its spying on us, is not so much to collect information about us but rather to make us feel so totally spied upon that we will be afraid to do or say anything we know the government doesn't want us to do or say.
- The Great Corporate Tax Shift
The $10 Trillion Heist Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The great corporate myth-making machine has been hard at work of late, attempting to create the false impression that US corporations are increasingly uncompetitive with their foreign rivals due to the fact they allegedly pay higher corporate taxes.
- Greece's Fascist Threat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The increasingly bold Golden Dawn party has precipitated a political crisis in Athens whose resolution is far from certain. Golden Dawn, the largest fascist party in Europe and the third largest party in Greece, has grown rapidly during the economic crisis both by scapegoating immigrants, ethnic minorities and queer people, and offering basic necessities like food to Greek citizens impoverished by the country’s austerity program.
- Greenhouse Gas Concentrations in Atmosphere Reach New Record
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record high in 2012, continuing an upward and accelerating trend which is driving climate change and will shape the future of our planet for hundreds and thousands of years.
- Groups need to investigate impact of damaging corporate media censorship
Freedom to Read Week 2013 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Guadeloupe and Martinique threatened as pesticide contaminates food chain
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Chemical once used on banana crops threatening livelihoods and public health by polluting soil and sea.
- Gun Control: Carnage in Context
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 What "the right to bear arms" means today is murkier in a society which is profoundly unorganized, exceptionally violent, highly racist, and with desperately inadequate care for the mentally ill.
- The H-Block Struggle - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Book review of "Smashing H Block: The Rise and Fall of the Popular Campaign Against Criminalization, 1976-1982" by F. Stuart Ross.
- Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years
His Idealism Remains at Large Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 28-year-old political activist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release at the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. This was the maximum sentence he could receive after his non-cooperating plea deal.
- Harper government's extensive spying on anti-oilsands groups revealed in FOIs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The National Energy Board, supposedly an independent federal agency, has directly coordinated efforts between CSIS, the RCMP and private oil companies against environmentalist groups and indigenous-rights activists.
- Harper's Seven-Year War on Science
Chris Turner's treatise on Tory anti-empiricism should spark outrage. But those in power won't see it. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Held hostage by Big Pharma: a personal experience
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mike Marqusee looks at how drug firms can make huge profits from their state-enforced monopoly on an essential good.
- Heroism Against the Machine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- The high price of cheap meat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A tiny percentage of the wrong animal passed off as beef in industrially processed food in western Europe? It’s a small misdemeanour set against the misuse of the world’s agricultural land to produce the luxury of meat.
- History as Argument
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On the argument of E.P. Thompson’s tremendous book, The Making of the English Working Class
- The History Behind the Organizer of the Water War
Oscar Olivera remembers how the Bolivian people took back their land and their power Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Many know Oscar Olivera as the voice and the organizer of the water war in Cochabamba in 2000. Others remember his experience as a factory worker.
- The History of Democracy
A Marxist Interpretation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Roper traces the history of democracy from ancient Athens to the emergence of liberal representative and socialist participatory democracy. He argues that democracy cannot be understood separately from the social and economic contexts in which democratic states operate.
- Hold the Front Page!
Time for a Fifth Estate Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Today, we need a “fifth estate” right across the media and in journalism training and on the streets. We need those like Edward Smith Hall, who see themselves as agents of people not power.
- Home of the Whopper
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Frank observes a fast-food worker protest in North Carolina and ponders the intersections of technological efficiency and worker redundancy, corporate wealth and de facto government subsidies, and company rhetoric and profits alongside workers' struggles for survival.
- Hondurans Walk for Dignity and Sovereignty
Step by Step Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 About the Walk called 'Caminata Dignidad y Soberanía Paso a Paso' (Walk for Dignity and Sovereignty Step by Step), which culminated with over 400 people from various groups representing the social movements in Honduras reaching the National Congress in Tegucigalpa with various demands.
- How a London court Repudiated Zionist Abuse of the Anti-Semitism Charge
Tribunal Blow to Israel's Advocates Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Taunting and tainting opponents with the charge of anti-semitism is a long-standing Zionist ploy, familiar to everyone involved in the Israel-Palestine issue.
- How A-historical Journalism Serves Power
A Calendar of Infamy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Contemporary journalism has a horrendous habit of considering history superfluous.
- How Australian bank financed the heroin trade
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A Leicester-based blogger's monitoring of weapons used in conflict has been taken up by media and human rights groups. Never having been near a warzone has not stopped him from breaking some of the most important stories on the Syrian conflict in the last year.
- How Canada’s Prisons Killed Ashley Smith
A National Crime and Shame Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Published: 2014
- How Cars Drive Inequality
An Exclusive Form of Travel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Studies show that in car oriented cities are poor are less likely to rise the socioeconomic ladder than in transit and pedestrian oriented cities.
- How Chavez Changed History for the Better
A New Kind of Socialism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Hugo Chavez's impact on Venezuela.
- How Does the Subaltern Speak?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Vivek Chibber argues that postcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of Enlightenment universalism at its own peril. Focusing particularly on the strain of postcolonial theory known as subaltern studies, Chibber makes a strong case for why we can -- and must -- conceptualize the non-Western world through the same analytical lens that we use to understand developments in the West. He offers a sustained defense of theoretical approaches that emphasize universal categories like capitalism and class. His work constitutes an argument for the continued relevance of Marxism in the face of some of its most trenchant critics.
- How Drug Courier Profiles Begot Terrorism Watch Lists
The Drug War and the Fourth Amendment Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 More than a million names are now included on the catch-all terrorist watch list maintained by U.S. government agencies.
- How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 As a feminist, I've always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world – more egalitarian, just and free. But lately I've begun to worry that ideals pioneered by feminists are serving quite different ends. I worry, specifically, that our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation.
- How Human Rights Watch Covers for Companies in Colombia
Down Where the Death Squads Live Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Human Rights Watch fails to name the names in its recent report on Colombia entitled, “The Risk of Returning Home, Violence and Threats against Displaced People Reclaiming Land in Colombia.” And, this is much to HRW’s discredit.
- How Israeli Apartheid is Coming Unstuck
Big Racists vs Little Racists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life for Jews and Arabs: land allocation and housing, citizenship rights, education, and employment.
- How not to grow a new town
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 For years the governments of Peru, and the municipality of Lima, had a working deal with rural migrants who flocked to the city: we'll plan the place, you build it, amenities will arrive. Then came the cheap neoliberal substitute of granting land titles -- and the speculation began.
- How Private Prisons Game the Immigration System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With huge profits at stake, CCA and the Geo Group are pushing discreetly for enforcement-heavy immigration reform.
- How should we remember Ralph Klein?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Ralph Klein was one of Canada's most aggressive neo-liberals. Klein's true legacy is a string of anti-social policies and programs.
- How the cops try to predict our next move
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 As civil dissent ramps up, UK secret police develop new modes of repression. Kevin Blowe reports on cops, kettles and a database profiling thousands of activists.
- How the FBI Turned Me On to Rare Books
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 I have wanted to be a historian of hope. We can take heart from the fact that no matter how dire the situation, some will find means to resist, some will find means to cope, and some will remember and tell stories about what happened.
- How Tides Canada Controls the Secret North American Tar Sands Coalition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mainstream environmental groups are being positioned to make a bad deal on the Tar Sands.
- How To Make India Safer For Women
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 What’s to be done to make India, a country where women are veneered in the temple and beaten at home, safer for women?
- How to Overthrow the Illuminati
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This article explores the creation, migration and refutation of the Illuminati theory.
- Hugo Chávez and me
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Tariq Ali's thoughts on how Hugo Chavez, the late president of Venezuela, will be remembered by his supporters as a lover of literature, a fiery speaker and a man who fought for his people and won.
- Hugo Chavez and the Revolutionary Imagination
A Benevolent Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Chavez was one of the most important voices for peace in Colombia – a country ravaged by over 50 years of civil war. The revolution Chavez led in Venezuela is, without exaggeration, the most benevolent one in human history.
- Human Rights Need Not Apply
America's Racist Links Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Americans, particularly Muslim Americans and Arab and Desi Americans have experienced overt discrimination first hand for over a decade.
- Humanity Imperiled: The Path To Disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That's been true since 1945. It's now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.
- I Am a Woman and a Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Intersectionality Theory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In the United States, during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a specific set of politics among the left reigns king. Today, you could go into any university, on any number of liberal-to-left blogs or news websites, and the words “identity” and “intersectionality” will jump out you as the hegemonic theory. But, like all theories, this corresponds to the activity of the working class in response to the current composition of capital.
- I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Forty-four years ago this month, in December 1969, I quit my job as a manager of a bookstore in New York City's Greenwich Village and began to write the Anarchist Cookbook. My motivation at the time was simple; I was being actively pursued by the US military, who seemed single-mindedly determined to send me to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam.
- "Identity”" -- the bane of the contemporary Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Historically, identitarian ideology is a product of the failure of the Left. The various forms of identity politics associated with the “new social movements” coming out of the New Left during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s (feminism, black nationalism, gay pride) were themselves a reaction, perhaps understandable, to the miserable failure of working-class identity politics associated with Stalinism coming out of the Old Left during the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s (socialist and mainstream labor movements). Working-class identity politics — admittedly avant la lettre — was based on a crude, reductionist understanding of politics that urged socialists and union organizers to stay vigilant and keep on the lookout for “alien class elements.” Any and every form of ideological deviation was thought to be traceable to a bourgeois or petit-bourgeois upbringing. One’s political position was thought to flow automatically and mechanically from one’s social position, i.e. from one’s background as a member of a given class within capitalist society.
- If U.S. Mass Media Were State-Controlled, Would They Look Any Different?
Snowden Coverage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Edward Snowden leaks have revealed a U.S. corporate media system at war with independent journalism. Many of the same outlets that missed the Wall Street meltdown and cheer-led the Iraq invasion have come to resemble state-controlled media outlets in their near-total identification with the government.
- Immigration and Racial Bias
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The immigrant debate, once again at the center of U.S. politics, was accelerated by the success of president Obama winning more than 70% of the Latino and Asian vote in the 2012 elections. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s call for all 11 million undocumented immigrants to "self deport" was a significant reason for his defeat. Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the country -- and growing rapidly -- and more and more of them vote.
- Immigration "Reform"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Some thoughts on the U.S. Senate's tortuous immigration reform bill.
- Immigration Reform: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The introduction of “immigration reform” legislation is a tribute first and foremost to the heroic activism of proud “Undocumented and Afraid” youth coming forward to demand their rights and refusing to live in the shadows.
- The Implacable Russell Maroon Shoatz
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of Maroon the Implacable The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz
- Improve your privacy and security on the Internet using Tor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This user manual contains information about how to download Tor, how to use it, and what to do if Tor is unable to connect to the network
- In 2011 the dacha gardens of Russia produced 40% of the nation's food.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 While many in the world are completely dependent on large scale agriculture, the Russian people feed themselves. Their agricultural economy is small scale, predominantly organic and in the capable hands of the nation's people. It's not just a hobby but a massive contribution to Russia's agriculture.
- In Blow to 'No Fly' List, US Judge Rules Air Travel Is a Right
Precedent Could Allow Fliers to Contest Travel Bans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 US District Judge Anna Brown ruled that the ability to travel internationally by airplane is a constitutionally protected right.
- In Defence of Diversity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An essay on immigration.
- In Defense of Amira Hass
Claiming the Right of Resistance Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Amira Hass is a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. She reports on Palestinian affairs in the occupied territories and, over the years, has come to understand the Palestinians’ plight from their own point of view.
- In Home Gardens, Income and Food for Urban Poor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A slowly but steadily growing phenomenon in Jordan, urban agriculture has vast potential for reducing poverty and improving food security, and it has the added benefit of greening and cleaning up more rundown sections of cities.
- In Spain they are all indignados nowadays
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The indignado protests that flared up two years ago have become a Spanish state of mind.
- Indefensible design: the high social costs of 'security'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The pedlars of gates, alarms and CCTV have an ever-growing business. It’s the community that pays.
- Independent Politics and Self-Determination
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A inteview with Chokwe Lumumba about a project combining community organizing and electoral efforts in a changing South.
- India - buried under stinking rubbish heaps
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Under the 'Incredible India' brand lurk millions of fast-growing piles of decomposing waste. As they await removal, polluting waters and stinking under the tropical sun, India is rapidy becoming the world's biggest rubbish dump.
- India: Growing Inequality and Destructive Development
Misery for the Many, Benefits for the Few Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Under the careful guidance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund the Indian government has for the last twenty years or so, embraced market liberalization and the global market; garlanded corporations with all manner of subsidies and damned the poor to greater poverty, destitution, suffering and, suicide in the case of farmers.
- India is taking acid attacks more seriously
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Women campaign for courts and public to take notice of impact of devastating assaults.
- India : The United Tea Workers Front (UTWF) launched to break a vicious circle of poverty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The United Tea Workers Front (UTWF) has been launched, primarily to raise the issue of a living wages and related matters in the forthcoming wage negotiations in North Bengal.
- The Indiana "Subversion" Case 50 Years Later
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The case of the Bloomington Three began at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis with updates on the case appearing in the state and national press for several years. Alan Wald assesses the case as a foreshadowing of the mass radicalization of the late 1960s.
- Indians, Leftists, and Rebellion in Bolivia - review
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia' by Jeffery Webber.
- Inside Avaaz - can online activism really change the world?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With 30 million members, Avaaz is an organisation with ambitions to save us all through technology.
- Inside Bahrain After the Crackdown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An interview with Nada Alwadi, one of the journalists who reported honestly about the events on the streets of Manama, Bahrain’s capital, and in the rest of the small kingdom. She founded the Bahraini Press Association as a vehicle to fight for the right of journalists to report stories freely.
- Inside the Capitalist Crisis
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The bi-partisan austerity offensive — corresponding to the logical of capitalist profitability and accumulation — continues.
- Inside the Corporate University
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Recent corporate transformation of the university, the profit-driven research orientation and the direction of instruction to the requirements of the private sector discourages faculty from finding common cause with other constituencies. The article looks into problems of neoliberal university and how to help create a genuine university community.
- Inside the International Socialist Organization
Putting the Sect Into Sectarian Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Intellectual conformity in such groups is not a function of bureaucratic measures such as expulsion. It is all about peer pressure.
- The Institutionalization of Tyranny
When Victory Has Nothing to do With Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.
- The Internet, Capitalism, and the State - Book Review
A Review of Robert McChesney's "Digital Disconnect" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Robert McChesney's Digital Disconnect is an account of the internet's history and likely future within the context of corporate-dominated U.S. society.
- Internet Hackers and the Real Threat They Expose
Government and Corporations are the Real Problem Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There were nearly ten major cyber attacks in August 2013 against very prominent targets such as The New York Times.
- Interview: Agriculture, class and capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Henry Bernstein, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, has for decades been at the forefront of research into the class structure and political economy of agriculture.
- Invitation to a Hanging
Pity the Executioner Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A recently filed lawsuit suggests Texas execution officials were forced to engage in illegal activities in order to obtain a death dealing drug.
- Iron Cagebook
The Logical End of Facebook's Patents Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Is there a White Skin Privilege?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The idea that all whites are privileged at the expense of Blacks is popular on the left -- but Bill Mullen makes the case that Marxism offers a better understanding of racism.
- Israel Has Been 'Singled Out' in the US for a Very Long Time
To whom much is given, much is expected Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The American Studies Association, the umbrella organization of academics devoted to the study of US literature, history and culture, recently voted to join the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
- Israeli Property Theft is Nothing New
Is the Custodian of Absentee Property Awaiting the Absentees? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Israel's Indigenous Invaders
How Israel Justifies the Immanent Relocation of Thousands of Palestinian Bedouin by Characterizing Them as Invaders Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 If implemented, the “Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev” will expel an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current homes.
- Israel's New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 About 60,000 African migrants have arrived in Israel since 2006, fleeing unrest in their home countries. But upon arrival in the ostensibly democratic country, the migrants have faced intense persecution and have been branded as "infiltrators" by right-wing politicians and activists.
- Istanbul's Shameful May Day
Silencing the Masses Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 "I was walking through the streets of Istanbul. Smoke and tear-gas bombs were exploding everywhere and people were running, pursued by police in riot gear". I lay for a while analysing my dream. It was May the first – International Workers’ Day.
- It's Time to Put an End to Israel's "Don't ask-don't tell" Nuclear Policy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Israel and its allies in the U.S. Congress continue to lobby against a deal that would meet Iran in the middle, insisting on a “zero-enrichment” policy that is a deal-breaker for Iran.
- Jailed by Israel for his cartoons, Mohammad Saba’aneh speaks out
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mohammad Saba’aneh, who has a daily cartoon in the Palestinian newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida, has published his work in newspapers across the Arab world. His cartoons are decidedly political, frequently criticizing Israel, the Palestinian Authority and mainstream Palestinian political parties. Targeted by Israeli occupation authorities for the opinions expressed in his art, he was arrested by Israeli occupation forces, and jailed.
- James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Hansen has provided the starting point for a realistic climate-change exit strategy aimed at keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 2°C (3.6° F), an amount that constitutes the planetary tipping point with respect to climate change.
- Japan's post-Fukushima 'secrecy' clampdown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Japan's secrecy law, just passed by parliament, gives the government carte blanche to designate state secrets - and restrict information about anything it likes.
- Jeremy Hammond's Court Statement Upon Being Sentenced To 10 Years In Jail
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to ten years in prison for hacking Stratfor communications, then releasing information to Wikileaks. This is his statement.
- Jerry Tucker, 1938-2012
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Jerry Tucker died last October 19, 2012 of pancreatic cancer, at age 73. A passionate advocate of workers’ rights, his career in the labor officialdom was hindered by his investing greater loyalty in the workers he represented than in the organizations for which he worked.
- Job makes us sick
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Corporations blame individual workers for their own state of health, which in reality is adversely impacted by unsafe work conditions individual workers have little or no control over. When management puts austerity and cost-cutting ahead of well-being, individual human beings pay the price.
- Johanna Lawrenson: Organizing on the Run
Lawrenson and Partner Abbie Hoffman Ran the Guantlet of US Law Enforcement to Organize for Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In 1978, Johanna Lawrenson launched a social movement with a fugitive. Her partner was Abbie Hoffman, an experienced organizer who at the time was wanted by the FBI.
- Journalistic Malpractice at the Post and the Times
Rejecting the Offer of Evidence of US War Crimes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Wikileaks source Bradley Manning is evidence that the USA’s two leading news organizations, the Washington Post and the New York Times, are not willing to report critically of the government.
- Jousting With Toothpicks - The Case For Challenging Corporate Journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A critic responding to a recent alert objected to our use of the term 'corporate journalist'. In fact the meaning of 'corporate journalist' could hardly be clearer: it describes someone paid to write for a corporation.
- Judging workers for control and profit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The computer with its air of objectivity has come to dominate human beings. The usurping of human judgment pervades all of society, from healthcare and education to manufacturing and the judicial sphere. Human empathy and understanding have been replaced by automated thinking that mimics the computer. Reclaiming our own minds is a step towards human freedom.
- Just the Beginning of Canada's Filthy Tar Sands
A Qualitative Jump Down a Black Hole Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The technology used in Canada's tar sands will be used to open up other potential oil deposits that could more than double all know oil reserves. The disaster threatens to keep expanding.
- Just winning next election not enough for Liberals or NDP
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 if there is a new government, it will come to power with the extreme right wing more entrenched than ever before.... Aggressive organizations are determined to maintain policies that tend to reward the rich and penalize the rest of us.
- Kalahari Bushmen unite to end oppression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Representatives of the Basarwa or Bushman peoples of Botswana step up their fight to end structural oppression of their communities.
- A Kangaroo in Obama's Court
Will the Guantánamo Tribunal Execute a Man We Tortured? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Can a tribunal born of an impatient contempt for due process prove itself a legitimate institution of American law? On trial by military commission at Guantánamo's courtroom.
- The Katrina Pain Index, 2013
New Orleans Eight Years Later Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Eight years after Katrina, New Orleans has lost about 86,000 people, and the city remains incredibly poor.
- Keystone and Humanity's Fate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With the desicion looming for the Keystone XL pipeline, what's really at stake for climate change, for human civilization, and for the environmental movement that's fighting to save the future? That tar sands development may determine "game over for the climate, in the phrase of NASA scientist and climate researcher James Hansen, is illustrated by data provided by environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben.
- Keystone XL Activists Labeled Possible Eco-Terrorists
Green Scare Continues Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 TransCanada has colluded with an FBI/DHS Fusion Center in Nebraska, labeling non-violent activists as possible candidates for “terrorism” charges and other serious criminal charges.
- Kill Anything That Moves
The Real American War in Vietnam Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Turse demonstrates that violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the American war against Vietnam. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to "kill anything that moves."
- The Kill Team
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2013 An account of the aftermath of one American soldier's decision to turn whistleblower after his involvment in the Maywand District murders during the War in Afghanistan.
- Killing Civilians to Protect Civilians
The Warped Logic of the Syrian Bombing Mission Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Obama administration will reportedly launch a military strike which would invariably kill civilians for the purpose of showing the Syrian government that killing civilians is wrong
- The Killings Fields of Gaza
Asymmetric Warfare Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Revelations from Israeli sources such as ‘Breaking the Silence’ and ‘Physicians for Human Rights-Israel’ that the Israeli assaults on Gaza in 2008/9 (Cast Lead) and 2012 (Pillars of Defence) were planned many months ahead pose many questions about the real motives for the seven year siege and these massive attacks on a helpless concentration of impoverished and imprisoned people.
- Kosovo: Where NATO Bombing Only Made the Killing Worse
The Big Lie: From Serbia to Syria Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The NATO powers brandished the charge of genocide as justification for the bombing that destroyed much of Serbia’s economy and killed around 2,000 civilians, with elevated death levels predicted for years to come.
- Labor and the Locavore
The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Gray examines one of the most vibrant local food economies in the country, the Hudson Valley. Based on more than a decade's in-depth interviews with workers, farmers, and others, the author depicts how the currency of agrarian values can serve to mask the labour concerns of an already hidden workforce.
- Labor's Bitter Defeat in Detroit, Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor by Chris Rhomberg.
- LAPD Chickens Come Home to Roost
Why I'm More Scared of the Cops Than I Am of Christopher Dorner Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- The Last American Newspaper
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Nostalgia is a particularly Bostonian pastime, and now almost anyone who ever set foot in that city over the past half-decade has another trigger for melancholy. The Boston Phoenix is dead, boys and girls. The Phoenix wasn’t merely the newspaper where I worked in my thirties. It was the place that gave me the time, space and freedom to evolve into who I would become for the rest of my life.
- The Last Post Files: Fighting subversion or protecting the government from embarrassment?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Last Post was one of the best alternative publications of the 1970s. While the small team of journalists was creating solid investigative journalism, the RCMP Security Service was keeping a close watch. One of its aims? Protect the government from embarrassment.
- Last Sparks From Tahrir Square
Tahrir Square Died, But Not the Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Once again, the prisons of Egypt are full. The hospitals are overflowing with injured men and women. But the fight, the ‘process’ goes on; it is not dying. Tahrir Square died, but the revolution is getting stronger.
- Laura Flanders talks to Gar Alperovitz about What Then Must We Do?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Alperovitz says we may be witnessing the prehistory of the next American Revolution.
- Lawlessness is the New Normal
The Lust for Washington's Money Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 No country has been willing to stand up to Washington and to give Snowden asylum.
- Learning to struggle: my story between workerism and feminism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An account of an Italian Marxist feminist's experiences and development in the autonomist and feminist movements in Italy in the 1970s.
- The Left and Immigration
A Major Challenge for a Different Vision of the European Union Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 After the latest drama in Lampedusa, where more than 350 immigrants, mostly Eritreans, perished 600 metres from the Italian coast, the immigration policies of the European Union and its member states are more than ever under scrutiny.
- The Left in British Columbia
A History of Struggle Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 This comprehensive history of the left in British Columbia from the late nineteenth century to the present explores the successes and failures of individuals and organizations striving to make a better world.
- Left Out History - review
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power' by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy.
- "Left Reformism" and socialist strategy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Rooksby talks about the renewed interest in radical left "big picture" questions of socialist strategy that represents a return to "important debates of the left largely absent over the last three decades." The major factors driving this are several years of deep capitalist crisis together with the almost total capitulation of social democratic parties across Europe to the austerity agenda, opening up a clear space to the left of these organisations.
- Left reformism, the state and the problem of socialist politics today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Blackledge claims that, while it is of the first importance that revolutionaries welcome and work alongside these coalitions, it is also imperative that we maintain our political independence from them so that we are better able to struggle for an alternative beyond the limitations of their politics. This perspective demands a clear analysis of the nature of reformism.
- Lenin On The Need For Political Compromise
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Considering the nature of compromises and how to deal with them.
- Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder revisited
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Lenin’s famous pamphlet holds the key to unlocking the reasons why the October 1917 Russian Revolution failed to spread to the more advanced industrial countries in Europe.
- Gerda Lerner, 1920-2013
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Gerda Lerner has been the single most influential figure in the development of women’s and gender history since the 1960s.
- Lessons from small shop organizing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A significant amount of organizing experience in the IWW comes from working in relatively small workplaces such as stand-alone single shops or franchises of multiple smaller shops. These places present their own set of difficulties and opportunities.
- Lessons From the Working Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Acuna tries not to romanticize the working class, but he considers them his teachers.
- Lessons of the Snowden Revelations
You are the Target! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We in the Left have long worried about “police state tactics”. Now we have to confront the police state structure. It’s here and it can morph into a real police state with very little effort. Opposing and dismantling it should now be among our top priorities.
- Let the Fire Burn
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 A history of the conflict of the City of Philadelphia and the Black Liberation organization, MOVE, that led to the disastrously violent final confrontation in 1985.
- Let the People Know
Put Full Texts of Government Contracts Online Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Openness in our government is essential for a healthy democracy
- Lettuce Wars
Ten Years of Work and Struggle in The Fields of California Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 An account of ten years working as a farmworker in California and participating in the struggles over wages, working conditions, and unionization.
- Librarians and Palestine
An Interview with Vani Natarajan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Working to preserve Palestinian records and memory in the face of deliberate destruction by Israel.
- Libya's Hell, Enabled by Canadian Humanitarians
Who Will Protect Libyans Now? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 One of the darkest and most shameful chapters in Western military intervention continues to play out in spades in Libya. Recent news from Benghazi revealed that one of the (literally hundreds) of murderous militias opened fire on peaceful, white-flag-bearing protesters (protesting militias), killing at least 20 and wounding over 130.
- A Life Beyond Imagination - review of Searching for Sugar Man
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of “Searching for Sugar Man”, Malik Bendjelloul directing.
- Lincoln: A Review
Civil War, Not Compromise, Smashed Slavery Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Lincoln—Steven Spielberg’s new movie reduces the abolition of slavery to so many parliamentary maneuvers.
- Lineages of Revolt
Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 While the outcomes of the tumultuous uprisings that continue to transfix the Arab world remain uncertain, the root causes of rebellion persist. Drawing upon extensive empirical research, Lineages of Revolt tracks the major shifts in the region’s political economy over recent decades.
- Lobbying Elites: The Fast Track To Extinction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 As we evaluate the outcomes of the recent UN climate negotiations in Warsaw, one lesson that we are invited to learn, again, relates to our strategy for getting effective action taken on the ongoing climate catastrophe and other critical environmental.
- Lobbyists for the havens: ICIJ's guide to the offshore system's defenders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Across the world, tax havens are under attack. Leading global organizations like the G20 and OECD have put cracking down on offshore tax avoidance at the top of their agendas. Ambitious plans for automatic sharing of tax data between countries are in the works.
- Location Tracking: A Pervasive Problem in Modern Technology
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 NSA is tracking people around the Internet and the physical world. These newly-revealed techniques hijacked personal information that was being transmitted for some commercial purpose, converting it into a tool for surveillance. One technique involved web cookies, while another involved mobile apps disclosing their location to location-based services.
- The Lockdown Society Goes Primetime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Michael Schwalbe ponders the influence on society of incorporating authoritarian jargon into everyday use, with specific reference to the use of 'Lock down' normalizing the concept of restrictions on movement in non-prison situations.
- The Logic behind Mass Spying: Empire and Cyber Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Revelations about the long-term global, intrusive spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other allied intelligence apparatuses have provoked widespread protests and indignation and threatened ties between erstwhile imperial allies.
- Looking Inside the Education Crisis
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of The Future of our Schools:Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner.
- Louisiana's For-Profit Prisons
How Long Jail Sentences for Trivial Offences Enrich Local Sheriffs' and Police Departments Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In Louisiana, writing a cheque that bounces still carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, and the minimum sentence for a repeat burglary offender is 24 years without parole.
- Louisiana's profitable prisons
Inside America Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Long jail sentences for trivial offences enrich local sheriffs' and police departments in the state of Louisiana -- and keep the local economy going.
- Madagascar: At the Bottom of the Capitalist Abyss
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Madagascar is a country still too little known today and yet, in many ways, it is an emblematic victim of contemporary capitalist pillage. Set in the Indian Ocean, the size of France, with a population of more than 20 million people, Madagascar shows symptoms of advanced general degradation.
- Madiba in Palestine
Apartheid Died on the Sharp Edge of Principles Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The profound political ties between Palestinians and South Africans are quite strong, matched, perhaps, only by the deep connections to the black freedom movement in the U.S. Madiba’s death has generated an outpouring of mourning and remembrance from Palestinian activists.
- Mali, Wahabis, and Saudis
Following the Money Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The impact of the Wahabi movement in Mali.
- The Man the Media Loved to Hate
The US Press and Hugo Chavez Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Chávez was a “classic petro-dictator”, a “charismatic demagogue” whose chosen successor guaranteed “that the combination of buffoonery and thuggery that Chávez pioneered will continue past his grave.”
- Mandela the radical
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Nelson Mandela will be celebrated principally for the dignity with which he emerged onto the world stage after decades in prison and for the forgiveness that he displayed towards his former enemies in forging a democratic, multi-racial South Africa from the poisoned legacy of apartheid.
- The Mandela Years in Power
Did He Jump or Was He Pushed? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 South Africa's democratization was profoundly compromised by an intra-elite economic deal that, for most people, worsened poverty, unemployment, inequality and ecological degradation, while also exacerbating many racial, gender and geographical differences.
- Mandela's art of 'understanding the enemy'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A senior correspondent reflects on decades of covering the savvy political operator who became an African icon.
- Mandela's Long Walk To Freedom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Mandela's Paradoxes Made His Journey Even Greater
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mandela was in it to win it. He sought concrete, historic and “big” change, knew that it could not be achieved without the support of public opinion, and proved expertly flexible in, through trial and error, discovering what worked and what did not work, and embracing what did work.
- Marching to Jerusalem
Searching for Dignity in Occupied East Jerusalem Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 46 years ago, Israel seized East Jerusalem. Since then, Israel has undertaken measures to restrict Palestinian movement.
- Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The rediscovery over the last decade and a half of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift has come to be seen by many on the left as offering a powerful critique of the relation between nature and contemporary capitalist society. The result has been the development of a more unified ecological world view transcending the divisions between natural and social science, and allowing us to perceive the concrete ways in which the contradictions of capital accumulation are generating ecological crises and catastrophes.
- Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 A study devoted exclusively to Marx's perspectives on gender and the family.
- Marxism and Anarchism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Remarks in our meeting in the London Anarchist Bookfair.
- Marxism and women's oppression today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Times reflect how much in society in relation to women has changed, but also how much appears to have stayed the same.
- Marxism as if the planet mattered
A Return to Marx's Ecological Critique Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels held that capitalism inevitably tears apart the natural conditions that sustain life. They argued capitalism's exploitation of working people, and the unsustainable exploitation of nature, were linked and part of the same process.
- Marxism, ecology and human history
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Land and Labour: An important new book explores humanity’s contradictory relationship with the environment: our role in destroying nature, and our potential to for positive change.
- Marxism and "Subaltern Studies"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of Vivek Chibber's book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.
- Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 In contrast to the traditional view that Marx's work is restricted to a critique of capitalism – and that he consciously avoided any detailed conception of its alternative – this work shows that Marx was committed to a specific concept of a post-capitalist society which informed the whole of his approach to political economy.
- Massacres That Matter - Part 1 - 'Responsibility To Protect' In Egypt, Libya And Syria
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Where offending states fail to live up to this responsibility by inflicting genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity on their own people, the international community has a responsibility to act.
- May 5, 1818: Birth of Karl Marx
Seeds of Fire Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Marx breathes dialectics and revolution. For Marx, radicalism means going to the root, and Marx's radicalism seeks to go to the root of capitalism, to comprehend its essence dialectically, to understand its inherent contradictions - and the seeds of revolution it contains.
- Mayday, the 8-hour movement and the Knights of Labor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Jeremy Brecher's account of the growth of the Knights of Labor union in the US, the agitation for a maximum 8-hour working day and the Chicago Haymarket events of 1886.
- Media Control and Indoctrination in the United States
An Interview With Catherine Komp Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An excerpt from the just released 2nd edition of Noam Chomsky’s OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity.
- Media Gets Targeted by Obama, Discovers No One Cares Except the Media
Welcome to the Freakshow Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The news media has a role to play and it’s not entertainment. Instead of informing people what their government is doing abroad, news organizations are making up fiction about food stamps breaking the budget and digging through Michael Jackson’s grave.
- The Mekong must run free!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Mekong is among Southeast Asia's greatest rivers, sustaining tens of millions from its abundant fisheries and its floodwaters which both irrigate and fertilise. But Nature's bounty, and beauty, are at risk from a series of 11 dams.
- Memory and Repression in El Salvador
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The raid on Pro-Busqueda happened three days after the Salvadorean Supreme Court heard testimony from survivors of a 1982 raid carried out by government forces.
- Mental Illness in the Workplace
It Still Haunts Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Metadata - your files talk for you
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Few Internet users are aware that many file formats contain hidden data, or metadata. Text processing files or PDFs are likely to contain the name of the author, the date and time of the creation of the file, and often even part of its editing history.
- The Metaphors of Movements - review
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Guerillas in the Industrial Jungle: Radicalism’s Primitive and Industrial Rhetoric' by Ursula McTaggart.
- Mexico in Labor's Crucible
Book Review of Roman and Arregui's "Continental Crucible" and Gomez's "The Collapse of Dignity" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 These two books deal in important and interesting ways with the question of building a real labour movement throughout North America.
- Mexico's war on drugs is one big lie
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Anabel Hernández, journalist and author, accuses the Mexican state of complicity with the cartels, and says the 'war on drugs' is a sham. She's had headless animals left at her door and her family have been threatened by gunmen.
- A Microcosm of the Nation - Control Unit Prisons
Out of Control Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Out of Control: A Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons' by Nancy Kurshan.
- Migrant laborers building 2022 World Cup facilities worked to death in Qatar
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Deprived of their pay for months at a time, migrant construction workers building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar are being worked to death under slave labour conditions.
- Migrant Workers Fight Exploitation in New Zealand
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Unite Union has dealt with several cases of extreme exploitation of migrant workers. It seems that some of the liquor shops around Auckland have been employing students from India and paying a pittance four or five dollars an hour, well below the legal minimum of $13.75 an hour.
- Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia
Killed Beaten Raped Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With few opportunities at home, millions of poor, desperate men and women from South East Asia and the horn of Africa migrate annually to Saudi Arabia. Vulnerable at home and vulnerable abroad where many are enslaved and badly abused, some killed.
- Migration and Morality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Paul Collier's book Exodus has been welcomed as a humane and rational intervention in an often toxic debate. It seems to tell us more about the character of the contemporary immigration debate than it does about the merits of Collier’s arguments.
- A Militant, "Minority" Union?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 At the AFL-CI0 convention in Los Angeles in September 2013, a small group of rank-and-file workers managed to alter the convention agenda -- by threatening to protest the presence of Kaiser Permanente, which happens to be their employer.
- Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 This book is about a group of Mississaugans that few people who live in Mississauga, Ontario, today are likely familiar with. The people profiled are none other than a handful of the original inhabitants of much of the land that is now covered by the sprawling city of more than seven hundred thousand people in the Greater Toronto Area.
- Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence
In a World Without Privacy, There Are No Exemptions for Our Spies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America's spymasters had made just that mistake. If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks -- which began in June and clearly won’t stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence. At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other. In fact, at the moment Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be.
- Mkhuseli "Khusta" Jack and the Art of the Boycott
27 Years Later, a South African Organizer Looks Back at a Tactic that Hastened the End of Apartheid Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A key figure in organizing a consumer boycott was the young South African Mkhuseli (Khusta) Jack, who recently discussed his experiences in that campaign with students and professors assembled for the 2013 Narco News Authentic School of Journalism.
- Mongolia, Canada, Israel & the United States
Colonialism, Mining and Oil Shale: Don't Let the Genie Out of the Bottle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Genie Energy announces a deal they struck with the Petroleum Authority of Mongolia.
- Monsanto: Contamination By All Means Necessary
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 What happens when you allow commercial interests free rein over a nation state's food and agricultural policies? Consumers and farmers end up paying the price.
- Monsanto is buying up non-gmo seed companies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A positive trend in recent years is the growing number of gardening enthusiasts choosing to plant gardens using organic and/or heirloom seeds.
- Monsanto, the TPP and Global Food Dominance
Putting Profits Before Populations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.
- Monsanto vs. Vernon Bowman's Farm
The Fiction of Intellectual Property Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Monsanto’s entire case against Vernon Bowman — as with Percy Schmeiser — is that their profits will be negatively affected if they’e not empowered to dictate what Vernon Bowman does on his own land and with his own stuff. The relief they’re requesting is that the state should therefore so empower them.
- Montreal revolutionaries, Canadian security and race: An interview with author David Austin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Recently, Montreal writer David Austin published Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, a groundbreaking work that details the significant breadth and scope of Black Power activism in Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s.
- Moving Beyond Keystone XL
Direct Action on Line 9 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Line 9, which is a pipeline that moves oil west towards Sarnia and the refining facilities there, is where a group of people walked onto the Canadian energy corporation Enbridge’s North Westover pumping station and occupied the facility on June 20th, 2013.
- Mundurukú Indians in Brazil Protest Tapajós Dams
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 10 Mundurukú chiefs and 30 warriors made the trek to the capital of Brazil to demand the demarcation of their territory and the right to prior consultation in order to block the Tapajós hydroelectric dam, which could flood several of their villages.
- Murdoch's Politics
How One Man's Thirst For Wealth and Power Shapes our World Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 McKnight tracks Murdoch's influence, from his support for Reagan and Thatcher, his deal with Tony Blair and attacks on Barack Obama. He examines the secretive corporate culture of News Corporation: its private political seminars for editors, its support for think tanks and its global campaigns on issues like Iraq and climate change.
- Museum of the World and Image
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Challenges the "official narrative" that re-writes the Civil War as a struggle of "national security" against an "internal communist threat," manifested in the form of unions, student groups, human rights and refugee organizations, progressive Christian base communities, and the peasant insurgency of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
- My Years at Wal-Mart
Making One Do the Work of Three Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Wal-Mart is but the largest wave in a rising tide, and, unless we stand together, united and with dignity, as a great levy for justice to hold and push it back, this tide threatens to drown us all.
- "Não Nos Representam!" A Left Beyond the Workers Party?
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2013 Larrabure identifies why the participatory budgeting strategy of Brazil's Worker's Party and the city's government failed to decentralize unequality in land ownership and the economy, resulting in mass protests and demonstrations by the public.
- Narcoland
The Mexican Drug Lords And Their Godfathers Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Hernández explains how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. She reveals the mind-boggling depth of corruption in Mexico's government and business elite.
- Narcs Versus Big Pharma
Behind the Meth Curtain Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Communities in the heartland of America are fighting an epidemic of methamphetamine labs.
The driving force behind the scourge? Big Pharma.
- The National Security State Exposed
Obama v. Snowden Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Snowden disclosed orders demanding that all of the nation’s internet providers allow for secretly conducted, and ongoing government sweep of phone calls, audio and video chats, e-mails, photographs, and other communications used daily by American citizens.
- NATO Sets Its Sights on Colombia
Trouble Brewing in South America Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Colombian Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón and the Deputy Secretary-General of NATO, Alexander Vershbow, signed an Agreement on the Security of Information which include future collaboration in matters of security, and facilitates the participation of Colombia in a number of NATO activities.
- Needed: 5% Participation to Overthrow Crony Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Erica Chenoweth, author of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, explains how to overthrow U.S. crony capitalism: “In raw numbers, movements generally achieve systematic change (i.e., in the +80% likelihood category) when they mobilize over 5 percent of the population. The Iranian Revolution, among the largest popular uprisings, achieved about 10 percent mobilization. In the US with 311 million people, this would mean between 15.5 million and 31.1 million people.”
- Negar la cobertura de salud a los trabajadores migrantes lesionados es vergonzoso
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Nelson Mandela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mandela was not alone. The struggle to liberate South Africa was a collective effort. Moreover it was the power of the most downtrodden, the workers in the factories, the poor in the community, working class women and youth that brought the Apartheid government, if not completely to its knees – at least to negotiate the terms of the end of their racist system.
- Nelson Mandela: A Dissenting Opinion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order. As I suspect Mandela realised only too well, one cannot lead a revolution when there are no followers.
- The New "Politics from Below"
Book review of Raul Zibechi's "Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Zibechi's "Territories in Resistance" centres on the practices in Latin American movements, such as the Zapatistas and the Landless Workers Movement, analysing their strengths and weaknesses over time vis-à-vis the central governments that they helped bring to power.
- The New Commune-ist Manifesto
Workers of the World, It Really Is Time to Unite Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 The book starts with a question: If Karl Marx were alive today and asked to write a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, how would it be different from the original, composed 165 years ago?
- New report documents "a living death" in US prisons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a massive report that meticulously documents the unconstitutional practice of life imprisonment without parole in federal and state prisons in the US.
- New wave of attacks on freedom of information
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With the trial of former president Mohamed Morsi and major leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood under wa, Egyptian media workers are targets of attack. Freedom of information is threatened. Measures include military trials, arbitrary arrests, and abusive treatment in detention as Egyptian authorities maintain their campaign of repression.
- The New Worker Organizing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Many, perhaps most, worker center–based organizing projects focused on workers in low-wage jobs, are conducted with the active support and, often enough, leadership provided by a variety of community-based organizations—with support from one or more unions.
- New York Times, Obamacare and the war on the elderly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 “On Dying After Your Time” by Daniel Callahan advances the notion that the burning issue vexing the US health care system is that people are living too long. The cost of keeping them alive, Callahan argues, is threatening a social catastrophe.
- The nightmare hidden within liberal Zionism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Since the American Studies Association (ASA) announced this month that its members had voted overwhelmingly to endorse the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, the predictable outpouring of furious responses has been proliferating.
- The Nine-Hour Movement
How civil disobedience made unions legal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 From today’s strike-first strategy of fast food workers in America, to the 1965 postal workers wildcat which ushered in public sector collective bargaining, civil disobedience has long been essential to breaking through legal barriers imposed on workers. The birth of Canada's labour movement was during a movement of mass civil disobedience in attempt to secure the nine hour workday.
- No Easy Victories
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In today's "new Middle East" with its cauldron of Arab upheavals and the likelihood of longterm revolutionary processes, the United States cannot dictate terms unilaterally.
- No Land No Food No Life
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 A film which explores sustainable small scale agriculture and the urgent call for an end to corporate global land grabs. This feature length documentary gives voice to those directly affected by combining personal stories, and vérite footage of communities fighting to retain control of their land.
- The No-Nonsense Guide to Degrowth and Sustainability
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Published: 2014 This No-Nonsense Guide looks deeper into the idea of economic growth – to trace its history and understand why it has become so unchallengeable and powerful.
- Noam Chomsky - Everyday Anarchist
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Interview with Noam Chomsky.
- None of the world's top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The notion of "externalities" refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. Roberts argues that, although the term is useful in folding ecological concerns into economics, it has its downsides.
- Northern Freedom Chronicles - book review
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of 'Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North' by Thomas J. Sugrue.
- The "Not so Bright" Protégés and the Comrades that "Never Quarreled"
C.L.R. James's Disputes on Labor's Self-Emancipation and the Political Economy of Colonial Freedom Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Surveying C.L.R. James's shifting and evolving views on the making of national liberation struggles, whether in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, Eric Williams’s Trinidad, or Toussaint L'Ouverture's Haiti, which he was associated as anti-colonial activist and independent socialist historian, may lead observers to conclude he was either inconsistent in defending his most cherished ideals or, alternatively, strategically minded in specific historical moments.
- The Not-So-Secret History of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This is a coda to my review of Paul Collier’s book Exodus. I questioned the moral and social arguments that Collier employs to justify his arguments, and suggested that there is often a chasm between that evidence and Collier’s more contentious arguments, while many of his policy prescriptions are morally questionable.
- A Novel of Class Struggle & Romance
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'The Gleaming Archway' by A.M. Stephen.
- The NSA and the Infrastructure of the Surveillance State
In Search of Real Liberty Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The NSA’s surveillance and data-gathering activities illustrate the extent to which US intelligence seeks “full-spectrum dominance” in cyberspace.
- The NSA Apologists
It's Not Snowden Who Betrayed Us Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The NSA controversy is about whether we should trust people with institutional power.
- NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.
- The NSA Has Effectively Destroyed Internet Privacy
Snowden's Latest Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Whistle-blower Edward Snowden prove that the NSA, working with its British counterpart the Government Communications Headquarters has conducted an intentional and largely sucessful campaign to destroy all privacy on the Internet.
- NSA Turns Cookies (And More) Into Surveillance Beacons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 These Google cookies - known as 'PREF' cookies - last two years and can uniquely identify you. The NSA is using this to enable remote exploitation (hacking into people’s computers) - an act aided by the ability to uniquely identify individuals on the Internet.
- The NSA's Invasion of Google and Yahoo Servers
Your Email is Likely Being Monitored Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The American National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting information coming in and out of Google and Yahoo servers over non-public, internal network fibre optic lines. In December, 2012 alone, the program (revealingly called “MUSCULAR”) processed 181,280,466 Google and Yahoo records that included email, searches, videos and photos.
- NSA's Path to Totalitarianism
Ever-Shrinking Democracy in America Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The American National Security Agency (NSA) appears as a “rogue” organization, extremism in the putative service of liberty. Or better, call it, stripped of all cosmetics, the unerring mark of a Police State, itself become identical with Fortress America, the National-Security State.
- The NSA's Spying Operation on Mexico
Systematic Eavesdropping on the Government Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The American NSA has been systematically eavesdropping on the Mexican government for years. Three major programs constitute a massive espionage operation against Mexico.
- The nuclear renaissance is stone cold dead
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 2013 has been the nuclear power industry's annus horribilis and the nuclear renaissance can now be pronounced stone cold dead. The industry is finding it increasingly difficult to profitably operate existing reactors - especially ageing reactors requiring refurbishments - let alone build new ones.
- Obama, African Americans and War on the Working Poor
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Malcom X's speech given nearly 50 years ago still remains valid today even in the age of the first African-American president and a sizable Congressional Black Caucus. While much has changed legally and socially -- upper-class African Americans can work and live almost anywhere if qualified -- much hasn’t changed for the working poor who are Black.
- Obama: Human Rights Disaster
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The presidency of Barack Obama has continued, consolidated and institutionalized the human rights catastrophe of its predecessor. It's frankly impossible to look at the string of atrocities without becoming enraged and it's also critical to understand why they're happening.
- Obama's Obscenities on Syria
Obama Offers No Evidence Assad was Behind Poison Gas Attack in Damascus, Yet Defends Unprovoked War Anyway Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 President Obama did not give any compelling evidence to prove that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was behind the alleged Sarin attack on residents of a suburb of Damascus.
- Obama's Sinister Crackdown on the Press
Detention of Greenwald Partner in London Clearly Came on US Orders Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 David Miranda was placed on such a watch list by the US because of his relationship with Greenwald and was detained and held, without access to a lawyer, for nine hours.
- Occupy Cincinnati as a Case Study
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Occupy Cincinnati was "an event, not a movement." It is argued that viewing Occupy — both in Cincinnati and nationally — as a movement, causes it to be seen as something that is now over, diminishing its significance.
- Occupy the Workplace - review
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present', edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini.
- Old-Fashioned Political Activism Doesn't Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 If you have ever read an article aiming to make you angry at some government or corporation by exposing some vile wrong-doing of it, then you've experienced at least one author's old-fashioned politcal activism. And if you've ever been asked by some organization, that avoids talking about the necessity and possibility of revolution, to attend a demonstration or sign a petition or vote against some particular governmental or corporate wrong-doing, then you've encountered an old-fashioned political activist organization. If you are, yourself, an old-fashioned political activist, as I once was, then this article is for you.
- On Assata Shakur
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In one of those all too frequent outrages where the facts of the case mean nothing, the FBI has placed political refugee Assata Shakur, now 65, who has lived in Cuba since receiving asylum there in 1984 following her prison escape, on its "fugitive terrorist" list. Among other things, this deprives "terrorism" of any specific meaning.
- On Being Watched in the 60s
When Police Power was Embraced as a Form of Government Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There would seem to be the notion that the Sixties were the product of immaculate conception. In fact, they were more an act of conversion, conversion of the isolated, unfocussed, dispersed and inarticulate alienation of the 1950s into a mass movement with common language, direction, and rules.
- On Buddhist Fundamentalism
Hollywood, Please Take Note Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Four years after the brutal assault on the Tamil population and the killing of between 8—10,000 Tamils by the Sri Lankan army, there is trouble again. The saffron-robed fanatics, led by the BBS — Bodu Bala Sena: the most active and pernicious of Buddhist fundamentalist groups that have sprouted in Sinhala strongholds throughout the island— are on the rampage again.
- On Democracy As A Good
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Is democracy good in itself? Exploring the impact of democracy during and after the Arab Spring.
- On Egypt
An interview with Gilbert Achcar Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An interview with Gilbert Achcar.
- On Syria Crisis and Prospects
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This article speculates and considers the probable outcomes and consequences that could result if a U.S. bombing campaign against Syria takes place.
- On the nature and causes of environmental violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We need a much broader definition of violence than is allowed for by limiting its meaning to a physical and immediate brutal act of aggression, and one that includes an environmental dimension.
- On the Perils of Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Barak Obama's September 10, 2013 address, originally meant to mobilize Congress in support of an authorization for using military force against Syria, turned into a "life-saving" speech for Obama avoiding embarrassment and political defeat.
- On the Side of the Road
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 Filmed over the course of five years, this documentary focuses on the collective Israeli denial about the expulsion and displacement of Palestinians in the wake of the 1948 war for independence.
- On the Warpath in Venezuela
Against the Bolivarian Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Nicolas Maduro won Venezuela’s presidential election in April by a slim margin, a result still unrecognized by the U.S. government. Opposition demonstrations quickly spread, killing 13 people. Now his government faces municipal elections on December 8, and engineered social turmoil has returned.
- On Western Terrorism from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Noam Chomsky, world-renowned dissident intellectual, discusses Western power and propaganda with filmmaker and investigative journalist Andre Vltchek. The discussion weaves together a historical narrative with the two men's personal experiences which led them to a life of activism.
- 150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation
Finish the Civil War! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Emancipation Proclamation was a pledge, a promise. It only freed slaves in areas that were not yet controlled by Union armies, true enough. But in that sense it was like the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which didn’t make any of the colonies free—it took a victorious war to free the colonies from British rule. The Emancipation Proclamation bound the defense of the Union to the destruction of slavery.
- #131+1: Voices in Movement An Oral History of the Mexican Youth Movement of 2012
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On May 11, 2012, in the heat of the presidential campaign, history took an unexpected turn: a video, the social networks, and marches and mass actions managed to bring a new moment of hope into the history of Mexico, and the Mexican youth surprised the whole world.
- Online Survival Kit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This Online Survival Kit offers practical tools, advice and techniques that teach you how to circumvent censorship and to secure yo communications and data. This handbook will gradually be unveiled over the coming months in order to provide everyone with the means to resist censors, governments or interests groups that want to courntrol news and information and gag dissenting voices. The Reporters Without Borders Digital Survival Kit is available in French, English, Arabic, Russian et Chinese. Published under the Creative Commons licence, its content is meant to be used freely and circulated widely.
- Open Borders and the Tragedy of Open Access Commons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 “Open borders” refers to a policy of unlimited or free immigration. I argue here that it is a bad policy. If you are poor and your country provides no social safety net, you move to one that does. If you are rich and your country makes you pay your taxes, you move (or at least move your money) to one that doesn’t. Thus safety nets, and public goods in general, disappear as they become both overloaded and underfunded. That is the “world without borders,” and without community. That is the tragedy of open access commons.
- Organizations & Leaders' Critique of S.744
A statement by the Mexican American Political Association Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A statement by the Mexican American Political Association
- Organizer Renny Cushing Tapped the Power of Community to Pull the Plug on Nuke Plants
Clamshell Alliance Drew a Line in the Sand That the Nuclear Energy Industry Has Not Crossed to This Day Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 As one of the key figures in the Clamshell Alliance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cushing was effective in organizing a movement that played a major role in freezing the construction of new nuclear power projects in the United States for decades.
- Osama Bin Laden, Bradley Manning and Me
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 As far as can be deduced, the government believes that the documents and videos that Bradley Manning gave to Wikileaks, which Wikileaks then widely distributed to international media, aided the enemy because it put US foreign policy in a very bad light.
- Oscar Lopez Rivera and the Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence
An Indomitable Spirit of Resistance Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Oscar López Rivera has served 32 years in the dungeons of imperialism for the crime of fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico as a member of the Armed Forces for National Liberation (FALN). The continued militancy of Oscar López Rivera, after more than three decades of imprisonment, is a living testimony of the indomitable will to resist all attempts to break the combative spirit of a man, who has become a symbol of his people, yearning for freedom.
- The Other Police State
Private Cops vs. the Public Good Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A revealing study on "Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-profits" written by Gary Ruskin confirms one’s worst suspicions about the ever-expanding two-headed U.S. security state. It details how some companies use the security apparatus, including questionable espionage tactics, against anyone who challenges their authority.
- Outsourcing racism: Bill C-31, Prison Expansion, and the Detention of Immigrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, CBSA may arrest and detain a foreign national or permanent resident they deem a threat to public safety, a potential flight risk, unable to substantiate their identity, or a threat to “national security.” Despite the regular invocation of migrants as potentially dangerous and as “criminal,” in reality the overwhelming majority of detainees (94.2%) are held for reasons entirely unrelated to questions of security. Indeed, entire families, including young children, are currently imprisoned in Canadian detention centers.
- Overthrowing other people's governments: The Master List
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War.
- Pakistan: Bloody Origins of the Z.A. Bhutto Regime
Part One: Hidden History of the 1968-69 Workers Upsurge Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Published: 2014 Pakistan’s 1965 war with India over Kashmir -- a reactionary war in which the working class had no side -- was a key turning point in Bhutto’s career. The Pakistani military's poor showing provoked a bitter backlash against the regime among much of the population. Following the signing of a January 1966 armistice agreement in Tashkent, student demonstrations erupted in cities throughout the country. Despite being a principal architect of the war, Bhutto emerged as a national hero, denouncing the Tashkent accords (which he had helped negotiate) and accusing the regime of having given away at the peace table what the generals claimed they had won on the battlefield. In November 1967, Bhutto launched his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) based on a combination of virulent anti-Indian chauvinism, "socialist" demagogy and paeans to Islam.
- Pakistan: Bloody Origins of the Z.A. Bhutto Regime
Part Two: The Bangladesh War Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Published: 2014 The Pakistani military expected to put a quick end to the nationalist aspirations of the Bengalis. Just before midnight on 25 March 1971, Pakistani troops led by General Tikka Khan launched "Operation Searchlight," an orgy of killing directed against the civilian population of Dhaka and other cities and towns. Working-class and Hindu neighbourhoods in Dhaka were attacked with tanks, mortars and machine guns. Using prepared lists, soldiers went door-to-door gunning down Awami League activists. U.S.-supplied tanks led a military assault on student residences at the University of Dhaka. The students and teachers who were killed were dumped into a mass grave in the football ground.
- Palestinians and the Queer Left
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman.
- Pamplona's locksmiths join revolt as banks throw families from their homes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In the years of the housing boom, Spain's banks offered 100% mortgages. Now, while receiving millions in public aid, they are throwing people out of their homes. But there's a rebellion under way.
- Paradise of Untouchable Assets
Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Trusts held in the Cook Islands can put money beyond the reach of the American legal system.
- The Paranoia of The Superrich And Superpowerful
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The United States is in favor of stability. But you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to U.S. orders. We “stabilize” countries when we invade them and destroy them.
- The Passion of Richard Seymour
Book Reviews of "The Liberal Defence of Murder" and "UnHitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchen" by Richard Seymour Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The books of Richard Seymour skewer the predictable platitudes and puncture the sanctimonious pretensions of the "Pro-War Left," what was a transatlantic confederacy of journalists, public intellectuals, and bloggers that championed the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a "humanitarian intervention."
- Paulina González Uses Story Telling as a Tool of Civil Resistance
The organizer from south Los Angeles believes that you can touch peoples' hearts with stories Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Paulina González believes that story telling is fundamental to succeed any social movement needs the support and dedication of a critical mass.
- The People Want
A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 "The people want . . .": This first half of slogans chanted by millions of Arab protesters since 2011 revealed a long-repressed craving for democracy. But huge social and economic problems were also laid bare by the protestors' demands.
- People's Assembly: we need unity to beat austerity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Argues that the People's Assembly is not merely a nice idea or a worthwhile event, but the main basis for co-ordinating resistance to cuts for some time to come.
- A People's Manifesto: Let's Roll Back Austerity and Claim Real Democracy!
Urgent common priorities for a democratic, social, ecological and feminist Europe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Europe stands on the edge of a precipice, looking into the abyss. Austerity policies drive the peoples of Europe into poverty, undercut democracy and dismantle social policies. Rising inequalities endanger social cohesion. Ecological destruction is worsening while acute humanitarian crises devastate the most affected countries.
- Petitions next to useless in campaign to defend CBC
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Pressure groups put a lot of effort into petitions, but the question is - does sending petitions have any effect. Are they just wasting everyone's time?
- Philip Mirowski, Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste (Book Review)
How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso, 2013) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Philip Mirowski has written an important book, one well worth reading. Both an economist and an historian/philosopher of science, Mirowski is unusual in being highly attuned to the purging (long ago) of both economic history and the history of economic thought from the Anglo-American academic “economics” curriculum.
- Philosophy of the GNU Project
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A collection of essays dealing with the ideas behind the GNU Project.
- Photographing Tragedy
What Victims Actually Want Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 What is the use of a photo when the human conscience has grown numb, and barely appreciates the artistic expression of the photo, not the moral and political crisis it represents?
- Pink Sari Revolution
A Tale of Women and Power in the Badlands of India Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Narrating the story of Sampat Pal and the Pink Gang's fight for Sheelu, as well as for others facing injustice and oppression: a portrait of women grabbing fate with their own hands - and winning back their lives.
- Pirating Creativity
The MPAA Is Going After Schoolchildren Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) goes all-out enforce its “intellectual property” claims upon those who would dare share and distribute media.
- 'The Planet Can't Keep Doing Us A Favour'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With humanity's huge impact on the planet's climate becoming ever clearer, the claim of 'history in the making' is truly deserved.
- Plutocracy in America
Runaway Exploitation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Arguments for categorizing America as a plutocracy (a government of the rich and for the rich).
- A Poet for Our Planet
Book Review of Friedman's "A Turnpike Utopia" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Azure provides a review of Friedman's poems within the collection "A Turnpike Utopia" dealing with issues of AIDS, workers' rights, racism, and the mistreatment of immigrants.
- Police Attack Palm Oil Protestors in Sierra Leone
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Sierra Leone police opened fire on a group of protestors who were demonstrating against a palm oil plantation in the southern province of Pujehun. The project is being developed by Societe Financiere des Caoutchoucs (Socfin), a French agri-business giant.
- The Police State is Real
It Has Happened Here Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Bush regime’s response to 9/11 and the Obama regime’s validation of this response have destroyed accountable democratic government in the United States. So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive branch that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document.
- A Policy without a Conscience
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The tragedy and the horror of Lampedusa did not come out of the blue. Much of the responsibility lies with the policies pursued by European nations. The only policy that could prevent more tragedies like that is that no European politician will countenance: the liberalization of border controls, and the dismantling of Fortress Europe.
- Political Prisoners in the USA
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A list of political prisoners in the USA (with links to support websites).
- The Politics of Extractivism
Book Review of "Geopolítica de la Amazonía: Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista" by Alvaro García Linera Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 García Linera's work is most certainly an expression of the dramatic changes in Bolivia and the "cultural and democratic revolution" Morales and his MAS party claim to have inaugurated.
- Porter's corporate interests can't be allowed to trump public health
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We are concerned that it will be the children who live, study and play less than 300 metres from the current airport in the high-rises, the Waterfront school, Little Norway Park, the daycare and community centre who will be most affected by the addition of jets. Consider that landings and takeoffs generate the highest emissions and that peak airport periods coincide with times children walk to and from school.
- Post-war Left Feminism - review
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A review of 'Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture' by Kathlene McDonald.
- Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Against the thesis that Western subalterns are made of different stuff, Chibber argues that human beings are, at their core, not that different across contexts. The winds of history and culture may change many things, but not human constitutions. His defense of this argument sets the stage for a deliberate, careful explication of the key tenets of historical materialism. This argument is that humans, everywhere, take an interest in defending their well-being and their dignity.
- Postering Revolution
Wheat Paste, the Marxist Glue Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On the role of postering in the activist agenda.
- Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Over the past fifty years, postmodern theory — an umbrella term generally used to refer to such diverse theoretical movements and paradigms as post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and others — has generally dominated most fields in the humanities and some in the social sciences. But the economic meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent chronic crisis in capitalism have dealt a fatal theoretical blow to the varied and nearly ineffable assemblage of perspectives that are often grouped under the rubric of “postmodernism.” postmodernism was indeed tragedy. It was tragedy for the massive amounts of “cultural capital” that it wasted; it was tragedy for the defrauding of intellectual integrity that it represented; it was tragedy for the abandonment of reality that it recommended. Further, like the financial fiasco, it was criminal.
- The Power of Idle No More
A Resurgent Radicalism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The remarkable Idle No More movement is the biggest and most important national outpouring of grass roots aboriginal anger ever seen in Canada.
- A practical guide to protecting your identity and security when using mobile phones
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Many activists have been tracked via their mobile phones. Assess the risk for your own activities given the practices used in your country, how high-profile your work is, and what others in your community have experienced.
- The Predatory Pedagogy of On-Line Education
New Techno-peasants of the Latifundia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Distance learning amounts to the erosion of the traditional face-to-face classroom.
- Preparing for a Post-Chávez Venezuela
Not One Step Backward, Ni Un Paso Atrás Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Hugo Chávez is no more, and yet the symbolic importance of the Venezuelan President that exceeded his physical persona in life, providing a condensation point around which popular struggles coalesced, will inevitably continue to function long after his death.
- Preparing For More Slaughter in Syria
Moloch's Minions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 it is likely that Western leaders will give the nod to launch the airstrikes that will kill a large number of human beings.
- Primitive Heterosexuality
Carnal Knowledge Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Prisoners of the War on Terror
Time to Give up "Hope" and Think About Active Change Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Status of prisoners of war in Guantanamo.
- Prisons Full of Innocents
The Big Lockup Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The number of convictions and the lengths of sentences has increased and some men have been wrongly convicted of crimes they simply did not commit.
- Privacy for the other five billion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Aadhaar is but one example of the development sector's growing fascination with technologies for registering, identifying, and monitoring citizens
- Privacy and the Right to Strike in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The neoliberal assault on labour has now entered its fourth decade. Equally concerning for the labour movement has been the long assault on the post-war labour freedoms to organize, bargain, and strike.
- Privacy tapped out
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 For over a century, Americans and their judiciary fiercely fought any attempt by security agencies and law enforcement to listen in on private electronic communications. Now they’ve stopped fighting, and the surveillance is out of control.
- Privatising the Oceans
Fished out in our Lifetimes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Long-range fishing with the backing of the EU deprives countries elsewhere in the world of employment and a crucial food source. And it is depleting the seas to the point of ecological collapse.
- Pro-European Union protests mount in Kiev
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Over 100,000 demonstrators protested in Kiev on Sunday to demand the resignation of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. They were protesting Yanukovich’s abandonment of an association agreement with the European Union (EU.
- Profiles in Courage, and in the Lack of Courage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The White House's press release of Malala's meeting with Barack Obama further diminished the import of her visit, and her remarkable courage, by failing to note that she had taken the opportunity of her visit to tell the president directly to his face that he should halt the drone attacks that he has been ordering on suspected Taliban “leaders” in western Pakistan — drone attacks that have often been calculated to kill not just targeted individuals but many innocent men, women and children in the vicinity of the blasts.
- The Prosecution and Persecution of Bradley Manning
Setting An Example Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The desire to strip Manning of careful intent has been a tactic of the government that is prosecuting him and the mainstream media who parrot their propaganda from the start.
- Protect your freedom and privacy; join us in creating an Internet that's safer from surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In order to defang surveillance programs like PRISM, we need to stop using centralized systems and come together to build an Internet that's decentralized, trustworthy, and free "as in freedom."
- Public Declaration: Solidarity against police repression in Montreal
We will not submit to the municipal by-law P-6 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With this public declaration, we assert our opposition to by-law P-6: we will continue to demonstrate without negotiating our demo routes with police, and we will systematically challenge all tickets that arise from this by-law.
- Public Enemy Number One: the Public
Keeping Us in the Dark and Under Watch Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Those in power use language to obscure meaning more often than to convey it. Their power depends on keeping us — the enemy — in the dark.
- Pungesti, Romania: people versus Chevron and riot police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Pungesti is at the terrifying front line of Romania's resource war - where villagers are fighting off rapacious corporations and their private army of violent riot police, backed by corrupt politicians.
- Putting Socialism Back on the Agenda
Daring to Hope Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Is Socialism Capitalism's future?
- The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This is a hitherto unpublished chapter of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). The text as published here has been edited and includes notes by John Bellamy Foster. The style conforms to that of their book. Part of the original draft chapter, dealing with mental health, was still incomplete at the time of Baran's death in 1964, and consequently has not be included in this published version.
- Quebecers' right to protest restricted after 2012 "Maple Spring" in Canada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In 2012, a massive student strike over tuition fee increases rocked Quebec and thousands took to the streets, marching in protest. In the aftermath, Montreal residents find that their ability to protest has been restricted, as the police employ increased powers to arrest and fine demonstrators.
- Race, Religion and Rounding Up Africans in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Israel has launched a wholesale roundup of African immigrants, whom members of the ruling parties call a "cancer" on the Jewish state. To circumvent court rulings against imprisonment without trial, the government has packed the refugees into a detention center in the desert. The aim is to convince the Africans "to give up all hope of a normal life in Israel" and go back where they came from.
- Racism and Sexual Violence in Indonesia
Where Fear Stalks the Streets Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Indonesia, since 1965, performed three genocides fully backed by the West.
- Racism, capitalism and contradictions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Workers under capitalism have a dual existence: both as collective producers struggling against capital for control of the workplace, for hours and wages, but also workers compete as each other.
- The Radical Center and Armed Revolution
A Challenge for the Left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Poll shows 29% of registered voters in the U.S. believe armed revolution to ‘protect liberties’ may be necessary the self-appointed political ‘center’ went into full conniption in defense of the established order.
- Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Radical Jesus is arguably the first modern effort to convey through comic art the meaning of Jesus and his social message, not just in his own time, but also in the Radical Reformation, recent centuries, and in our own time.
- The Radical Left in Europe
An Outline Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An attempt to understand what unites the organisations of the new left and the nature of its radicalism.
- The radical legacy of Nelson Mandela
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In 1964, Nelson Mandela along with many other comrades in the struggle for the liberation of South Africa from racist white domination under apartheid was sentenced to life in prison. A voice for justice has gone silent. But the words and example of Mandela will live as long as people struggle against injustice and oppression.
- A Radical Vision for Victory
A Freedom Budget for All Americans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This remarkable book brings back into view a radical vision for victory within the mainstream, armed with the kind of expectation glimpsed briefly in the 2008 election race but this time without the support of a grassroots movement long since vanished.
- The Radicalness of the Accessory
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being 1.and Exchanging Clothes:
Habits of Being 2. edited by Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz
- Rafael Correa, the Press, and Whistleblowers
Corporate Control and Double Standards Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There are claims of hypocrisy because of Correa providing asylum to whistleblowers however also passing a Communications Bill that detractors claim is a major blow to a free press.
- Rallying to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Despite uncomfortably cold weather in Washington, DC the February 17 mobilization to stop the Keystone XL Alberta-U.S. tar sands pipeline drew a crowd conservatively estimated at over 20,000.
- Reasoning about terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The trouble with much of the discussion of terrorism today is that it misses a fundamental point about contemporary terror: its disconnect from social movements and political goals. In the past, an organisation such as the IRA was defined by its political aims. Its members were carefully selected and their activities tightly controlled. However misguided we might think its actions, there was a close relationship between the aims of the organization and the actions of its members. None of this is true when it comes to contemporary terrorism. An act of terror is rarely controlled by an organisation or related to a political demand. That is why it is so difficult to discern the political or religious motivations
- Rebellion in India's Heartland - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of the "Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion" by Gautam Navlakha.
- Recovering Nonviolent History
Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Essays showing, in considerable detail, the varied roles played by civil resistance in fifteen liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.
- Red Lines Drawn with Syrian Blood
The Problems With Obama's Case Against al-Assad Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The US and its allies are likely to carry out an attack on Syria in the very near future whether or not Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons.
- Reflections on a Religion of Hate
Engaging in War Crimes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Refelctions on US preparations to engage in more acts of war against yet another Middle Eastern country.
- Reflections on the Corporate Security State
"He's nuts. Like out there." Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Wikileaks began releasing millions of emails from anonymous hacks of the intelligence firm Stratfor, a global intelligence provider. Stratfor staff are very interested in organizations such as the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
- Reform and Revolution at Left Forum 2013
Tension and Transformation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This year’s Left Forum, held at Pace University in lower Manhattan was one of the largest gatherings in North America of the US and international Left.
- Remembering a Vietnam Veteran
The Death of Sgt. Van Dale Todd Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Remembering E.P. Thompson
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An article about E.P. Thompson
- Remembering Medgar Evers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Renewal through Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Strikes are a major means of trade union self-assertion. A closer look at strikes in Germany reveals interesting trends and developments, indicating new approaches to trade union strategies and practices.
- The Representation of Torture in the 'War on Terror'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A nation cannot claim to act to promote democracy and human rights whilst it kidnaps citizens the world over, places them in secret detention and tortures them.
- Reproductive Justice Needed
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Many wonder why the fight to maintain legal abortion is still so heated forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Dianne Feeley points to attitudes about women that provide the political space for the right-wing’s attacks.
- Resistance to Reporting on Discrimination in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 To date, I have published over a hundred reports about anti-African racism in Israel. Some of these stories have been widely circulated, including a 10-minute video released last month that has been seen by more than three quarters of a million people. But, it would seem that the mainstream American media is consciously refraining from reporting on the story.
- Retracting Séralini Study Violates Science and Ethics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Giles-Eric Séralini, a professor of molecular biology at Caen University, led a toxicological study on GM maize and the Roundup herbicide which found an alarming increase in early death, large tumours including cancers, and diseases of the liver and kidney. What followed was a concerted worldwide campaign to discredit the findings.
- The Return of COINTELPRO?
Time to Target the Real Terrorists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The FBI was using its offices and agents across the country as early as August 2011 to engage in a massive surveillance scheme against Occupy Wall Street. The documents show a government agency at its most paranoid.
- Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents.
- Revenge of the Pomo
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The repression (either physically or ideologically via social amnesia) of utopians by the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and now (certain varieties of) Post-Modernism has led us to a situation in which some search for authenticity in the wrong places. The gap between virtuous and misplaced authenticity is a symptom of repression, the loss of some deeper truths about solutions be they cooperatives, political mobilization, or honest journalism.
- Review: Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of Staughton Lynd's "Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change", a book that by and large uses a story-based pedagogy rather than an analysis-based one. It walks through struggles that Lynd and his wife Alice have been involved in directly.
- Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Published: 2014 A book on the Teamster's strike of 1934.
- The Rise of the Fast Food Worker
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Rise of the naked female warriors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Known for its topless protesters, Femen is a worldwide movement against patriarchy. But are the activists' breasts obscuring the message?
- River of Dark Dreams
Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labour of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands.
- Roadblocks to Climate Activism
The Problem of Natural Localism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The consequences of global warming. The evidence for the evolving dire effects of building CO2 and other greenhouse gases is getting increasingly conclusive. We are a species influenced by natural localism, and therefore the majority of Americans, and others in the West as well, are not going to abandon a present full of profit and relative comfort as long as the sky is clear in their own local place and time. As to the future beyond their grandchildren, it simply does not seem real.
- Roads to the Arab Uprisings
Book review of "The Journey to Tahrir" eds. Sowers and Toensing and "The Arab Revolts" eds. McMurray and Ufheil-Somers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The strength of all the essays in these two collections is that the principal trends the authors analyzed have become critical background to recent events in Egypt and Syria during the summer of 2013, even as the nature of these events continue to shift.
- The Roots of Academic Freedom
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of 'Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge.'
- Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997): Journalist, Communist, Intellectual
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This thesis explores aspects of the life, times, and career of Australian journalist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997). During the Cold War, Lockwood was one of the best known members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), variously journalist, commentator, author, editor, orator, pamphleteer, broadcaster.
- Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Two leading activists of the fight against Apartheid, Ruth First and Joe Slovo, for the first time have received a comprehensive biography.
- Saudi Arabia's foreign labour crackdown drives out 2m migrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Ethiopian workers face hostility amid 'Saudisation' campaign to control foreign labour and get more Saudi citizens into work.
- Save Our Unions
Dispatches From A Movement in Distress Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Steve Early, a union organizer for more than four decades, writes about the challenges facing the union movement in the United States.
- Save Our Waterfront
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 An architect, a doctor, a teacher & mother and a sailor tour Toronto Harbour and discuss the negative impacts the expansion of BIlly Bishop airport would have on the environment.
- Scaling the wall: what to do if you get stuck while reading Marx’s Capital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Lots of people who start Karl Marx's Capital get stuck somewhere in the early chapters of Volume 1. Here are some suggestions are made about how to get unstuck and read the whole book.
- Scientific journal retracts study exposing GM cancer risk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology appears to have violated scientific standards by withdrawing a study which found that rats fed on a Monsanto GM corn were more likely to develop cancer than controls.
- Scientists pledge to boycott Elsevier
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Following the retraction of the Seralini et al scientific paper which found health damage to rats fed on GM corn, over 100 scientists have pledged in this Open Letter to boycott Elsevier, publisher of the journal responsible.
- Screening the Working Class
Movies We Love About Workers, Work and the Workplace Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 List of movies featuring workers, work, and the workplace.
- Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Big players are taking unprecedented steps to stop offshore abuses, but financial crime fighters worry reforms don’t go far enough.
- Secret Memo Casts Doubt on Feds' Claims for Science Library Closures
Goal stated is 'culling' research, not preserving and sharing through digitization Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A federal document marked "secret" obtained by Postmedia News indicates the closure or destruction of more than half a dozen world famous science libraries has little if anything to do with digitizing books as claimed by the Harper government.
- Secret Sexual Fantasies
The Erotic Theater of the Mind Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Your fantasies are always with you, playing hide-and-seek with your perceived realities, whispering wild ideas into your inner ear, showing movies in your mind, stirring your passions mysteriously, yet so powerfully. If you are imprisoned in any way–by your work, your family, your education, your religion, your government–your fantasies become your freedom. Sometimes your ability to fantasize is the only freedom you have.
- Seed Monopoliies, GMOs and Farmers Suicides in India
A response to Nature Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Sending encrypted emails using Thunderbird and PGP
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There are easy ways to ensure your Internet activities remain confidential.
- The Servility of the Satellites
The Snowden Affair and the Destruction of Effective Democracy in Europe Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Recent revelations confirm the completion of the transformation of the "Western democracies" into something else, an entity that as yet has no recognized name. The outrage against the Bolivian President confirmed that this trans-Atlantic entity has absolutely no respect for international law, even though its leaders will make use of it when it suits them. But respect it, allow it to impede their actions in any way? Certainly not. And this disrespect for the law is linked to a more basic institutional change: the destruction of effective democracy at the national level.
- Sex segregation in UK universities - a step forward for the Muslim religious right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The authorities of universities in the UK have made public their policy of bending to religious fundamentalists by condoning sex segregation on university premises. The education system is especially targeted, as controlling the minds of the youth is critical.
- Shaping Histories
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 During the last few years, a number of researchers have interviewed the authors regarding their politics and practice in relation to 'history'. In reflecting upon their individual 'historiographies', they have put the following together.
- The Shocking Savagery of America's Early History
Bernard Bailyn, one of our greatest historians, shines his light on the nation's Dark Ages Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A discussion with reknowned historian Bernard Bailyn whose recent book "The Barbarous Years" examines a particularly violent period of America's early history which has since been almost erased.
- Short Circuit: Towards an Anarchist Approach to Gentrification
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Gentrification, etymologically speaking, is a relatively new word, coined in 1964 by the English Marxist sociologist Ruth Glass.
- A Short History of Bio-Chemical Weapons
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Chronology between 400 BC and 2013 of bio-chemical weaponry and foreign policy.
- A Short History of Primitive Accumulation
From Adam Smith to Angela Merkel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In Capital, Smith’s concept of “original accumulation” appeared as a word that could mean either original or primitive. Then in the English translation of the English translation of Capital “primitive accumulation” first appears.
- Should Russia Attack Colombia?
Another Case for Military Action Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Debating the case on whether Putin should or should not attack Columbia. Will Russia follow the example of the US?
- The Singularity and Socialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 By definition, a singularity is something utterly peculiar unto itself, a species of being unmatched for its “this-ness.”
- The Sinicization Of Tibet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In 1950s, China incorporated Tibet into its territory and since then, it has began a major reform of all aspects of Tibetan life - social, religious, political and economic. The Tibetans had organised an armed resistance but it could not challenge the Chinese army. As a result of this, thousands of Tibetans fled from Tibet and seek asylum in nearby countries like India, Nepal and Bhutan where they have created refugee or exile communities. But other forms of resistance had been continued and is still continued by Tibetans in Tibet and in exile.
- Slavoj Zizek: Apologist for the social democratic turn of SYRIZA
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The authors argue that Zizek's radical posturing is at odds with his reformist political stance.
- The Sleepwalkers Are Revolting
The Right to Sleep, or... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Center for Disease Control’s finding that sleep deprivation has reached epidemic proportions has failed to generate significant public outcry.
- Smuggler Nation
How Illicit Trade Made America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Peter Andreas shows that smuggling has played a pivotal and too often overlooked role in the birth, westward expansion, and economic development of the United States, while anti-smuggling campaigns have dramatically enhanced the federal government's policing powers. The great irony, Andreas tells us, is that a country that was born and grew up through smuggling is today the world's leading anti-smuggling crusader.
- SNCC Movement Worker Reflects
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Gloria House reflects on how SNCC saw the struggle of African Americans as linked to the struggles of colonialized people, and identified with liberation movements domestically and internationally.
- Snowden document confirms US-backed mass surveillance in Australia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The document obtained by the former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor confirms that the electronic surveillance agency, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), monitors the domestic population, as well as the people and governments of many Asian countries.
- Snowden, Surveillance And The Secret State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 There is plenty to be said about living under a giant system of government surveillance. Just don't expect the corporate media to explore the full extent of what it really all means.
- Soapbox Rebellion
The Hobo Orator Union and the Free Speech Fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909-1916 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 A new critical history of the free speech fights of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which illustrates how the lively and colourful soapbox culture of the "Wobblies" generated novel forms of class struggle.
- A Social History of Wiretaps
Memory's Half-Life Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 American’s century-long distrust of electronic surveillance is shifting to Americans accepting and internalizing new levels of state surveillance.
- Social Networking and the Death of the Internet
How Do You "Like" That? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Social Networking is, by its nature, a capture environment. The companies that offer the services, particularly Facebook, host your site and control all the information on it. Facebook — a group of linked pages on a giant website — is constraining and not very powerful. In order to use it, you have to use it the way they want you to and that’s not a whole lot of “using”. But there is a comfort in having one’s options limited, being able to use something without learning anything about it or making many choices about how you use it. That alluring convenience is a poisoned apple, however.
- Socialist Register 2013
Volume 49: The Question of Strategy Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2013 This, the 49th volume of the Socialist Register examines the choices faced by the left today, the models of strategy available to it, and the innovations that are being made by groups as they organize in diverse settings.
- The Software Freedom Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Nicolson-Owens thinks that Alfredo Lopez’s article, "Stallman, FOSS and the Adobe Nightmare," gets some of Richard Stallman’s message wrong and ends up giving the open source movement credit for a freedom-based philosophy the open source movement disagrees with.
- The soundcloud city
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Cities are increasingly saturated with visual information -- advertising, instructions, prohibitions -- so smart marketing is shifting its attention to a new battleground in its quest for your attention -- your ears. Sounds are used to attract and repel, to inform and sell. Private companies and public services try to seduce customers through their ears, or to discourage non-target groups.
- Spain's communist model village
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Marinaleda, in impoverished Andalusia, used to suffer terrible hardships. Led by a charismatic mayor, the village declared itself a communist utopia and took farmland to provide for everyone. Could it be the answer to modern capitalism's failings?
- The Spanish Revolution, Past and Future: Grandeur and Poverty of Anarchism
How the Working Class Takes Over (or Doesn't), Then and Now Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2013 Looking at the Spanish Revolution, arguably the richest and deepest social revolution of the twentieth century.
- Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-profits
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Giant corporations are employing highly unethical or illegal tools of espionage against nonprofit organizations with near impunity, according to a new report by Essential Information.
- Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This report is an effort to document something about corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations. Law enforcement should prioritize investigating and prosecuting corporate espionage against nonprofits.
- Sport, Peace and Development: International Worker Sport 1913-2013
A festschrift book in honour of International Workers and Amateurs in Sports Confederation (CSIT) Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Sport is seen to play an important role as a promoter for peace and social integration in different geographical, cultural and political contexts.
- Spying by the Numbers
Hundreds of Thousands Subject to Government Surveillance and No Real Protection Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden many more people in the US and world-wide are learning about extensive US government surveillance and spying. There are publicly available numbers which show the reality of these problems are bigger than most think and most of this spying is happening with little or no judicial oversight.
- Spying on Democracy
Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and to the future of democracy itself.
- Stallman, FOSS and the Adobe Nightmare
Don't Say Stallman Didn't Warn You! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. Free Open Source Software gives control to users, whereas proprietary software gives control to the corporations that own the software.
- State Law Breakers
Violating the Law While Enforcing the Law Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Police routinely break the law under the pretext of enforcing the law.
- Stay Solid!
A Radical Handbook for Youth Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 This scrapbook-style collection of essays, excerpts, explanations, and images pushes back against a culture that relentlessly demands that kids give up their best ideals, abandon their hopes, forget their ethical objections to dominant life, soothe their rage, and accept their fates. From dealing with the cops to dealing with your peers, from school and community to drugs and sex, from race and class to money and mental health, Stay Solid! provides essential support for radically inclined teens who believe that it's possible for all of us to hang on to our values and build a life we believe in.
- Stop-and-Frisk as a Policy of State Control Over Blacks and Latinos
Hobbes on Trial in New York City Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Nicholas Peart is one of the plaintiffs in the federal class action lawsuit against the New York Police Department’s policy of stop-and-frisk, where officers use their power to roam the streets and stop, search and question people they believe may be connected to crime. Their allegation is that the application of this method is racially biased and unconstitutional.
- The story of symphysiotomy in Ireland
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Symphysiotomy is a childbirth operation that effectively unhinges the pelvis. Ireland was the only country in the world to do these childbirth operations in preference to Caesarean section. Religious ideology and medical ambition drove the surgery. An estimated 1,500 women and girls, some as young as 14, had their pelvises severed, gratuitously, by senior doctors who believed in childbearing without limitation. Life long disability, chronic pain, mental suffering and family breakdown followed.
- Strictly Legal
The Caronia Decision and a Culture of Mercantile Nihilism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Caronia decision reveals an injustice system whose function is to provide legal cover for the excesses of the corporate elite. Caronia is a wake-up moment, announcing that the institutions and the philosophy that sustains it are broken, maybe beyond repair, and must be replaced now, while we’re still standing, by new social forms imbued with sane and humane values.
- The Strike That Didn't Change New York
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Chicago teachers' strike was a victory for workers around the country. But how do we move from homegrown resistance to a national movement?
New York City's 1.1 million public school children were stranded without a ride, when eight thousand bus drivers walked off the job, sparking a month-long standoff between Local Amalgamated Transit Union 1181 and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
- The Struggle Against Rape and Sexual Assault
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Soma Marik discusses how to advance the struggle against sexual assault in the wake of the bus gang rape of last December, which led to massive demonstrations throughout India.
- The Struggle at Peugeot in France
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 When the management of the PSA Peugeot Citroën group announced, in early July 2012, that it was eliminating 8,000 jobs and closing the Aulnay plant near Paris (3,000 employees) in 2014, it caused a shock wave, well beyond the workers in the automotive sector.
- Students, Austerity & Resistance
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2013 Students have been part of an international wave of occupations, from Tahrir Square in central Cairo, to the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison, to the encampments of the Occupy movement all around the world. But students movements can falter, or fail to connect to the broader public. Activists need to look at the relationship of students to the system, and figure out the best way to build resistance to it.
- The Subterfuge of Syrian Chemical Weapons
Investigating a Forgone Conclusion Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 UN independent commission is investigating whether or not chemical weapons were used in Syria.
- Subversive Nun’s Sophisticated Plot to Incite Peace
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 83-year-old Catholic nun Megan Rice is facing 20 years in prison for breaking into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
- Success, sex, and morality in the tar sands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A glimpse of what life is like for a certified electrician who is one of three women among 500 employees working on a site in the tar sands.
- Suited Vandals Pillage Detroit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 On the pillaging of Detroit.
- Surveillance and the Corporate State
Spying, Control and Murder Under the Imperial Presidency Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 With all of the fear mongering the subject has received in recent decades, Americans have in fact had remarkably little to fear directly from ‘terrorism.’
- Surveillance USA
NSA and the PRISM Project Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The government is merrily going about its business of keeping tabs on you in virtually every conceivable way.
- Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Book review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The current global crisis has once again brought the questions of global struggle and world revolution into a position of importance. The basic questions posed are whether it is possible to build a “global Left” and how to rethink the idea of universal human liberation, which was the utopia once central to the left, and which has perhaps re-emerged once again.
- The Sussex University Occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Interview with Maia Pal during and immediately following the campus occupation against outsoursing at Sussex, England, which was broken up by the police on April 2, 2013.
- Sylvia Pankhurst: War and Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Katherine Connelly's Sylvia Pankhurst’s activism during the First World War demonstrated her unwavering commitment to anti-imperialism - a thread running through all her activity for the rest of her life.
- Syria chemical warfare claims aim to provoke Western intervention
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The unsubstantiated charges that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus killing large numbers of civilians have all the hallmarks of a staged provocation aimed at provoking Western intervention.
- Syria, "Credibility" and Historical Amnesia
Grandpa Made Mustard Gas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The first casualty of war is truth. Comparison between WWII and the Syria situation.
- Syria in the Crosshairs
The Kosovo Precedent Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Some high officials in the Obama Administration consider the 1999 war in Kosovo to be a precedent for justifying cruise missile strikes in Syria.
- "Syrian people are asking for our solidarity. The local civilian councils are a good place for us to start"
Reporting From the Inside Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In 2013 Syria is on the verge of collapse. What began as a grassroots protest movement, inspired by revolutionary action in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East, is now a bloody civil war. As media headlines focus on the armed aspects of the battle against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, there is a sustained popular resistance being waged in Syria that is not being fully reported.
- The Syrian Target
Why Only an All-Out War Can Depose Assad Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Syria is close to becoming the target of a major Western military intervention
- Tails: The amnesic Incognito Live System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Tails is an operating system like Windows or Mac OS, but one specially designed to preserve your anonymity and privacy.
- Tax havens face crisis in wake of Offshore Leaks, report says
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 ICIJ’s “Offshore Leaks” investigation has created a “crisis of confidence” for tax havens, damaging the offshore industry’s bottom line and its prospects for growth, a new report by a leading offshore services firm says.
- Tax is Not a Four-Letter Word: A Different Take on Taxes in Canada
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 The contributors, leading Canadian practitioners and scholars, explore how taxes have become a political "no-go zone" and how changes in taxation are changing Canada. They challenge the view that any tax is a bad tax and provide broad directions for fairer and smarter approaches.
- Tear Down These Walls - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of "Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel" by Reece Jones.
- Ten Steps You Can Take Right Now Against Internet Surveillance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 One of the trends we've seen is how, as the word of the NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how (or if) they can defend themselves from surveillance online. With a few small steps, you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, both against you individually, and more generally against everyone.
- The terrible legacy of Agent Orange and dioxin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Agent Orange was manufactured by Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemicals to use as a herbicide and defoliant in the Vietnam War.
- A Terribly Human Challenge
Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 To make the movie, Joshua Oppenheimer approached the regime’s henchmen and spent eight years interviewing some of these killers.
- The Terrifying World of Electronic Monitoring
From Drone Strikes to Martha Stewart Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Electronic monitoring is about tracking and marking. The GPS technology that is trending in electronic monitors tracks people’s every movement with the purpose of marking them for punishment if they deviate from the program
- The Terror Factory: The Isis Edition
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism exposes how the FBI has, under the guise of engaging in counterterrorism since 9/11, built a network of more than 15,000 informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau can then claim it is winning the war on terror.
- Testimony of a Deportee
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Manuel Sanchez, member of Mexicans United for Regularization (MUR) and Action LGBTQ for Immigrants and Refugees (AGIR), was deported to Mexico on July 26, 2012. With the courage that he is known for, Manuel delved into his memories of that stressful period to raise public awareness about the harshness and violence of the criminalization that he experienced as a migrant.
- Theory and Practice of Idealism in Trotskyism and the ISO
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We have come to conclusions there is a theoretical underpinning to the problems we (and others) experienced in the ISO, such as continually erroneous perspectives which rarely were assessed, a leadership method that emphasized cheerleading and exhortation over sober assessment of the challenges we are facing, a tendency to tail the liberals both politically and organizationally (opportunism), a growing separation between our Marxist theory and our practice (a hallmark of opportunism), a sectarian attitude towards the revolutionary left (other socialists and anarchists alike) and an intolerance toward ongoing political disagreement within the organization.
- There Is a War on Ordinary People, and Feminists Are Needed at the Front
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class. The bourgeois media club relegates and distracts from the fact that a full-blooded class war is under way.
- There’s Always a Class War Going On
An Interview with Chris Steele Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 An excerpt from the second edition of Noam Chomsky’s OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity published by Zuccotti Park Press.
- Thinking of Joining the ISO?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 My goal in writing this is to encourage a fundamental re-thinking of “Leninist” party-building efforts in order to help end the unnecessary separation between the socialist movement and the working class that has blocked both movements from beginning to reverse the balance of class forces in America. I strongly believe such party-building efforts have helped perpetuate rather than undermine this crippling separation.
- Thinking of Joining the ISO?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A critical examination of the ISO’s methods, practices, and structures compared to those of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) which the ISO holds up as its organizing model, as well as some suggestions for a better, more effective political practice.
- 13 Things the Government is Trying to Keep Secret From You
Constitutional Black Out Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The President and the Government are intentionally keeping massive amounts of information about surveillance secret.
- 'This Madman Must Be Stopped'
Syrian Chemical Weapons Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The White House claims that US intelligence assessed 'with varying degrees of confidence' that 'the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin'.
- Thompson, William Morris and Ecosocialist Tasks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Bernabe highlights E.P. Thompson's biography of William Morris and his theories regarding ecosocialism.
- Threatened with Censorship and Ouster by PEN's Henchmen
Sign the Petition to Remove Suazanne Nossel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Nossel's appointment may be seen as the most visible and overt symptom of Western subversion that goes back to the very founding of the "human rights" NGO’s
- Three Leaks, Three Weeks, and What We've Learned About the US Government's Other Spying Authority: Executive Order 12333
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The National Security Agency has been siphoning off data from the links between Yahoo and Google data centers, which include the fiber optic connections between company servers at various points around the world. While the user may have an encrypted connection to the website, the internal data flows were not encrypted and allowed the NSA to obtain millions of records each month, including both metadata and content like audio, video and text.
- Three Things Young People Should Know to Save the World
Know Your Rights! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Old people should know these things too. Energy seems better invested in trying to teach them to young people who have less to unlearn in the process.
- The Thrust Toward Opacity
Shh! It's a Secret! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Lately we’ve been bombarded by Secrets. We don’t know many of the details, but we do know of their existence, at least some of them. Let’s turn briefly to some specifics, first in the area of intelligence and surveillance, then in the terrain of military and paramilitary actions, and finally in the sphere of economic efforts.
- To end the occupation, dissolve the Palestinian Authority
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Palestinians will not gain their freedom except through popular resistance, in which all segments of the Palestinian people are unified against the occupation, in an organized popular intifada. There will not be a popular intifada before the Palestinian Authority is dissolved, and a unified, principles-centered national leadership is formed.
- To Look and Communicate
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We Zapatistas know that just as there are many worlds in this world that we inhabit, there are also many forms, modes, times, and places to struggle against the beast, without asking, nor hoping, for anything in exchange.
- Tony Cliff as a Socialist Leader
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of 'Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time.'
- Too Big to Jail
Not Too Big to Resist Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 US rich evade punishment while the poor are criminalized in the two-tier justice system.
- Toolkit for a New Canada - 2013 Edition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A pamphlet providing a snapshot of what the contributors, brought together by Canadian Dimensionmagazine, believe are the big issues facing Canada in the second decade of the 21st century. The articles are short and offer concrete suggestions for the way forward.
- Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied on Porn Habits as Part of Plan to Discredit 'Radicalizers'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as "exemplars" of how "personal vulternabilities" can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.
- The Torturer as Feminist: From Abu Ghraib to Zero Dark Thirty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 How “feminism” is used in service of the American empire.
- Torturing and Jailing Palestinian Children
Nightmare in the Occupied Territories Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 About 500-700 children are arrested by the Israeli occupation every year, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. These children face a policy designed to kill their spirit and shut them down. It targets them physically and psychologically.
- Toward a Literacy of Rebellion
Compañeros of the Word Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The words dignity, dream, democracy, justice, struggle and liberty are among those central to the Zapatista vision, but perhaps it is the word compañero, the building block of the community and the organization, that holds and contains all of these other words in it.
- Trade Unions: The Difficult Path to Solidarity in One's Own Interest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In both the ideals and the rhetoric of trade unions international solidarity plays a major role. Trade union practice, however, is first and foremost focused on the context of those nation-states, in which they were able to achieve their most important victories in the 20th century. It is those achievements within the national framework which are being undermined with the help of the EU and its institutions.
- Transpacific Antiracism
Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 This work introduces the social movements in black America, Japan, and Okinawa that formed Afro-Asian solidarities against the practice of white supremacy in the 20th century.
- Transpacific Partnership and Monsanto
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the potential to become the biggest regional Free Trade Agreement in history, both in economic size and the ability to quietly add more countries in addition to those originally included.
- The triumph of green hearts over sere
Reflections on student radicalism at Sydney University in the 1910s and the 1960s Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In April 1910, thirty graduates and undergraduates met on the eve of the federal elections with the intention of establishing the University Socialist Society. The conservatives downtown were shocked. The next day, while the voters shifted to the left, and Andrew Fisher looked forward to leading his second Labor government, the Sydney Morning Herald called the formation of a socialist club at the University, ‘The Last Straw’...
- Trotsky Reconsidered: Claude Lefort's Perspective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In spite of all the ink spilled that says the opposite, Trotsky may have been closer to Stalin than he was to Lenin. That’s the argument made by Claude Lefort (one of the leading members of Socialisme ou Barbarisme) in a 1948 essay, “The Contradiction of Trotsky.” He criticizes Trotsky for having over and over again pursued a conciliationist approach towards Stalin and failing to uphold what Lefort claims would have been Lenin’s positions if he had still been alive.
- The Troubled State of Labor
Book review Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A book review of The State of Working America
- Turkey's Urban Uprising
The Struggle for Democracy against Inequality, Oligarchy, Oppression, and Tyranny Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In Turkey, a wave of urban uprisings had spread across the country, involving hundreds of thousands of protesters, in dozens of cities, met with massive state repression and violence, resulting in a few deaths and thousands of injuries and arrests.
- Turning Blood into Money
Profiting from Killing Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Yotam Feldman’s documentary The Lab, released in August, is one of the most important exposés of the obscene rationale and execution of Israel’s hugely lucrative arms and security industries through the voices of some of its ex-military key operators: Amos Golan, Shimon Naveh, Leo Gleser, and Yoav Galant.
- Twenty-First-Century Land Grabs
Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Land grabs -- whether initiated by multinational corporations and private investment firms emanating from the capitalist core, sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, or state entities such as China and India -- are now in the news constantly.
- Twice Removed: Double Punishment and Racial Profiling in Canada
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 Immigrants who commit criminal offences are punished twice: once when they're sentenced for their crime, and again when they are permanently removed from Canada, even if they had lived here since childhood.This is known as "double punishment."
- Two Acts of Terror, Only One Investigation
The Real Terrorists are the Corporate Execs Who've Bought the Regulators Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Two acts of terrorism in the US this week, the first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators; the second happened a couple days later in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues.
- Two Americas -- Where Racism Lives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The George Zimmerman case and racism.
- The Two Faces of Class Struggle: The Motor Force for Historical Regression or Advance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 One of the most important and yet most neglected determinants of the outcomes of the economic crisis and resultant deepening of social inequalities and immiseration is the ‘class struggle’. In one of his most pithy metaphors, Karl Marx referred to class struggle as ‘the motor force of history’.
- Two in one?
A review of Donny Gluckstein, A People's History of the Second World War: Resistance Versus Empire (Pluto, 2012) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Second World War was and still is the example of the “good war”, a war that put an end to Auschwitz, a war fought not only by regular armies but also by mass movements of anti-fascist resistance.
- Two Struggles, One Story
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mkhuseli “Khusta” Jack and Oscar Olivera met face to face and shared their stories of strategic organizing with the scholars and professors of the School of Authentic Journalism.
- UK Ordered Destruction Of 'Embarrassing' Colonial Papers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Britain systematically destroyed documents in colonies that were about to gain independence, declassified Foreign Office files reveal. Operation Legacy saw sensitive documents secretly burnt or dumped to cover up traces of British activities.
- UK: Walking a tightrope: Between the pro-Islamist Left and the far-Right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Opposing Sharia and Islamism in the west is like walking on a tight rope most of the time -- thwarting attacks from the Left, refuting cultural relativism, preventing alliances with the far-Right, explaining the issues ignored by government and the media, mobilising support for secularism and citizenship whilst opposing racism and xenophobia, and making linkages with the many fighting Islamism on the ground in countries across the world.
- Ukraine Is Not a Brothel
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 Ukraine Is Not a Brothel is a 2013 Australian film directed by Kitty Green. The film debuted at the 70th Venice International Film Festival, although was not part of the competition.The documentary concerns the FEMEN movement, a feminist protest group originating from Ukraine.
- Ukraine: what's going on, and what does it mean?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Some thoughts on the protests happening in Ukraine. Things are not completely what they may seem.
- The UN did NOT create Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 UN General Assembly Resolution 181, the Partition Plan, was a recommendation that was to go to the Security Council. The resolution requested that the Security Council take it up. This never happened, and the partition plan has no force of law. Israeli propagandists, however, perpetrated the myth that the UN created Israel, and this interpretation was then been repeated by numerous others.
- Undercover Agents Infiltrated Tar Sands Resistance Camp to Break Up Planned Protest
TransCanada and Department of Homeland Security Keep Close Eye on Activists, FOIA Documents Reveal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Law enforcement officials and TransCanad had been spying on a Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance training camp and were able to block some activists who had planned to block the gates at the company’s strategic oil reserves.
- Understanding Idle No More
Special Topics in Aboriginal Community Learning Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A selection of readings related to the Idle No More movement, and to aboriginal struggles in Canada generally.
- The U.S. Empire & Modern Day Christian Martyrs
80th Priest Killed in Colombia Since 1984 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 there has been almost no media coverage of the killings of the “two bishops, 79 priests, eight men and women religious, as well as three seminarians” killed in Colombia alone between 1984 and 2011.
- Unless Union Workers Can Strike, They're Dead
Level the Playing Field Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The strike is workers' only viable weapon. Why? Because it, and it alone, immediately affects the company’s profits. Without labour, they're crippled.
- Unregulated oil fracking boom does permanent damage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We know about the dangers of pollution from fracking. But its lethal, long-term byproducts and the ease with which they leak or are dumped may be causing worse problems in a state that can’t even question them.
- Update: Chicago's School War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Chicago Public Schools took a hit on May 22, 2013 as the appointed Board of Education of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) voted to close 50 schools, of the 54 originally targeted for shutdown -- in the largest closing of public schools in U.S. history. This was done despite an outpouring of opposition, expressed by thousands of parents in more than 100 meetings mandated by state law to allow parental and community input into the process.
- The Uprising in Turkey
Conservative-Neoliberal Alliance and Popular Resistance in Turkey Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Thousands are taking to the streets to oppose the current regime of old Islamic, anti-secularist values sitting comfortably with large scale US based Neoliberal capitalism.
- US and Israeli Intelligence
Practice of Torture Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Torture by US and Israeli intelligence agencies.
- US Civil Rights-Era Leader Mary King Says Successful Social Movements Expand Space for Other Struggles
Paper Penned by King Helped to Spark Modern Women's Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mary King played an important role in helping to advance the struggle for women's rights.
- US: Offensive Cyber-Warfare is Illegal... Unless We Do It
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The US government declares that cyberwarfare directed against the US would be an act of war -- and, oh, by the way, that it is agressively engaged in cyberwarfare against foreign countries.
- The U.S. Press and Repression in the Obama Era
A New Awakening or Political Theater? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Obama administration’s is expanding its use of executive powers to intimidate and crush dissent had turned its focus on the U.S. press.
- US Prosecutors Turned a Blind Eye to Drone Code Piracy
They Chose Instead to Strap Digital Visionary Aaron Swartz to Their Buzzsaw Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist and the co-developer of popular web tools like RSS feeds and Reddit, ended his life earlier this year at the end of a long battle with federal prosecutors in Boston — who had accused him of engaging in digital piracy.
- US Still Fighting "Threat" of Liberation Theology
The Wikileaks Revelations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The assault on the Church in Colombia is both state policy of Colombia as well as the United States which is propping up that military with billions of dollars of assistance, and which views organized movements for social justice in Latin America as a threat to its economic domination of the region.
- US Uses Past Crimes to Legalize Future Ones
Justifying the Unjustifiable Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The liberal warhawks are groping around for a pretext they can call “legal” for waging war against Syria, and have come up with the 1999 “Kosovo war”.
- The US v. Trayvon Martin
How the System Worked Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, teenage pedestrian died and George Zimmerman walked because our entire political and legal foundations were built on an ideology of settler colonialism.
- Review: The Uses and Abuses of History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of "The Uses and Abuses of History" by Margaret Macmillan.
- Utopia in the Catskills
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Proyect talks about "Utopia in the Catskills," an article published on July 20, 1947, which is about refugees who wanted to be farmers and made Woodridge, N.Y., into a prosperous farm-resort town with five co-ops.
- Vandana Shiva On Resisting GMOs: "Saving Seeds Is a Political Act"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Sarah van Gelder interviewed Vandana Shiva, renowned for her activism against GMOs, globalization, and patents on seeds and traditional foods.
- VAWA Must Pass to Protect All Women, Regardless of Race
The Fight Ahead Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 No woman deserves to be beaten, raped, or killed, regardless of her race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.
- Ventra Capitalists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Zimmer discusses the problems arising with the recent implementation of the Ventra fare collection system for Chicago transit, a change that has been costly and inefficient for riders but profitable for corporations involved.
- The Very Future of Third World Agriculture Is at Stake
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Food security is simply a smokescreen to provide a cover-up for the global efforts being made to dismantle the very foundations of Third World agriculture. Putting more income into the hands of Third World farmers is not acceptable, as it makes developing country agriculture economically viable and therefore deals a blow to U.S. agribusiness trade interests.
- A Very Perfect Instrument
The ferocity and failure of America's sanctions apparatus Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Essay on the U.S. system of sanctions and its international negative repercussions.
- A View from the Base
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In Atlanta there was a very serious discussion both in meetings and on the Spanish-language talk radio station beginning a week ago over whether we should continue to call on the Senators to vote yes. And at least for the Senate, we stuck with calling for a yes vote.
- The Village Against The World
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Hancox recounts the fascinating story of Marinaleda villagers who expropriated the land owned by wealthy aristocrats and have, since the 1980s, made it the foundation of a cooperative way of life.
- A Village Awaits Doomsday
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Jaideep Hardikar brings us the personal stories of ordinary people from across India who were displaced and made destitute by innumerable government and private initiatives.
- Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This technology allows the creation of an Internet tunnel (a virtual link) between two physical networks in different locations in a way that is transparent for users.
- The Virtues of Mutiny and Desertion
Two Christmas Anniversaries Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Christmas Eve also marks the famous 1914 “Christmas truce” when British and German soldiers crossed No Man’s Land to shake hands, play soccer, exchange souvenirs and sing carols to each other. The High Commands and politicians on both sides swiftly put an end to that foolishness. The war went on killing many millions.
- Voices of Resistance to the Northern Gateway Pipeline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The National Energy Board's Joint Review Panel (JRP) has just published its recommendation that the Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway to transport Alberta's tar sands oil to the northwest coast of British Columbia should be approved.
- Voter Suppression Hits Mississippi
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Concerns regarding the polarization of voting in Mississippi between classses and actions taken with the apparent goal of suppressing the non-white opposition.
- Vulnerable Akron: the first great sit-down
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Akron, rubber manufacturing capital of the world. A drab Mid-Western industrial city of 255,000. A city with a hum, a throb, anodor all its own. It made the front pages in February, 1936. A strike had closed the largest tire factory on the globe, which had 14,000 employees.
- Howard Wallace, 1936-2012
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Walmart: Black Friday and Beyond
Against The Current vol. 162 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The “Black Friday” strike at Walmart stores surprised and elated many on the left and activists throughout labour and allied movements.
- The War on Science
Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Do No Science, Hear No Science, Speak No Science -- that is the Harper agenda. And if this agenda is most evident and most pronounced in environmental science, that's simply because it is the field most likely to uncover evidence that the government's paramount goal -- to free the country's resource extraction industries from oversight in the name of rapid expansion -- is wrongheaded, reckless, and damaging.
- The War on Terrorism ... or Whatever
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 A brief survey of the War on Terrorism, a war that has become increasingly difficult to sell to the American public as one of pro-democracy "moderates" locked in a good-guy-versus-bad-guy struggle with an evil dictator, although in actuality the United States has fought on the same side as al Qaeda on repeated occasions before Syria.
- War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State
Free Press and the National Security State Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2013 During his election campaigns, Barak Obama promised the most transparent administration in U.S. history. Cynics can rejoice in the fact that the Obama administration has indicted more people for violating government secrecy than all previous administrations combined. This is the story of four whistleblowers who who traded their careers and life normalcy for slander, danger, legal prosecution and an opportunity to expose the crimes of the US government.
- War With Syria and its Repercussions
A Smoldering Tinderbox Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Obama seems intent on going to war with Syria. The U.S. will be leading Europe, Arab and Israeli allies while pushing an already unstable Middle East into full fledged regional chaos, which could instantly take on an international character.
- We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Stephen emphasizes the crucial role of testimony in human rights work, indigenous cultural history, community and indigenous radio, and women's articulation of their rights to speak and be heard. She also explores transborder support for APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca), particularly among Oaxacan immigrants in Los Angeles.
- We can't go on like this
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The legitimacy of capitalism as a way of organising society has been undermined; its promises of prosperity, social mobility and democracy have lost credibility. But there has been no radical change. The system has repeatedly come under fire, but it has survived. What has happened? What can be done about it?
- We Will Shoot Back
Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. As the civil rights movement developed, armed self-defense and resistance became a significant means by which the descendants of enslaved Africans overturned fear and intimidation and developed different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.
- The Whack 'Em and Stack 'Em Mentality of American Cops
Killers on the Road Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Killings by police are not a negligible proportion of the United States' firearms death toll. The public apprehension that cops are often borderline psychotic, hair-trigger-ready to open fire on the slightest pretext, virtually immune from serious sanction, is growing apace, fueled by such incidents as the dog slaughter on an interstate.
- What Bradley Manning Revealed
The Wikileaks Files Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 PFC Bradley Manning is a US Army intelligence specialist who released classified information to WikiLeaks.
- What Comes Next?: A forum on the end of the two-state paradigm
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 "What Comes Next?: A forum on the end of the two-state paradigm" was initiated by Jewish Voice for Peace as an investigation into the current state of thinking about one state and two state solutions, and the collection has been further expanded by Mondoweiss to mark 20 years since the beginning of the Oslo peace process.
- What Comes Next: Towards a bi-national end-game in Palestine/Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Jeff Halper suggests that the best political system to express both the desires of the two national communities of Palestine/Israel for self-determination and of its individual citizens for democracy would seem to be a consociational democracy.
- What If ObamaCare was a Fighter Jet?
Prospering Through Failure Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Like the comically bad roll-out of the Affordable Care Act’s website, the long-delayed and often-rejiggered F-35 program is a costly disaster rife with technological snafus, software problems and repeated contractor incompetence.
- What is a Revolution?
A Total Mess Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Ever since the beginning of the Arab Spring there has been much talk of revolutions.
- What Is the "Working Class"?
Against The Current vol. 163 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 I used to hold up signs about “Workers Power” at demonstrations. I rarely do that any more. This is because almost no one understands what “workers power” might mean. They also do not know what “worker” means.
- What Makes a Protest Violent?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The conversation about protest violence has changed but the essential reality remains: the State and its enforcers (public and private) determine what acceptable violence is and what isn’t. This determination is not arrived at according to the nature or degree of the violent acts; it is arrived at according to who is perpetrating said act.
- What Motivated the Boston Bombers
Why It's Not a Chechen Thing, But All About the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Two young men, brothers who emigrated from Kyrgyzstan twelve years ago with their parents and sisters — high-achieving, “well-assimilated” immigrant men — planted bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring well over 250.
- What privilege analysis doesn't provide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Reading the ongoing debate on white skin privilege at SocialistWorker.org has author think about a recent fightback that took place where he works. It is a large, publicly funded hospital that cares for a patient population that is as racially and ethnically diverse as its workforce.
- What the Snowden Affair Reveals About US Journalism
Corporate Media shown to be Rank Propaganda Arms Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The national corporate media is little more than unofficial propaganda arms of the US government.
- What Then Must We Do?
Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Gar Alperovitzexplains why that the time is right for a revolutionary new economy movement, what it means to democratize the ownership of wealth, what it will take to build a new system to replace the decaying one — and how to strengthen our communities through cooperatives, worker-owned companies, neighborhood corporations, small and medium-size independent businesses, and publicly owned enterprises.
- What to do with a tin of beans? Food banks, the left and the movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Acts of collective practical solidarity are a springboard to participation in campaigning against austerity and the Tory war on the poor.
- What's Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries?
Scientists reject Harper government claims vital material is being saved digitally Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Scientists say the closure of some of the world's finest fishery, ocean and environmental libraries by the Harper government has been so chaotic that irreplaceable collections of intellectual capital built by Canadian taxpayers for future generations has been lost forever. Many collections ended up in dumpsters while others such as Winnipeg's historic Freshwater Institute library were scavenged by citizens, scientists and local environmental consultants. Others were burned or went to landfills.
- What's the Matter With That Union Boss?
The Real Yes Men Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Why do the most right-wing politicians and corporate news outlets always use the term “union boss”? Because the worst thing they can think of is to say the leader of a labour organization acts like a capitalist? Or the capitalist’s lackey?
- What's the Sexual Health of the Nation?
Sex, Lies and the Great Recession Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 What happens to pleasure during a period of social crisis? Sex may be the best way to determine the true pulse of the nation.
- What's Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)?
A Response to Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (And Its Critics) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Identity, like an occupation, is a trap, because it curtails human potential and bars workers from participation in the social totality as fully developing individuals. Identities are reified social categories from which we should emerge, not within which we should be compelled to remain. The problem with identity politics, then, is that it is one-sided and undialectical. It treats identities as static entities, and its methods only serve to further reify those categories. It aims to liberate identity groups (or members thereof) qua identity groups (or individuals), rather than aiming to liberate them from identity itself.
- When Does Criticism of Islam become Islamophobia?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Basic points that undergird about the relationship between criticism, Islam and Islamophobia. We should stop being so obsessed by the distinction between legitimate criticism and Islamophobia, and start thinking about how an obsession with both Islam and Islamophobia distorts our culture and our debates.
- When Madness Swept the Mediterranean
A Review of “Smyrna: the Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City” Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 What was so unique about this Mediterranean port in the Ottoman Empire, which even today, 90 years after the Destruction is still linked to a joie de vivre during the good times and dirges for the Destruction that came so suddenly in September 1922?
- When the Unimaginable Happened
Mandela: the Movie Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Mandela: the Movie is a very accurate film, depicting what actually happened in South Africa, and one cannot help thinking about it again and again.
- Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
The Anti-Empire Report Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The double edged sword of declaring war and fighting "terrorism".
- Where War Reporting Goes Wrong
A Diary of Four Wars Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The four recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria have been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television and radio journalists played a central role. In all wars there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns the outside world has been left with misconceptions even about the identity of the victors and the defeated.
- Where's the Body Count from Shootings by the Police?
Protecting Killer Cops Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 It estimated that in the United States in 2011 police shot more than 1,100 people, killing 607. However, the government refuses to keep track of the killings, so the exact number is unknown, and may well be higher.
- Which strategy for the left?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Ed Rooksby, a supporter of the Left Unity initiative, recently put forward his view that a left government can play a key role in the fight for radical change. Mark L. Thomas argues this ignores the role of the state.
- Which Way Out for Detroit?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Feeley discusses the prevention of further home foreclosures in Detroit through a consideration of two of the most urgent issues: unemployment and evictions. These indicators reflect the poverty of the city -- where 35% live below the poverty line according to the 2009 U.S. Census.
- Who Is An Objective Journalist?
Agents of the Status Quo Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The false dichotomy between journalists and activists.
- Who was Nelson Mandela?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 We should treasure the memory of the Mandela our rulers hated: the lonely, courageous, unbowed political prisoner, condemned for his resistance to racial oppression.
- Whose sarin?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. The Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin.
- Why Cooperative Businesses Are Not the Answer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The problem with the worker-owned cooperative business economic model is that this model retains one of the most important defining characteristics of the capitalist model with which we are so familiar today: production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the market place.
- Why environmentalists must support workers' struggles
Global Capitalism is the Real Enemy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 This is to specifically address class struggle as it relates to the ecological crisis. It will not address all the other (many!) reasons that working class struggle must be waged and supported.
- Why I Represent the New Orleans Immigrant Workers Who Committed Civil Disobedience
An Honor to Defend Them Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In the thirty six-years I have been a lawyer, I have seen many people take brave moral actions. I have represented hundreds in Louisiana and across our country who have been arrested for protesting for peace, civil rights, economic justice, and human rights for all. It is amazing to see people put their freedom on the line when they risk jail for justice.
- Why is Canada Subsidizing Racist Property Restrictions?
The JNF's Bigoted Land Use Policy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In Canada it is illegal to restrict the sale of property to certain ethnic or religious groups but many of our business people and politicians promote an organization that does exactly that in Israel.
- Why it's time to realign the left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Ed Rooksby, one of the supporters of the call for a new radical left party to be formed in Britain, explains why he thinks the time is right to launch such a party and what its aims should be.
- Why Saying No to Toronto Airport Expansion Makes Sense
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Saying no to the expansion of the Toronto Island Airport and introduction of jet aircrafts is the economical, ecological and socially responsible thing to do.
- Why socialism can be nothing else than 'real': Lessons from 'really existing socialism- - Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 In this guest post, Sabina Stan from the Transnational Labour Project in Oslo critically questions this understanding and asks what the real lessons from 'really existing socialism' are for the understanding of today's capitalism.
- Why the Ruling Class is So Upset About Edward Snowden
The Damage to Our Intelligence is Gut-Wrenching to See Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Is Snowden a hero, or a villain? The tiny power elite that controls the mainstream press and cable channels, the corporations that dutifully hand over meta-data to the state, the twin political parties, are sick to their stomachs that they’ve been so exposed.
- Why Vote for a Scottish State ?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Barry Biddulph takes a critical look at, The National Question-Some Basic Principles, by John Molyneux in the Irish Marxist Review and the application of these principles to Scotland by Keir Mckechnie.
- Why We Should Not Forget Miriam Carey
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The ignominious and unnecessary public killing of Miriam Carey should be a human marker that triggers our cultural meaning machine to honestly consider what’s wrong with the picture of a howling pack of cops shooting down a troubled young mother … like a dog.
- Why Workplace "Accidents" Happen
Safety Costs Money Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Many industrial and manufacturing companies resort to almost any means (some of them not entirely legal) to dissuade employees from joining a union because besides having to offer higher wages and improved benefits (and giving employees a voice in how they’re treated by management), they are required to provide a safe work environment. Safety costs money and every company is interested in saving money.
- Wild Socialism: All Power to the Councils! (Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Review of Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-1921 by Martin Comack (2012) and All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918-1919 edited by Gabriel Kuhn (2012).
- Wilfred Burchett's Retreat From Moscow
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Between 1965-1968, journalist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997) was the Moscow-based correspondent for the Communist Party of Australia’s (CPA) newspaper Tribune. A veteran journalist, Lockwood had become a leftist as the result of his front-line experiences covering the Spanish Civil War for the Melbourne Herald. A party member since 1939, his Moscow experiences contributed to him leaving the party in 1969. In these previously unpublished “Notes and Recollections”, drafted in the 1980s, Lockwood recalls his Moscow experiences, and his association with journalist Wilfred Burchett (1911-1983).
- The Will of the People Doesn’t Mean Jack Shit to the Drug Warriors
Gangsters With Federal Pensions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The DEA vs. voter-approved marijuana legalization in Washington and Colorado.
- Will the Real Gwyn Morgan Please Stand Up
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013
- Wind power opponents may be blowing hot air
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 When it comes to wind power, we have to be careful to ensure that impacts on the environment and on animals such as birds and bats are minimized, and we should continue to study possible effects on health. But we must also be wary of false arguments against it.
- Winning the Rank and File Soldiers in Egypt
An Historical Drama Unfolds Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will wield power during and immediately after the current transition of the toppling of Mohamed Morsi.
- Without Fear, Without Favor
The Future of Journalism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 The Words “lifetime achievement” have a certain undertone. There is a hint that the work is finished.
- Witness to Betrayal: Scott Crow on the Exploits and Misadventures of FBI Informant Brandon Darby
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Scott Crow tells the story of his friendship with Brandon Darby, an anarchist militant and FBI informer.
- The women of Greenham Common taught a generation how to protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Women in Greenham used their voice in order to advance the ordinary class, and their legacy lives on.
- Women's liberation: theory and practice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Fundamental change for women means challenging the priorities of a system based on profit, and that requires connecting women’s movements to the wider fight for change.
- The work of authentic journalists is the most important thing for social movements
How Mercedes Osuna became a rebel with a cause Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Not an activist, social organizer nor a defender: Mercedes Osuna would rather define her work as human labor, something that she has dedicated an entire life to. She was born in a place were true words are heard with the heart and she lived out her convictions at a young age.
- Working class cinema: a video guide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Libcom.org's guide to working class films and TV shows, showing class struggles, revolutionary situations and everyday lives.
- The working class, trade unions and the left: the contours of resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Vernell talks about the attacks of the British government to stabilise capitalism, as well as the response of the working class.
- Working To Honour Nelson Mandela's Legacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 As the world mourns the passing of South Africa's first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, his close friend and political stalwart Tokoyo Sexwale says much needs to be done to honour his legacy.
- Would You Believe That the United States Tried to do Something That was Not Nice Against Hugo Chávez?
The Plan to Destabilize Venesuela Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Wikileaks releases documents on U.S. efforts to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
- Yahoo's Tumblr, Google's Makani and Noah Cross's Future
Designing Software, Wings and Your Life Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Corporations, in seeking to control markets, become the custodians and designers of our culture and our future. For them, the future is a communication limited to outbursts and pithy comments, a data-base that includes all our personal information available to governments who request it or advertisers who pay for it and lives that are, in large part, directed toward consumption.
- Yemenis Have Moms Too
Michelle Obama, Open Your Heart Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Abdurahman al-Shubati disappeared more than a decade ago, just 18-years-old and teaching abroad, separated from his family for the first time in life. Join us in calling on Michelle Obama to open her heart to the cries of Abdurahman’s mother and ask Barack to send those cleared home and to expedite the closing of Guantanamo.
- Yes, But What Are You For?
Occupy Wall Street and its Evil Twin, the Tea Party Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Reading all the accounts of Occupy Wall Street’s theorising in Zuccotti Park can send you to sleep: all academic prose and no real world action or demands. They also make explicit Occupy’s resemblance to its enemy, the Tea Party.
- Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here
Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2013 Karima Bennoune interviews 300 people from 30 countries to report on a largely invisible group of people: Muslim opponents of fundamentalism. They remain largely invisible, lost amid the heated coverage of Islamist terror attacks on one side and abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists on the other. A veteran of twenty years of human rights research and activism, Karima Bennoune draws on extensive fieldwork and interviews to illuminate the inspiring stories of those who represent one of the best hopes for ending fundamentalist oppression worldwide.
- Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, by Karima Bennoune (Book Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Karima Bennoune, a US-based law scholar raised in Algeria, has written an account of the stories of numerous people whose lives have been scarred by Islamic fundamentalism and who decided, using a variety of means, to put up a fight.
- Yugoslav Self-Management: Capitalism Under the Red Banner
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2013 Yugoslav self-management is a unique historical experiment. Furthermore, it is one of the most interesting formations of, so called, real-socialism up to today, as Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and initiated its own specific economic, political and ideological way.
2012
- Abortion and Conscience
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 I am as in favour of a woman’s right to abortion as I am hostile to Creationism. I recognize, however, a fundamental difference between insisting that all biology teachers teach the theory of evolution and forcing a doctor to perform an abortion against his or her will. I recognize, too, a fundamental difference between defending a woman’s right to choose and insisting that this includes the right to compel a doctor to perform an abortion. Not to recognise such distinctions is to distort the very idea of morality.
- Abortion, Infanticide, Humanity, Free Speech
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Abortion is right, and infanticide is wrong, because there IS a moral boundary between the fetus and the newborn.
- The Act of Killing
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 A film is about the individuals who participated in the Indonesian killings of 1965–66.
- The Activists' Handbook
A Step-by-Step Guide to Participatory Democracy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A guide to grassroots activism.
- Adivasi Movements in India: An Interview with Poet Waharu Sonavane
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Waharu is a Bhil Adivasi, long-time poet and activist. Since the 1970s, he has been organizing for Adivasi self-sufficiency among his community near his hometown in western India.
- Afghan Young Women Protest Killing Women
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Afghan Young Women for Change (YWC) activists, holding placards which read 'where is justice?', take part in a protest denouncing violence against women in Afghanistan in Kabul on April 14, 2012. Some 30 Afghan women took to the streets of the capital Kabul against the killing of five Afghan women in less than a month in three provinces of the country.
- Afghanistan: the Smell of Defeat
Cut-and-Run Time Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The United States hasn’t liberated Afghanistan. It hasn’t rebuilt Afghanistan. It hasn’t removed the warlords from power, curtailed opium production, established strong democratic institutions, or improved life for ordinary working people. The US hasn’t achieved any of its strategic objectives.
- African Awakenings: The Emerging Revolutions (Book Review)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This book sets out to place the host of new movements arising across the continent in a singular socio-political context.
- African Odyssey Turns to the South
The Great Migrations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Chronicles the economic hardships faced by Africans and the means they take to alleviate their suffering.
- Against Fundamentalism and Imperialism - Review
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A view of the inside forces in Pakistan.
- The Age of Hell
Entrenching Murder as the American Way Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Washington Post has just laid out, in horrifying, soul-slaughtering detail, the Obama Administration’s ongoing effort to expand, entrench and “codify” the practice of murder and terrorism by the United States government. The avowed, deliberate intent of these sinister machinations is to embed the use of death squads and drone terror attacks into the policy apparatus of future administrations, so that the killing of human beings outside all pretense of legal process will go on, year after year after year, even when the Nobel Peace Laureate has left office.
- Air Force Invades the Rocky Mountains
Sky Grab Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Communities throughout rural America are fighting to stop more Air Force flights overhead. In addition to New Mexico and Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arizona, Kentucky and Maine are some of the other states fighting intrusive low-level flights.
- Alternative Media is an Absolute Necessity!!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 By now most people that have been paying close attention to the traditional media and made some attempt to look at other sources know that the traditional media is controlled by corporate interests and they’re financed by commercials that create a strong bias not to expose the corruption of those that advertise with them.
- America: Becoming a Land Without Farmers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In rural America fewer than 3 percent of farmers make more than 63 percent of the money, including government subsidies. The results of this emerging feudal economy are everywhere. Large areas of the United States are becoming impoverished farm towns with abandoned farmhouses and deserted land. More and more of the countryside has been devoted to massive factory farms and plantations.
- America Likes Democracy, Except In Venezuela
Chavez in the Crosshairs Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Venezuelans can be sure that their vote counts. The government in Venezuela has done everything to increase voter registration and participation.
- American Autumn: An Occudoc
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Shot on the front lines and meeting spaces of the Occupy movement in NYC, Boston, and Washington, DC from the earliest days through the end of January 2012, American Autumn: an Occudoc is an inside looking out view of the occupy movement.
- American Decline in Perspective
Empire and Its Discontents Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- American Jacobins
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In a recent broadside against the Occupy movement, Alexander Cockburn assailed, among other things, “the enormous arrogance which prompted the Occupiers to claim that they were indeed the most important radical surge in living memory. Where was the knowledge of, let alone the respect for, the past?”
- American Poetry's "Labor Problem" - Book Review
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Book review of 'Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry' by John Marsh.
- The American Way of Eating
Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Why do working Americans eat the way we do? And what can we do to change it? To find out, McMillan went undercover in three jobs that feed hte U.S., living and eating off her wages in each. Reporting from California fields, a Walmart produce aisle outside of Detroit, and the kitchen of a New York City Applebee’s, McMillan examines the reality of the American food industry.
- America's Baleful Worldwide Pressure
The Way the Wind Blows Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The overweening arrogance of the United States in conduct of its foreign relations is evident throughout the world.
- America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff
How Today’s Fiscal Austerity is Reminiscent of World War I’s Economic Misunderstandings Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An exploration of how today’s fiscal austerity is reminiscent of World War I’s economic misconceptions.
- America's Last Chance
One Against the Empire Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The United States is rapidly being turned into a police state.
- The Amistad Rebellion
An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 An account of the Amistad slave ship rebellion told for the first time from the slaves' perspective.
- Anthropologists, Spooks, and the Boys Who Went to War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Anti-Science: Left and Right Together?
A Systematic Attack on Rationality Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The suggestion that left and right thinking may be converging on matters scientific will, no doubt, be offensive to some on the left. After all, the right chooses myth over evolution, and oil profits over climate science.
- Anti-Yiddish Riots: September 27, 1930
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A mob of several thousand Jews protested outside the Mograbi Theater in Tel Aviv on this date in 1930 against the screening of one of the first feature-length Yiddish-language talkie movies,“My Jewish Mother”.
- The Anti-Semitism That Goes Unreported
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Our grandparents knew that the order-enforcement authorities wouldn't intervene to help a Jewish family under attack; we know that the Israel Defense Forces, the Israel Police, the Civil Administration, the Border Police and the courts all stand on the sidelines, closing their eyes, softballing investigations, ignoring evidence, downplaying the severity of the acts, protecting the attackers, and giving a boost to those progromtchiks. The hands behind these attacks belong to Israeli Jews who violate international law by living in the West Bank. But the aims and goals behind the attacks are the flesh and blood of the Israeli non-occupation. This systemic violence is part of the existing order. It complements and facilitates the violence of the regime.
- Arab Detroit, Targeted Community
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Since September 11, 2001, the Detroit area’s Arab-American community has become a convenient source of media reports, an object of investigation by government agencies, and a target of hatred for Americans looking for someone to blame for the 9/11 attacks.
- Arab Jews vs. Palestinians: Israel's Refugee Pawns
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Israel's attempt to compare Arab Jews to Palestinian refugees.
- The Arab Spring, the West and Political Islam
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The contemporary Arab political system, until the recent outbreak of Arab revolutions, is the byproduct of a number of domestic, regional and global arrangements and developments in the post-World War II international order.
- Are US Troops Targeting Journalists?
Incidents Raise Suspicions on Motive Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It is dangerous in the extreme to be a journalist covering America’s wars, at least beginning with Vietnam.
- Ask a Silly Question
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 An inquiry into the polling and market industry. Through bogus street polls, we see how frequently people are willing to give opinions on subject matter they know nothing about.
- Assessing the Battle of Longview
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 How does the Occupy movement connect with more militant segments of the workers’ movement?
- At the crossroads between 'Green Economy' and rights of nature
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Under the rhetoric of "green economy", capitalists are actually attempting to use nature as capital, proposing unconvincingly that the only way to preserve natural elements such as water and forests is through private investment.
- Attacking Gun Culture at Its Source
No Justice, No Peace Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When you rob people of their self-respect and sense of control over their own lives, use them as means to your own ends, and treat them like garbage, don’t be surprised if you don’t like the destructive methods they choose to assert their sense of self. By all means let’s feel sympathy for the innocent victims when the worm turns — but let’s also never forget who set things in motion.
- Austerity and Resistance: Lessons from the 2012 Quebec Student Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The student strike in Quebec has ended, in a rather clear victory. After a seven month-long struggle — the longest of its kind in Quebec history — students have won a cancellation of the proposed tuition hike, a pledge to repeal the infamous Law 78 that had criminalized demonstrations, and the ouster of Premier Jean Charest and his Liberal government.
- Bad Pharma, Bad Journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 ‘The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal’, from Ben Goldacre's new book, Bad Pharma presents a disturbing picture emerges of corporate drug abuse.
- The Ballot and the Bullet
Election Diary, Venezuela Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The 2012 Venezuelan election, like Chávez himself, is the result of something far more profound that has been developing for decades, and which has accelerated considerably in recent years.
- Banacol: A company implicated paramilitarism and land grabbing in Curvarado and Jiguamiando
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This study focuses on the International Banacol Marketing Corporation’s actions in the Afro-Colombian and Mestizo communities’ collective territories of Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó in the Lower Atrato region of Chocó, Colombia.
- Banks Are "Where the Money Is" In The Drug War
Big Lenders Face Few Hard Consequences for Violating Anti-Money Laundering Laws Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Man of the largest banks in the world have been accused of failing to comply with anti-money laundering laws — thereby enabling, collectively, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of suspicious transactions to move through the banking system absent adequate monitoring or oversight.
- The Barnardo Boys
Thousands of British 'Home Children' were shipped to Canada as child labourers in a plot right out of Dickens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Between 1868 and the 1930s, more than 100,000 destitute children in Great Britain were shipped off to Canada. An estimated two-thirds of the Home Children, as they were known, were under the age 14.
- A BDS Movement That Works
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In 2005, a call was issued for global nonviolent resistance to occupation through acts of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.They had three goals: an end to occupation and return to the pre-1967 Green Line, equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and recognition of the Palestinian right of return.
- A Bend in the Labyrinth - Book Review
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Book review of 'The Century’s Midnight: Dissenting European and American Writers in the Era of the Second World War' by Clive Bush.
- Berlin's oldest squatters in town defend threatened community centre
Pensioners take a stand against development of their comunity centre Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Dozen of pensioners took over a community centre in the east Berlin suburb of Pankow last month after the local council said the building they had used as a community centre for 15 years had to make way for real estate development.
- Beware the Anti-Anti-War Left
Why Humanitarian Interventionism is a Dead End Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Ever since the 1990s, and especially since the Kosovo war in 1999, anyone who opposes armed interventions by Western powers and NATO has to confront what may be called an anti-anti-war left (including its far left segment).
- Beyond capitalist green economy: In defence of Mother Earth and the commons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Democratic Left Front calls for action against destructive corporate interests that are driving the commercialisation and commodification of the natural environment.
- Beyond Solidarity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The American sociologist Richard Sennett has explored themes of class and social exclusion for more than 40 years. Horatio Morpurgo speaks with him about his recent book Together: The Rituals, Pleasure and Politics of Co-operation.
- Beyond the Sacred
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A transcript on Malik's talk "Beyond the Sacred" at a conference on blasphemy.
- Big Brother's Getting Bigger
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Government surveillance and attacks on the privacy of American citizens were bad enough under the Bush regime but they are getting even worse during the Obama years.
- The big robo-calling question: will anyone go to jail?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Good investigative journalism could break this affair wide open, but will the owners of the Harper-friendly corporate media allow their journalists to go beyond normal reporting and do the hard work necessary to get to the very bottom of this dark story?
- The Birth of Medicare
From Saskatchewan's breakthrough to Canada-wide coverage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An account of the history of medicare in Canada, from its birth in Saskatchewan to its adoption nation-wide.
- The black bloc and the Battle of Seattle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Black History and the Class Struggle
#22 Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2012
- Black Teachers' Revolt of the 1960s
Educational Apartheid in Chicago Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Chicago's educational apartheid has a history which includes the racial segregation of its schools, the allocation of resources on an unequal basis and second class treatment for teachers of color. It was Jim Crow North. But there was also resistance, a resistance which grew into a powerful social movement during the 1960's.
- Book Review: A Review of Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital and Some Thoughts Prompted by the Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In Love and Capital, published in 2011, Mary Gabriel makes a really good case that love was at the center of the life of the revolutionary named Karl Marx.
- Book Review: African Awakenings: The Emerging Revolutions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Conspicuously absent from the renewed and resurgent discourse amongst anti-capitalist forces and the popular imagination was sub-Saharan Africa, “black Africa,” the Africa of the eternal cycle of dictators, corruption, famine, “bad governance” and debt. African Awakenings: The Emerging Revolutions ambitiously sets out to remedy this and place the host of new movements arising across the continent in a singular socio-political context.
- Book Review: C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (1939,1969)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 What makes A History of Pan African Revolt enchanting is the thread of speculative philosophy that holds the assorted anecdotal historical commentaries on labor strikes, anti-racist rebellions, heroic personalities, and anti-colonial events together.
- Book Review: C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (1939, 1969)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A small and dangerous volume, this republication of C.L.R. James’s A History of Pan-African Revolt is a concise survey of Black freedom struggles in the United States, the Caribbean, and on the African continent from 1739–1969.
- Book Review: Eric Leif Davin, Crucible of Freedom: Workers' Democracy in the Industrial Heartland, 1914 - 1960 (2010)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Book review on Eric Leif Davin's Crucible of Freedom: Workers' Democracy in the Industrial Heartland 1914-1960.
- Book Review: John Eric Marot, The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History (2012)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This is a book review concerning a very important book, one of the very few books published since 1991 on the “Russian Question” that will compel people (this reviewer included), long wedded to different characterizations of the post-1917 or post-1929 Soviet regime, to think through their commitments.
- Book Review: Marixism without Marx: Recent Interpretations of the Economic Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Paul Mattick’s, Business As Usual, and David McNally’s, Global Slump, each focuses on a single, primary aspect of Marx’s theory as a means to explain the current crisis. For Mattick, the point of entry into the economy is money; for McNally, it is competition. This propels them in very different directions, largely a function of how close to Marx they remain. Mattick’s book takes the form of an extended essay that warrants close reading. McNally’s lengthier treatment is both breezier and polemical.
- Book Review: Marxism without Marx: Recent Interpretations of the Economic Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Book Review: Michael D. Yates, ed., Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back (2012)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Book review on Michael Yates Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back.
- Booker's Place
A Mississippi Story Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 In 1965, African-American waiter Booker Wright spoke out in a television documentary, outraging many white Southerners and resulting in his murder. Years later, the filmmaker's son returns to examine the repercussions of the interview on Wright's family and the community as a whole.
- Boom and Bust... Literally
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The richest country in the world is faced with literal “boom”—in the form of exploding sections of electric, gas and steam systems—and “bust”—in the form of collapsing roads and bridges—on a widespread and regular basis.
- Border Vigils
Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A look at immigration controversies, focusing on the migrants' circumstances.
- Brazil's Quilombola Hit by Major Land Tax
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 For decades, marginalized ethnic communities in Brazil have fought for--and won--land rights. But this victory is turning into something of a poisoned chalice for some remote Quilombola communities, who are now facing a giant tax bill.
- A Brief History of Superpowers
The Neck Irons of Empire Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 From the Congress of Vienna of 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the “Allies” invasion of Russia in 1918 to the formation of what became the European Union in the 1950s, the great powers of Europe and the world have gotten together in grand meeting halls and on the field of battle to set the ground rules for imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, to Christianize and ‘civilize’, to remake the maps, and to suppress revolutions and other threats to great-power hegemony.
- Bringing the Battlefield to the Border
The Wild World of Border Security and Boundary Building in Arizona Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The U.S.-Mexican border has not only become Ground Zero for every experiment in immigration enforcement and drug interdiction, but also the incubator, testing site, showcase, and staging ground for ever newer versions of border-enforcement technology that, sooner or later, are sure to be applied globally.
- Broadside: A Feminist Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A history of the groundbreaking Canadian feminist newspaper published between 1979 and 1989. Searchable copies of all issues are available at the web address.
- The Brutal Tragedy at Marikana
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The following statement, “A Brutal Tragedy that Never Should Have Happened,” was issued by the editors of Amandla! immediately following the August 16 shooting of striking miners.
- Burdened with Debt Reloaded: The Politics ofr Devaluation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A series of defensive and sectional struggles at workplaces in the private sector reveal that the Greek industrial capital has already taken advantage of the new institutional framework of the “state of emergency” now ruling in Greece to prop up its profitability or just transfer its own debts and losses onto the workers.
- Burying the Typewriter
Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Carmen Bugan reflects on what life was like growing up in Romania during the 1980's with a dissident father.
- Business is Booming for the Prison Profiteers
The GEO Group Cashes In Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Though GEO (formerly Wackenhut) is hardly a household name, they are a major player in the private corrections sector, combining a self righteous amorality in profiting from human misery with a ruthless sense of just how to make a buck in this business.
- Call it as it is
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Now is the time to see that most of our problems are the result of the insatiable greed of the very few. And to say so, clearly and repeatedly. It’s the only way to start changing towards reality.
- Call Me Kuchu
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 In Uganda, a new bill threatens to make homosexuality punishable by death. David Kato - Uganda's first openly gay man - and his fellow activists work against the clock to defeat the legislation while combating vicious persecution in their daily lives. But no one, not even the filmmakers, is prepared for the brutal murder that shakes the movement to its core and sends shock waves around the world.
- Campaigning for A Millionaires Tax
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In February 2012, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) launched a simple, clear initiative to raise taxes on Californians with incomes greater than $1,000,000 per year. The folding of this campaign for the Millionaires Tax (MT), following a compromise with the governor, has been felt as a seismic shock for many activists in California.
- Can You Pass The US Christian Right Quiz?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An understanding of the Christian Right, a loose coalition of politically conservative congregations and organizations, is critical to understanding the US. This quiz seeks to explore the political influence of the Christian Right, and to highlight the threat its radical fundamentalists pose to the majority of Americans who value pluralism and tolerance.
- Canada's Spy Groups Divulge Secret Intelligence to Energy Companies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Documents raise fears that info on environmentalists, indigenous groups and more shared with industry at biannual, secret-level, briefings.
- Canadian students strip in protest, clash with police
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Thousands of men and women stripped to protest planned tuition hikes and embarrass the hosts of the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal.
- Canadian Women & the Struggle for Equality
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 When Stella Bliss applied for unemployment insurance in 1976, she found that she would not be entitled to benefits for another six weeks. Bliss had just had a baby and was therefore subject to a different section of the Unemployment Insurance Act than her male counterparts.
- The Cancer in Occupy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists — so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property — is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.
- Canned Dreams
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 A simple can of ravioli propels this spectacular 30,000-kilometre, eight-country journey through all phases of food production and the far flung sources of international ingredients.
- The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Mander argues that capitalism is no longer a viable system: "What may have worked in 1900 is calamitous in 2010." Capitalism, utterly dependent on never-ending economic growth, is an impossible absurdity on a finite planet with limited resources.
- The Careerists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colourless human beings.
- The Case for Grassroots Archives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Grassroots archives play a valuable role in what has been called "the battle of memory". People's history projects such as grassroots archives preserve and share stories of resistance, hidden histories, and alternative visions.
- The Case for Grassroots Archives - Farsi text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- The Case of Oscar Lopez Rivera
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Examing the criminal case against and incarceration of Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican activist and organiser charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1980.
- Censorship? Haaretz Deletes Amira Hass Article On Surging Settler Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Israel’s Haaretz has mysteriously deleted a powerful article by Amira Hass headlined “The anti-Semitism that goes unreported,” about an unchecked upsurge in violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers.
- Censorship? Haaretz Deletes Amira Hass Article On Surging Settler Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Israeli newspaper Haaretz deleted a significant article by Amira Hass headlined "The anti-Semitism that goes unreported," about an unchecked upsurge in violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers. The original article by Hass is available on ZComm.
- Characterising the period
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An analysis of the fundamental contradiction today is that between global capitalism and the system of nation-states. In this brief but sharp overview Nigel updates his analysis by bringing it to bear on the global economic crisis and the political reactions it is provoking.
- Chatting with Chomsky
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The linguistics professor, political theorist and activist discusses the Occupy movement, Obama’s first term and the economic crisis in Europe.
- "Chavs", class and representation
A review of Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Chavs traces the rise of an offensive caricature of the working class: a racist hooligan, an alcoholic thug; women unable to control their vaginas, men unable to control their fists; brainless, feckless scroungers-working class people, as represented by the term chav, are nothing more than parasitic growths on society. Jones demonstrates how the figure of the chav is used to deflect blame away from the structures that create inequality onto individuals.
- Chicago Teachers Strike Back
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Chicago Teachers Union stage a walkout that leads to an improved contract.
- Chicken Game: Eurocrisis, Again.
Washington vs. Berlin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 How does one take an autonomous position against the European policies of social butchery without falling into nationalist, anti-German nostalgia or into rhetoric against “Anglo-Saxon speculation”? How do we put together struggles about rights, work and life with a constitutive struggle on the issue of debt, while avoiding any recourse to solutions “from above” to the risk of default?
- Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 The days of human history.
- Chile: Return of the Penguins!
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The struggle to democratize Chile’s educational system has, for the first time since the country’s return to bourgeois democracy in 1990, challenged the very foundations of its neoliberal model.
- China in Revolt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Few in the West are aware of the drama unfolding in today’s “epicenter of global labor unrest.” A scholar of China exposes its tumultuous labor politics and their lessons for the Left.
- China's capitalism and the crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Coupled with spectacular growth rates since the late 1970s, China’s “soft landing” and apparent rapid recovery from the crisis appear to support claims made by some on the right and the left that the 2008 recession has been a catalyst for the core of capitalism shifting to the East and setting in motion a change in global geopolitics.
- Chomsky on Civil Liberties, Obama and the Future of Progressive Politics
Left of Left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Interview with America's premier political dissident Noam Chomsky.
- Chris Hedges and the black bloc
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 From its inception back in the European autonomist movements of the 1980s, the black-clad activists refuse to answer anybody outside of their ranks. Within the “affinity group”, everything is cool. Outside of it, who gives a shit? Ironically, this kind of elitism is not that different from the “vanguard party” posture which puts the needs of the sect above that of the mass movement.
- The CIA's Death Machine at Work (book review)
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In compelling detail, two leading civil rights attorneys — both leaders of the Center for Constitutional Rights (New York) — recount the extraordinary life and deliberate killing of the world’s most popular revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara. Using internal U.S. governmental documentation, only recently released, the authors use their forensic skills to analyze the evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the execution of a war prisoner captured alive.
- Class Struggle in Vietnam: From the Colonial Yoke to Wage Slavery for Global Capital
Wildcat Strikes in Vietnam Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An alternation of repression and concessions is only one element among many of the whole apparatus of control and domination by the CPV. In the last analysis, it is repression which wins out, ranging from direct military and police force to administrative detention, from constant surveillance of the conversations and writings of the population to an ever stricter control of the use of such modern means as cell phones and the Internet.
- Class Struggle in Vietnam: From the Colonial Yoke to Wage Slavery for Global Capital
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Struggles which have unfolded since the first big strike wave in Vietnam in 2006.
- Classic Book: Frankenstein
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A look at the continuing relevance of Mary Shelley's classic to debates about science, technology and nature today.
- Climate Crisis Threatens Food Security of Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Maldives, Togo, Comoros, and Many Other Countries
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Climate crisis is threatening seafood and fish in gulfs, seas, and oceans. As a result, countries dependent mainly on fish and seafood are threatened.
- CLR James, Frantz Fanon And The Meaning of Liberation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A look at the Haitan Revolution and its place in history.
- C.L.R. James' Visionary Legacy
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In order to understand the connection between Black History Month and revolution, we must explode the stifling separation between art and everyday life that bourgeois society everywhere seeks to impose on us.
- Collective Memory, Archives, and the Connexions project
Michael Riordon interviews Ulli Diemer Resource Type: Audio First Published: 2012 An interview with Ulli Diemer about the Connexions project, collective memory, and the importance of archives and the challenges faced by those who work to preserve them.
- Colombia's Agent Orange?
Roundup Not Ready Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A core element of U.S. anti-drugs policy in Colombia has been the destruction of coca fields by aerial chemical fumigation thus impacting the cocaine trade at its source. The continuation of this policy is based on three core myths: (1) That fumigation can target coca fields with pinpoint accuracy; (2) That the chemical used is harmless to humans and the environment; and (3) that aerial chemical fumigation is an effective method of eradicating coca cultivation.
- A comment on Greece and Syriza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This analysis is a rebuke to the notion that there is nothing between the far left and social democracy. That diagnosis may have been appropriate in the period of revolutionary growth beginning in 1968. This period, marked by the long-term decomposition of once dominant social democratic parties, is quite different.
- Barry Commoner 1917-2012
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Barry Commoner, biologist, environmental, socialist, humanist, and one of the central leaders of the anti-nuclear-testing movement, dies at 95. He is particularly remembered for the “Four Laws of Ecology” he laid out in his book The Closing Circle: (1) Everything is connected to everything else. (2) Everything must go somewhere. (3) Nature knows best. (4) There is no such thing as a free lunch.
- Community Organising - A New Part of the Union
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A look at Unite’s community union organizing.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2012
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Connexions Twitter
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2012 Published: 2017 The Connexions Twitter page.
- A Convergence of Realities
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 What's striking the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement and its popular slogan “We are the 99 percent” is how much the central demand of the movement resonates with the Black community. African Americans with few exceptions are in the bottom 20% of income and wealth. Double digit unemployment is the norm in “good” economic times.
- Convicts, Collateral Damage, and the "War on Drugs"
The Real Crime is the War Itself Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Two recent court cases in southern California provide insight into the identity of those smuggle drugs across the international boundary between the two countries. But more importantly what they do is highlight how the ludicrous “war on drugs” produces casualties of many sorts.
- The Co-operative Revolution
A Graphic Novel Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 To celebrate the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives, The Co-operative Group has created a graphic novel, depicting the history, scale and diversity of co-operation.
- Copyright policies threaten internet use in Panama and Colombia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 After years of being one of the most progressive regions in the world in terms of balanced copyright policy, Latin America is unfortunately sliding into copyright maximalism, enacting increasingly restrictive copyright enforcement measures into their federal laws.
- Corporations profiting out of food crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The small group of food multinationals that monopolise the world food market are positioning themselves to take full advantage of the crisis: the latest food price hikes threaten to drive more people back into hunger.
- Countering the Israel Lobby's Dominance
Can Jewish Liberals Transcend the Wiesel Doctrine? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The distance between largely secular American Jews and the Zionist establishment is likely to widen. This will weaken the political power of the Israel lobby only if American Jews as a whole are prepared to announce unambiguously their antipathy to their self-proclaimed representatives.
- Crime & Impunity
A pioneering report on sexual torture in Iranian Prisons Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The first-ever comprehensive report on sexual violence and torture of women in Iranian prisons.
- Criminalizing Truancy
Should Kids be Jailed for Skipping School? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 American jurisdictions are increasingly turning to the criminal justice system to deal with truancy. Students and parents are being fined, and in some cases jailed, for missing school.
- Crisis in the Eurozone
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A controversial call to break up the Eurozone and stop the debt crisis.
- Crucible of Freedom: Workers' Democracy in the Industrial Heartland, 1914-1960
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Working people created a new America in the 1930s and 1940s which was a fundamental departure from the feudalistic and hierarchical America which existed before. In the process, class politics re-defined the political agenda of America as for the first and time in American history the political universe polarized along class lines. The author explores the meaning of the new deal political mobilization by ordinary people by examining the changes it brought to the local, county, and state levels in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Pennsylvania as a whole.
- Cruel Harvest
U.S. Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Mercille argues that the United States is not concerned about waging a real war on drugs, and that alleged concerns about narco-terrorism mostly act as pretexts to justify occupation. The United States in fact shares a large part of the responsibility by supporting drug lords, refusing to adopt effective drug control policies and failing to crack down on drug money laundered through Western banks.
- Cruise industry chafes at regulation that would help clean up Alaska's air
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The cruise ship Sapphire Princess will emit the same amount of sulphur dioxide as 13.1m cars as it takes its guests from Whittier, Alaska to Glacier Bay and eventually Vancouver.
- Cry for "Bread & Roses" Still Resonates
100 Years After the Lawrence Strike Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When worker solidarity prevailed over corporate power in the icy streets of Lawrence a century ago, it made the promise of a better life real for many. The Bread and Roses strike became a consciousness-raising experience, not only for textile workers and their families, but the nation as a whole.
- Cut It Out: An Open Letter to Black Bloc Anarchists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Black Bloc tactics actually serve the cause of the 0.1%.
- A Dangerous Lack of Rigor
Cross Examine Authority Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Explores two recent events reveal the lack of rigor that has come to pervade our public sphere: the failure of the UN (or anybody else) to question seriously the case for war against Iran, and the first presidential “debate.”
- The Dark Side Of The "Green Economy"
Why some indigenous groups and environmentalists are saying no to the "green economy" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Just a few years ago, the term "green economy" referred to economies that are locally based, climate friendly, and low-impact. But since the global economic meltdown began in 2007, the green economy has come to mean something more akin to the wholesale privatization of nature.
- Data Mining You
How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Washington.
- The Day the Internet Died
An Oral History of the Egyptian Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When Hosni Mubarak Shut Off Cell Phones and the Internet in January 2011 Was the Moment When More Egyptians than Ever Went Out into the Streets.
- Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 The searing account of Chris Hedges' and Joe Sacco's travels to sacrifice zones, those areas in the United States where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit, places that have been offered up for maximum exploitation in the name of profit and progress.
- 'The Death of Evidence' in Canada: Scientists' Own Words
Data distorted for 'propaganda' and other complaints against the Harper government made at last week's Ottawa rally Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- The Debate at Halle
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 There were two defining moments in the history of the international working-class movement in the first half of the 20th century. The first, by far the most discussed and written about for obvious reasons, was the revolution in Russia in October 1917 and its subsequent isolation and defeat. The second was the disaster in the German movement, which had been for half a century the model of a militant, socialist working-class movement, and the subsequent collapse of that movement in the face of Nazism.
- Debt: The First 500 Pages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We need more grand histories, but 5,000 years of anecdotes is no substitute for real political economy.
- Deconstructing The Locavore's Dilemma
A response to Pierre Desrochers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The book 'The Locavore's Dilemma' constructs a straw man argument while ignoring what the locavore movement really has to say.
- Designs on equality
City planning is a mechanism of discrimination - it mainly serves the able-bodied Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The idea of “universal design” is to stop creating public infrastructure that privileges one particular group, whether it’s car drivers, the able-bodied or those with paycheques, and start envisioning people with parallel but not identical mobility and sociability needs: children, teens, seniors, new immigrants, those on low incomes, parents, those with sports injuries or with physical and mental limitations, and those who care for any of the above.
- Destroying the Commons
How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Our rights and liberties are under ever-increasing attack.
- Detroit's Crisis -- Coming to You?
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 There are two realities to grasp about the current plight of Detroit. Reality one: Detroit is caught in a set of interlocking crises, from the level of the world economy and national political gridlock down to the viciously reactionary Michigan state government and the yawning divide between the city and suburban Detroit, that would severely challenge the most competent, the most visionary, the most energetic and most progressive city leadership.
- Detropia
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 A documentary on the city of Detroit and its woes, which are emblematic of the collapse of the U.S. manufacturing base.
- DID YOU HEAR IT? It's the sound of their world ending. It's that of ours resurging.
Communique from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Communiqué of the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee – General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Mexico.
- The Different Faces of 'Popular Resistance' in Palestine
Manipulating History Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Apparently, 'popular resistance' has suddenly elevated to become a clash of visions or strategies between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and its rivals in Gaza, underscoring an existing and deepening rift between various factions and leaderships.
- Digitising the ANC Archives
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 This video tells the story of the digitisation of the archives of the African National Congress. This was a talk given by David Larsen at the International Liberation Archives Conference held at the ICC in East London, South Africa from October 31 to November 2, 2012. The theme of the conference was "Archives Deepening Democracy." South Africa
- Disputed Territory
The green economy versus community-based economies Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 A story of the peoples of the Atlantic Forest in southern Brazil, looking at what happens when so-called "green economy" projects move into the area, clearning the forest, and taking over the land.
- A Diversion We Don't Need
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We know from our own experience that none of us wants to have the Diversity Of Tactics argument again. So why does it continue to happen? Because we radicals and anarchists have unintentionally become a Silent Majority, unwilling for whatever reason to prevent these ideologues, who are only a tiny handful of people with loud voices, from controlling the direction of our meetings.
- Do the Greeks get it?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A word has to be said about the somewhat depressing character of the clash between reformism and ultraleftism in Greece. Radical youth might have a natural prejudice against the KKE and PAME because it is so compromised with class-collaborationist coalition building. But instead of trying to figure out a way to win the ranks of the CP to the revolutionary cause, it sees its membership as part of the problem and not part of the solution.
- A Doctor's Quest
The Struggle for Mother-and-Child Health Around the Globe Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Recounting medical missions in half of the thirty countries in which she has worked for the past twenty-five years in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific -- from Darfur in Sudan to Papua New Guinea and Bhutan -- Dr. Gretchen Roedde shares the grim reality of world politics, bureaucratic red tape, and corruption on the front lines as a doctor in mother-and-child health and HIV/AIDS.
- Doing Time for Peace
Moral Lights Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Hundreds of Americans, young and old, are regularly going to prison, sometimes for months or years or decades, for nonviolently resisting U.S. militarism.
- Drone Strikes? What's To Feel Bad About?
Really Sorry We Burned the Korans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Drone Warfare
Killing by Remote Control Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A comprehensive look at the growing menace of drone warfare, with an extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who are "piloting" these unmanned planes, who are the victims and what are the legal and moral implications.
- The Drug Store in American Meat
We're Eating What? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Food consumers seldom hear about the drugs oestradiol-17, zeranol, trenbolone acetate and melengestrol acetate and the names are certainly not on meat labels. But those synthetic growth hormones are central to U.S. meat production, especially beef, and the reason Europe has banned a lot of U.S. meat since 1989.
- Drug War-Related Homicides In The US Average At Least 1,100 a Year
Full Extent of Carnage Unknowable Because US Government Doesn't Track Violent Crime Linked To The War On Drugs Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The stubborn resistance against entertaining any other options beyond a fundamentalist adherence to prohibition for dealing with drug use in the United States is cloaked in an arrogant denial of the human costs of the drug war and the possibility that ending it would lead to less, not more, death. The US, by some estimates now spends about $40 billion a year at home and abroad waging its war on drugs and has imprisoned currently up to 400,000 people on drug-related charges — the vast majority of them nonviolent offenders.
- Ecosocialism and the fight for free public transit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Mass transportation is intimately tied not only to the physical form of cities, but to the deeper social structures of imperial capitalism. A campaign for free public transit can be an important part of a broader fight to restructure society along ecosocialist lines.
- An Education in Occupy
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Two months earlier, I had been sitting in class listening to an ILWU member talk about Export Grain Terminal’s (EGT) union-busting tactics in Longview, WA. “Great,” I thought, “but how can I help from the campus of a little college in Moraga, California?”
- The Egyptian workers' movement and the 25 January Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This article is an exploration of one of the fundamental processes that brought the revolution back to Tahrir: the rise of an organised working class movement.
- Egypt's Aunt Peaceful
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Ghada Shahbender knows the Egyptian Revolution Didn´t Start in January 2011, because she was there seven years ago reminding the government ¨We Are Watching¨
- Egypt's Year of Revolution
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An interview with Carl Finamore, who went on a reporting trip to Egypt for ten days in 2011.
- Empire and Its Discontents
"Losing" the World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- End the Prison-Industrial Complex, Now!
A Moral and Political Crime Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In both political and moral terms, ending this prison industrial complex system is an imperative. As in the 1950s and 1960s, we must organize, mobilize and go into the streets. The existing system is the problem, not the solution.
- Enemies
A History of the FBI Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Published: 2013 A history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations.
- Enough With the Just In Time Schedules, Say Retail Workers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Employers increasingly use part-time scheduling to decrease costs and crush attempts at worker organizing. Scheduling software now cuts shifts into chunks as small as 15-minutes. Last-minute schedule changes result when the software predicts customer traffic based on the weather forecast or recent sales patterns. Most retail workers now don't know their schedules a week ahead of time, and often have shifts added or cancelled at the last minute. Erratic scheduling can also make it impossible for parttime workers to hold two jobs, because they never know when they will be available.
- Eradicating Extreme Poverty
Democracy, Globalisation and Human Rights Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A new approach to eradicating extreme poverty, contrasted with conventional "top-down" approaches.
- Espoir Voyage
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Like many young men of his country, Joanny travelled from Burkina Faso to the more affluent Ivory Coast in search of work and a better life. For many young Burkinabe men this emigration is a ritual and rite of passage — but Joanny never returned. Years later his brother, Burkinabe filmmaker Michel K. Zongo, decides to retrace his steps.
- The Evil of Humanitarian Wars
Iraq, Libya, Syria: We have no right to play God Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The West’s duty is not to intervene more but to intervene far less. We already massively arm tyrannies such as those in the Gulf so that they can protect the oil that we consider our birthright; we offer military, financial and diplomatic cover for Israel’s continuing oppression of millions of Palestinians, a major cause of political instability in the Middle East; and we quietly support the Egyptian military, which is currently trying to reverse last year’s revolutionary gains.
- The Expo Files
Articles by the Crusading Journalist Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Collected here for the first time are Stieg Larsson's essays and articles on right-wing extremism and racism, on violence against women and women's rights, on homophobia and honour killings.
- Facing Facts in Wisconsin
Progressives and Workers Were Sold Out by Obama and the Democratic Party Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The time has long since come for labor and progressives to bolt the Democratic Party and coalesce around a new genuinely progressive, working people’s party.
- The false solutions of Rio+20
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Food production and people's sovereignty in Africa could be seriously compromised by carbon capture projects and the so-called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus (REDD+) mechanism.
- FBI Continues To Foil Its Own Devised Terrorist Plots
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2012 It seems there's a new pattern showing itself every time I read a news report in which the FBI proudly announces it foiled a terrorist plot. That pattern goes something like this: hear that a huge explosion was averted and lives were saved, find out the plotter was an American citizen, find out he was under investigation by the FBI for several years, and then finally find out that it was the FBI that egged on the suspect and built his "bomb" for him. In other words, the only way these things could become less impressive is if the FBI actually decided to quit finding these loner folks to urge into violence and just built their own physical straw man to parade in front of the cameras.
- FBI Ignored Deadly Threat to Occupiers
US Intelligence Machine Instead Plotted with Bankers to Attack Protest Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Dcuments show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the Occupy Movement at least two months before the first occupation actions began in late September 2011.
- Fictitious Capital and Contracted Social Reproduction Today: China and Permanent Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Once gain, as in 1914, capital requires, in order to survive as capital, a vast devalorization of all existing values, however great the destruction of human beings and means of production which that entails.
- Fighting Back: Sotheby's and OWS
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Forty-two teamster art-handlers at Sotheby’s auction house in New York City have been locked-out of their jobs for more than four months. Against the Current interviewed Sotheby’s shop steward David Martinez about what’s at stake, and how they’ve built links with the Occupy movement to fight back.
- Filmmaker "Gringoyo" Putting the Fun Back Into Revolution
Harnessing Humour to Build Video Viewership and Social Movements Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 These satirical videos not only talk about movements, they are filmed in conflict zones in moments of political tension. Gringoyo moves in a very real world with the freedom of a cartoon.
- Final Blow to Affirmative Action?
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The current state of affirmative action in the United States.
- Finding North
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 A documentary that investigates incidents of hunger experienced by millions of Americans, and proposed solutions to the problem.
- Five Reasons the Super-Rich Need Big Government
The Real Welfare Kings and Queens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Taxes represent payment for society’s many benefits, which get bigger and better as people get richer.
- Flag, Fetish and Illusory Community
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Patriotism is usually understood as “love of country.” With the help of Marx’s theories of the state and of alienation, we explore what is meant by “love” and “country” in this definition. By viewing society as a contradictory relation between a social community, based on the cooperation required by the existing division of labor, and an illusory community dominated by the interests of the ruling economic class, it becomes apparent that the “country” which patriots love is not the country they actually live in.
- Flags of Convenience
Corporate Anarchy on the High Seas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Maritime lawlessness isn’t confined to pirates. Thanks to a system of ship registration called ‘flags of convenience,’ it is all too easy for unscrupulous ship owners to get away with criminal behaviour
- Follow the Money, Find the Leader
Billion Dollar Candidates Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The point is not whether Barack Obama wins re-election as President. The point is not whether Mitt Romney can win. The point is that you can’t dream of contesting without a billion dollars. That figure merely ensures you can run, not win.
- For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Part One
Contradictions of the Civil Rights Movement: A Marxist Analysis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We describe the black population in the U.S. as an oppressed race-color caste. From their arrival in this country, the Negro people have been an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society. Thus blacks face discrimination, in different degrees, regardless of social status, wealth or class position. Blacks are today still an integral and strategic part of the working class, despite unemployment and mass incarceration.
- Foreclosures and the Police State
Hernandez Family Foreclosure Sparks Anti-Eviction Outrage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The story of the Hernandez family, who became local heroes in their determination to keep their Van Nuys home from foreclosure.
- Four Conferences on Matriarchy
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The growth of a diverse and broad international wave of feminism has led to the development of what has been called Modern Matriarchal Studies, which includes research both on ancient societies and on existing communal cultures.
- Four Futures
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next.
- The Four Laws of Ecology and The Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An exponential growth dynamic is inherent in capitalism, a system whereby money is exchanged for commodities, which are then exchanged for more money on an ever increasing scale.
- 14 Years of Injustice
Time to Free the Cuban Five Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Five Cubans fighting terrorism in south Florida have served 14 years of prison, more than enough time for the US public to learn from its media about the horrific injustice done by the US government to these Cuban men. But the media has barely touched the grotesque frame up of the Cuban Five.
- France: The NPA in Crisis
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 France's new Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) is in crisis. While only two years ago many on the international left talked about the NPA as one of the brightest lights on an otherwise dim revolutionary horizon, today the Party is hemorrhaging members and struggling to stay afloat.
- Free Trade and Economic Imperialism
Economic Progress Toward Ecological Suicide Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Looming global environmental catastrophe renders the last several hundred years of Western economic theory dubious, if not outright suicidal. Economic ‘progress’ that increases dependence on unsustainable economic practices produces catastrophe in increasing proportion to the benefits that even proponents claim will result.
- Freedom National
The destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A powerful history of emancipation that reshapes our understanding of Lincoln, the Civil War, and the end of American slavery.
- Freedom Riders
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When Hillary Clinton expressed dismay over gender segregation on buses in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem — where women are forced to sit separately — she somehow neglected to mention the Jewish-settlers-only bus system in the Occupied Palestinan Territories.
- From "Occupy" to ...
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The question isn't whether the magnificent “Occupy” movement will continue after police action and the onset of winter have largely emptied the encampments. The righteous rage that made the movement possible, and the enormous social and economic crisis that made it necessary, are not going away anytime soon. Quite the contrary — capitalism’s inherent contradictions, made worse by economic policies in Europe and the United States that seem calculated to maximize the damage, pose the real possibility of a new global financial meltdown and potential world depression.
- From Oligarchy to the New Challenge of Global Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Most analysts and citizens of Western society suppose that we live in a democracy.
But is it really democracy – a system where the people rule and its representatives carry out the popular will? Or, do we live in an oligarchy disguised as democracy? Oligarchy: in others words, a system where a small, inner circle, makes the decisions they feel necessary.
- Fuck Love
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Further on Marikana Miners
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The circumstances surrounding the mass murder in Marikana, and the political wildfire it unleashed for the African National Congress and the trade union movement, are the subject of an ongoing discussion within the South African and international left. Background material on the South African political climate.
- G-Dog
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Unlikely gang expert Jesuit Father Boyle, known as G-Dog, creates Homeboy Industries, leading former gang involved youth to become a positive force in their communities.
- The Gates Foundation's Leveraged Philanthropy
Corporate Profit Versus Humanity on Three Fronts Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Gates' leveraged philanthropy model is a public-private partnership to improve the world, partly through targeted research support but principally through public advocacy and tax-free lobbying to influence government policy. The goal of these policies is often to explicitly support profitability for corporate investors, whose enterprises are seen by the Gates Foundation as advancing human good. However, maximum corporate profit and public good often clash when its projects are implemented.
- Gaza: What Would Lincoln Do?
Sasha, Malia: Tell Your Parents About Sara al-Dalou! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The point of invoking Lincoln is not to guess what he might do in Obama’s shoes, but to reflect on what he did when forced to balance political calculus, the rule of law, and moral and humanitarian considerations.
- Gender and Sexuality
Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Stories, accounts and histories of the movements to overcome racism, sexism and poverty.
- General Strikes, Mass Strikes
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Inspired by the boldness of the movement, activists of Occupy Oakland issued a “call for a general strike” in that city for November 2 — a sign of the movement’s radicalism and its sense of where social power lies.
- The genocide in Namibia (1904-08) and its consequences
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The repatriation of human remains more than a century after they were taken to Germany from Namibia has evoked painful memories of colonial wars in which primary African resistance was crushed, and genocide perpetrated (1904–08) in what was then the colony of German South West Africa.
- George Carlin sums up class structure and the purpose media of divisiveness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Germany and Genocide in Namibia
Special Issue of Pambazuka News - #577 - March 2012 Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2012 Between 1904 and 1908 imperial Germany waged an atrocious and inhumane war of extermination against the Herero, Nama, Damara and San peoples in its former colony ‘German South West Africa’, now the Republic of Namibia.
- Germany's lost Bolshevik: Paul Levi revisited
A review of David Fernbach (ed), In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings by Paul Levi Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Paul Levi’s name is almost unknown today outside a small community of specialised historians. But in the years 1919 and 1920 he was well known in Germany and abroad as the chair of the young Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He would become the most controversial figure in the German Communist movement. He was mainly responsible for building the KPD from a relatively small organisation in early 1918 into a truly mass party.
- Germany's genocide in Namibia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Germany, which has done commendable remembrance work about the Holocaust, seems to have forgotten or deliberately buried its violent colonial past. A past that hides the first genocide of the 20th century.
- Gimme the Loot
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Once the heroes of nations, pirates went from being state-sponsored champions to tolerated annoyances to the basest sort of criminals. Henry Morgan was knighted after plundering Panama in 1674; fifty years later hundreds of pirates were dangling from the gibbet at remote trading posts along Africa’s Gold Coast.
- Give Us Our Money Back!
How Harper Protects Canada's Tax Cheats Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 There is a class of people and corporations in this country whose illicit financial practices have an enormous negative impact on the country and its citizens. Yet the law and order regime of Stephen Harper barely plays lip service to the issue of tax evasion through tax havens. While Harper cuts billions from government programs in the name of deficit reduction, he refuses to go after billions of dollars in revenue lost to tax evasion and avoidance every year.
- The Global Intelligence Files
Resource Type: Database First Published: 2012 On 27 February, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations and government agencies.
- Globalization of Capital, Globalization of Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Something has escaped the control of the Democrats, the NGOs, the SEIU and the left sects — of official society and those attempting its mere facelift — which will not be easily brought to heel. Hundreds of thousands of people who had never before been in mass mobilizations (or mobilizations of any kind) found themselves confronting the police, facing tear gas and pepper spray, going to jail and learning in the streets what can never be learned any other way.
- Goodbye Welfare, Hello Workfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The world’s richest countries are coercing their citizens to ‘donate’ their labour to big businesses and other organizations in return for welfare payments.
- Goodwin, Albert (Ginger)
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Canadian labour leader. (1887-1918)
- The government's attempt to eradicate the travelling way of life
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Elly Robson explores the deliberate criminalisation of the travelling way of life by Britian's coalition government.
- Great investigative reporters don't take no for an answer
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The first thing to keep in mind about investigative journalism is that it’s not glamorous. (We can blame television with its “undercover” reporters and “hidden cameras” for this mistaken image.) It’s actually hard and often boring work. I have never pretended that I was anything other than a working reporter, nor chased a single guilty person down the street. But I did spend days poring over records in the House of Lords and devoted months trying to master the intricacies of accountancy, tax law and overseas trusts.
- Greece: Syriza Shines a Light
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Like a swan moving forward with relaxed confidence while paddling furiously beneath the surface, Syriza, the radical left coalition that could become the next government of Greece, is facing enormous challenges calmly but with intensifed activity.
- Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 If consumption is the problem, as Ozzie Zehner suggests, then we need to shift our focus from suspect alternative energies to improving social and political fundamentals: walkable communities, improved consumption, enlightened governance, and, most notably, women's rights. The dozens of first steps he offers are surprisingly straightforward.
- Greening Capitalism? A Marxist Critique of Carbon Markets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a serious threat to dominant modes of social organization, inspiring suggestions that capitalism itself needs to be transformed if we are to ‘decarbonize’ the global economy.
- Guatemala: Peaceful Resistance in the Face of Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Anti-mining activist speaks out for first time since being shot.
- Happy Hookers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Exploring the lives of sex workers and their would-be saviours.
- Health Care Reform or Ruin?
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Far from laying the health care debate to rest, the Supreme Court decision on Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) put life back into it. Calling the individual health insurance mandate a “tax” aroused anger on the right, but the court’s ruling on federal Medicaid money is what really puts a new dimension into the fight.
- Here We Go Again
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 One thing should be clear. The violence across the Muslim world in response to an American anti-Islamic film has nothing to do with that film. Yes, The Inocence of Muslims is a risibly crude diatribe against Islam, but the violence is being driven less by religious fury than by political calculation. In Libya, Egypt and elsewhere, the crisis is being fostered by hardline Islamists in an attempt to seize the political initiative in a period of transition and turmoil. The film is almost incidental to this process. The real struggle is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between different shades of Islamists, between hardline factions and more mainstream ones.
- Herman's House
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 'What kind of house does a man who has been imprisoned in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?' This film captures the remarkable creative journey and friendship of Herman Wallace, one of the Angola 3, and artist Jackie Sumell while examining the injustice of prolonged solitary confinement.
- Hitler's Bestiary from the Inside
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Over a decade ago, I spent several months poring through the Martha Eccles Dodd papers at the Library of Congress. I was driven to research her life while working on a book about Left feminist culture and anti-fascist resistance in the McCarthy era. I had just read two of Dodd’s novels (Sowing the Wind and The Searching Light) and was driven to find out more about the sources of Dodd’s attraction to antifascist causes.
- The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
Dispatches from the Front Lines Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Michael E. Mann, lead author of the original paper in which the Hockey Stick graph first appeared, shares the story of the science and politics behind the controversy of climate change, and the implied threat to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect the environment and planet.
- Housebroken
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 There’s a second environmental crisis, just as potent as the first.
- How Empires Fall
An Interview With Jonathan Schell Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Jonathan Schell discusses non-violent activism.
- How I Became a "Recovering Documentary Filmmaker" and Learned to Reach a Wider Public
The School of Authentic Journalism Saved My Life: Your Donations Make It Possible Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A look into the way that the The School of Authentic Journalism guides journalists and organizers to reach wider audiences.
- How Israel Abuses Africans
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Part 2 of 3 - interview with community activist Rami Gudovitch about state-sponsored Israeli racism towards non-Jewish Africah asylum-seekers.
- How Israel Stacks the Legal Deck
Court System Provides Little Justice for Palestinians Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 To Palestinians, Israeli military courts are sites of repression, not houses of justice. Palestinian defendants facing trial in 2010 were found guilty in 99.74% cases.
- How Laws Assault Queer People (book review)
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Queer (In)Justice is authored by Joey Mogul, a partner at the People’s Law Office in Chicago and director of DePaul University’s Civil Rights Clinic; Andrea Ritchie, an attorney and organizer who works on issues of police misconduct; and Kay Whitlock, an organizer and writer around structural injustices.
- How Not to Get Eaten When the Dinosaurs Escape from their Cages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The risks of moving too quickly to occupy TV stations, and “Suggestions for Radicals” who are in for the long haul.
- How Private Prisons Profit From the Criminalization of Immigrants
Lobbying for Lock-Up Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 How a nation uses its power to deny a person’s freedom has always been a critical measure of authoritarian rule. Massive incarceration based on race, ethnic origin or nationality, political beliefs, class, sexual orientation, age or other inherent characteristics is a form of tyranny. Yet few people realize that this is happening on an enormous scale in the United States.
- How 7 Historic Figures Overcame Depression Without Doctors
Drugless Antidotes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 While Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway received extensive medical treatment for depression but tragically committed suicide, other famously depressed people — including Abraham Lincoln, William James, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sigmund Freud, William Tecumseh Sherman, Franz Kafka, and the Buddha — took different paths.
- How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the '1 Percent'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn't expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral "democracy" was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.
- How the Colombia Trade Agreement Accelerates Human Rights Abuses
U.S.-Colombia Mass Displacement Policy Succeeding Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) would lead, indeed by design, to the immiseration and mass displacement of rural peoples, especially Indigenous and Afro-Colombian. The article explores the displacement of indigenous peoples in the last year.
- How the Left has Won
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Capitalism was the unintended consequence of bourgeois revolutions, whereas socialism has been the avowed purpose, or at least a crucial component, of every revolution since 1911. This difference has become so important that when we think about the transition from capitalism to socialism, we take the short view: we look for ideological extremes, social movements, vanguard parties, self-conscious revolutionaries, radical dissenters, armed struggles, extra-legal methods, political convulsions – as if the coming of socialism requires the abolition of capitalism by cataclysm, by insurgent, militant mass movements dedicated to that purpose.
- How to Grow Up Under Occupation
A Childhood Under the Nazi's Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Rochat illustrates the effect adult wars and occupations have on children, and how the relative safety of the Anglo-Saxon world make it hard to comprehend what effect these wars have on children in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other countries under attack.
- How to Rig an Election
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Election fraud in the United States in the era of computerized voting machines controlled and programmed by far-right corporate executives.
- How to Spot - and Defeat - Disruption on the Internet
The 15 Rules of Web Disruption Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Over a number of years, we've found that the most effective way to fight disruption and disinformation is to link to a post such as this one which rounds up disruption techniques, and then to cite the disinfo technique you think is being used.
- Humanity Once Came to the Cliff's Edge of Total Self-Annihilation -- Let's Make Sure It Never Happens Again
Revisiting the catastrophe that almost was Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended -- though unknown to the public, only officially.
- The Humiliation of Bradley Manning
Kangaroos Missing Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It is a bitter irony that Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, whose conscience compelled him to leak evidence about the U.S. military brass ignoring evidence of torture in Iraq, was himself the victim of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment while other military officers privately took note but did nothing.
- The Ice Melts Into Water
Arctic Ice Melt, Psychopathic Capitalism And The Corporate Media Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Last month, climate scientists announced that Arctic sea ice had shrunk to its smallest surface area since satellite observations began in 1979. An ice-free summer in the Arctic, once projected to be more than a century away, now looks possible just a few decades from now. Some scientists say it may happen within the next few years.
- The Illusion of Democracy
Liberal Journalism, Wikileaks And Climate Deceptions Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In an era of permanent war, economic meltdown and climate ‘weirding’, we need all the champions of truth and justice that we can find. But where are they? What happened to trade unions, the green movement, human rights groups, campaigning newspapers, peace activists, strong-minded academics, progressive voices?
- I'm Omar Saad and I will not be a soldier in your army
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Omar Saad, a young (Druze) Palestinian musician from the Galilee has received a summons to the Israeli army. The Druze citizens of Israel are forced to enlist in the Israeli military, since 1956, when conscription law applied to Druze men (not to other Palestinians).
- Imagine a Stadium
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A plea for organization.
- Immigrant Youth Victory!
Against The Current vol. 159 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 President Obama’s directive removing the threat of deportation from hundreds of thousands of young people is a tribute to the heroism of those who have come out as “Undocumented and Unafraid.” It’s still a long way from stopping the terror affecting immigrant communities — but under an administration that frankly has been a disgrace and disaster for civil liberties, human rights and due process, this victory shows the power of well-rooted and courageous activism to make a positive difference.
- Immigration Is Good, Immigration Is Bad, Migration Is (a Fact)
A Human Drama in Three Acts and a Few Ideas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Immigration is bad – that is what the propagandists of populist politics are blazoning, in unison with their primitive media set on singing the same tune. Immigration is good, say the left, the greens and NGOs. I share the human-rights concerns and the socio-economic analysis of the second position, but would like to add a third and more fundamental one: immigration IS happening. Immigration is what is human, because only through migration could humankind spread from its places of origin in Eastern Africa to the entire globe. Only if we remember this can we tackle the phenomenon of migration adequately and develop an immigration policy suitable for human beings.
- Imperialism, the Cold War and the Creation of Pakistan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The true intent of the partition was to detach Pakistan from India, create a militarily strategic foothold aimed at the Soviet Union and maintain control over the oil fields of the Middle East.
- The importance of dealing with Occupy's misogyny problem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An account of some misogynist dynamics within the Occupy movement and the need to challenge them.
- The Importance of Journalism and Communications to Social Movements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Remarks of Javier Sicilia to the School of Authentic Journalism.
- The Impossibilities of Reformism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We would like to use this text to begin a dialogue with those comrades within social democracy who contend that the last 25, 15 or 5 years of bleak development is the result of a series of coincidences – poor leadership, international pressure, mistakes, cunning opponents, etc. – and we would instead propose a more fundamental explanation. The problems we face are problems that are inherent and unavoidable in the very reformist strategy that social democracy is built upon – in both its successes and its failures.
- Impressions of Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force. And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world's largest open-air prison, where a million and a half people, in the most densely populated area of the world, are constantly subject to random and often savage terror and arbitrary punishment.
- In Defence of Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 On Jacques Berlinerblau's book How to Be Secular.
- In Defence of the Terror
Liberty or Death in the French Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A discussion about the causes and consequences of revolutionary violence, with the premise that dismissive disgust at bloodshed is an overly simplistic response.
- In Defense of Free Speech
It's Easier to Blame Bad Filmmakers Than to Address Massive War Crimes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The answer to speech you disagree with is … (drum roll) … MORE SPEECH.
- In Mexico, Finally, a Revolt Against the Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The summer will determine if the “I Am 132” moment becomes a movement and that’s why “Mexican Spring” is a poor choice of words for it.
- In perspective: John Holloway
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), like that other key text of autonomist post-Marxism, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s Empire (2000), cut with the grain of the global anti-capitalist mood at the beginning of the millennium. More than this, Holloway’s book was the focus for important debates on the international left and deserves praise both for emphasising the link between socialism and human self-activity and for criticising the idea that the capitalist state can be used to bring about socialist change.
- In Remembrance of Things Lost
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It’s astonishing that I actually have to make an argument (and a losing one at that) against murdering children, but this is the reality we ourselves have given birth to.
- In This Timeless Time
Living and Dying on Death Row in America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 An exploration of life on Death Row in Texas and in other states, as well as the convoluted and arbitrary judicial processes that populate all Death Rows. In chronicling the lives and deaths of these prisoners in words and pictures, the authors document the capriciousness of capital punishment and capture the day-to-day experiences of Death Row inmates in the official "nonperiod" between sentencing and death.
- Incarcerated Inside Israel
Palestinians Tortured and Isolated Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Detention without trial, the presumption of guilt, denial of family visits, solitary confinement, torture, violent interrogation, and denial of access to appropriate health care, such is the Israeli judicial system and prison confinement experienced by Palestinian men, women and indeed children.
- Incinerating Assange - The Liberal Media Go To Work
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The media response to Assange’s asylum request tells us much about the default brutality and reflexive herdthink of elite corporate journalism. The crucial importance of his achievements, of his cause, was deemed utterly irrelevant beside his allegedly unbearable personal failings.
- The Inconvenient Indian
A Curious Account of Native People in North America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012
- The Indefinite Detention of the Progressive Voter
The Politics of Continual Servitude Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Earlier this year President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. It allows for the indefinite detention without trial for any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism.
- Infiltration To Disrupt, Divide And Mis-direct Are Widespread In Occupy - Part I
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This article describes public reports of infiltration as well as results of a survey and discussions with occupiers about this important issue.
- Information Overload
Driving a Stake Through the National Security State Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Here’s an idea. Let’s all start salting all of our conversations and our written communications with a selection of those 300 key words. If every liberty-loving person in America virus were to do this, the NSA would have to employ all 15 million unemployed Americans just to begin to look at all those transcripts!
- Inocente
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Inocente is both a timeless story about the transformative power of art and a timely snapshot of the new face of homelessness in America: children.
- Intellectual Charlatans & Academic Witch-Hunters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Butler’s work has always divided critics. While some view her as a courageous and innovative thinker, others view her as an intellectual charlatan.
- The International Context of Global Outrage
Part I: Looking back on the movements that preceded the Arab Spring, the Indignados, and Occupy Wall Street Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Interview - Greece: the struggle radicalises
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Editor of the Greek newspaper Workers Solidarity on the latest developments in Greece.
- An Interview With Noam Chomsky on Obama's Human Rights Record
Nothing Can Justify Torture Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 America's human rights record under the administration of President Obama and the military intervention policies that have seen increased use during the Arab Spring.
- Intimate Enemies
Violence and Reconciliation in Peru Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Published: 2013 Theidon explores how Peruvians are rebuilding both individual lives and collective existence following twenty years of armed conflict. A compilation of stories and dialogues of Peruvian peasants and Theidon's own experiences to encompass the broad and varied range of conciliatory practices.
- Introduction: Time, Age, Myth: Towards a History of the Sixties
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Published in Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties, Lara Campbell, Dominique Clement, and Greg Kealey, eds. Toornto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2012
- Invaluable History and Important Lessons - Book Review
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Book review of 'The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988. A Political Memoir. Volume 2: Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-1988' by Barry Sheppard.
- The Invention of the Land of Israel
From Holy Land to Homeland Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists.
- The Invisible War
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 An investigative documentary about the epidemic of rape of soldiers within the US military.
- Invitation to form Operative Groups YoSoy#132
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 #YoSoy132 is against Enrique Peña Nieto, seeks the democratization of the mass media, and behaves as a peaceful movement.
- Is Stephen Harper displaying fascist-like tendencies?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Is that an archive in your basement... or are you just hoarding?
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Are you an 'accidental archivist'? Have you been saving the publications and documents produced by the social justice projects you've been involved in? Then Connexions would like to hear from you.
- Islamophobia, Left and Right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Should Muslims be worried about rising Islamophobia? Of course they should! Anti-Islam bigotry is becoming a key element of the revival of the far Right – a Right that doesn’t merely slander Muslims but also takes action against them.
- Israeli Apartheid Week: Call it as it is
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012
- Israeli government pays students to spread propaganda online
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Israeli government has launched a program to pay students to promote the Israeli agenda on Facebook and internet chatrooms.
- Israel's 'right to self-defense' - a tremendous propaganda victory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 By supporting Israel's offensive on Gaza, Western leaders have given the Israelis carte blanche to do what they're best at: Wallow in their sense of victimhood and ignore Palestinian suffering.
- Israel's starvation diet for Gaza
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Israel’s calculating of daily caloric needs shows how it manages the lives of Palestinians in Gaza in almost microscopic detail.
- Israel's Worldwide Role in Repression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Researched, written, and edited by members of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, this pamphlet focuses on the role of Israel’s government, its military, and related corporations and organizations in a global industry of violence and repression. The states most involved with this industry profit from perpetual war and occupation across the globe while maintaining vastly unequal societies of their own.
- Issues that Obama and Romney Avoid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 With the quadrennial presidential election extravaganza reaching its peak, it’s useful to ask how the political campaigns are dealing with the most crucial issues we face. The simple answer is: badly, or not at all. If so, some important questions arise: why, and what can we do about it?
- It Started in Wisconsin
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A collection of accounts of the first great wave of grassroots resistance to the corporate restructuring of the Great Recession in Wisconsin in the spring of 2011.
- It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 First-hand accounts of the largest pro-labour mass mobilization in modern American history. In the spring of 2011, Wisconsinites took to the streets in what became the largest and liveliest labour demonstrations in modern American history.
- Javier Sicilia Calls Out to Alternative Media as a Force for Communication
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 At the 2012 School of Authentic Journalism, a poet reviews the first year of the movement against the drug war that he inspired.
- Jean-Paul Marat
Tribune of the French Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Biography of Jean-Paul Marat and an analysis of his role in the French Revolution. Conner emphasizes Marat's total identification with the struggle of the propertyless classes.
- John Kerry and Me
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Experiences in community organizing and electoral organizing.
- John Pilger: The dirty war on WikiLeaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war.
- Journalist Security Guide
Covering the news in a dangerous and changing world Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This guide details what journalists need to know in a new and changing world. It is aimed at local and international journalists of varied levels of experience.
- Jurassic Park in France: The Return of the French Communist Party and the Melenchon Phenomenon
An Interview with Yves Coleman Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 For the moment what preoccupies working class people in France is not so much the next elections but the euro crisis and the massive layoffs postponed by the bosses and the Right until after the elections.
- Just Mobility: Postfossil Conversion and Free Public Transport
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 In the face of a growing world population and metropolitan areas growing to accomodate them, Brie and Candeias analyze electric cars and free transit as alternatives to urban mobility.
- Justice, Peace and the Israeli State
Rule by Ruthless Force Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 International Law and the creation of a world body to aid in the direction of nation states to live in peace and justice under defined conditions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charters of the UN suggests that Israel must change, it must recognize that it is not the sole determiner of world events, that it has lifted its beliefs beyond those that exist elsewhere in the world and it must, therefore, reverse its direction to become one with its neighbors and all the nations of the UN.
- Knowing Too Much
Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Norman Finkelstein studies the history of Jewish American support for Israel and how it is shifting.
- Krisis
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2012 By 2010, Greece was in an economic crisis and the society and people were shown to be deeply affected by the country's state.
- Kurt Vonnegut and the American Police State
Just Say "Hi-Ho!" as They Strip Search You Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The country seems to have crossed over a dark threshold. We are now a police state in all but name. Cops and wannabe cops are shooting innocent people and nothing gets done.
- The Land Grabbers
The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheikhs, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.
- Landmines still exacting a heavy toll on Vietnamese civilians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 37 years on, unexploded bombs continue to ruin lives in the former wartime frontline regions of Vietnam.
- The Left and South Africa's Crisis
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An interview with Brian Ashley, the editor of the South African journal AMANDLA!
- The Legacy of Forest Defender Chut Wutty
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 On the life, work, and death of the late Cambodian forest activist Chut Wutty, shot and killed at a logging site by military police.
- Lessons of the Battle of Longview
ILWU Holds the Line Against Union Busting Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Reflections on the battle fought by the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) against the giant EGT grain conglomerate.
- Letter from Baltimore
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Coming to grips with the impact of Occupy Baltimore means not just evaluating what the movement has been able to do or not do on its own terms but rooting its experiences in this larger picture of class decomposition and re-composition that in Baltimore followed in the wake of the same patterns of deindustrialization, suburban flight and disinvestment .
- Letter From Mexico City
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A letter from a Mexican comrade about the specifics of the “neo-liberal” phase of capitalism in Mexico since the 1970s, and the role in it of Carlos Salinas, as Mexican president from 1988 to 1994, and subsequently.
- A Letter To Other Occupiers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We need to act within a wide strategic context, and engage in more than tactical exercises. We need to invite local people to join our ranks and institutions. We cannot hope to win the trust of others, especially others different from ourselves in class background, cultural preferences, race, or gender, unless we stay long enough to win that trust one day at a time. We must be prepared to spend years in communities where there may not be many fellow radicals. In thinking about our own lives, and how we can contribute over what Nicaraguans call a “long trajectory,” we need to acquire skills that poor and oppressed persons perceive to be needed.
- Letter to the Editors
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The argument for sweatshops comes not only from “free market” ideologues but sometimes from voices of establishment liberalism. An argument against.
- The liberal way to run the world - "improve" or we'll kill you
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The death toll is estimated to be in the millions. This has been principally the project of the liberal flame carrier, the United States.
- Liberties and Commons for All
Preface to the Korean Edition of Magna Carta Manifesto Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Liberties and Commons for All expresses two aspects of the ancient English Charters of Liberty; first is the restraint on political power of the King, second is the protection of subsistence in the commons.
- The life and times of Occupy Wall Street
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), and the Occupy movement that rapidly spread across the country in late September 2011, marked a watershed moment in the re-emergence of mass struggle and radical politics in the United States.
- A Life of Challenge to the Dogma of "Objectivity"
Richard Bell Is Practiced at Juggling Journalism, Advocacy and Politics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Journalism, advocacy, politics: Are they completely different fields or aspects of the same game? Can someone actually do all three? Richard Bell has done them all and has lived to tell the tale.
- Living by the Clock of the World: Grace Lee Boggs' Call for Visionary Organizing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Grace Lee Boggs recently argued that activists should spend less time on protest organizing because it "leads you more and more to defensive operations" and "Do visionary organizing" because it "gives you the opportunity to encourage the creative capacity in people and it’s very fulfilling."
- Living Under Occupation
Against The Current vol. 159 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In her autobiography, Palestinian militant Leila Khaled calls the 1960s “America’s decade,” pointing to several spots around the world where the U.S. intervened against people’s struggles as evidence that the decade was not a cause for celebration.
- Long Distance Revolutionary
A Journal with Mumia Abu-Jamal Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 The life and situation of Mumia Abu Jamal.
- Looking Back on Occupy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A look at the Occupy movement and its relevance today.
- Lost Nuke: The Last Flight of Bomber 075
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 In a story seemingly drawn out of a Hollywood action script, the tale of America's first "broken arrow" - code for a lost nuclear weapon - is gripping stuff. The fact that the weapon disappeared over Canadian airspace makes this a unique chapter in Canadian aviation history.
- Mad, Passionate Love - and Violence: Occupy Heads Into the Spring
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter. Until they did.
- Make Art! Change the World! Starve!
The Fallacy of Art as Social Justice - Part I Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- The Make-Believe Crisis in Iran
More lies and Misinformation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Iranian nuclear program scenario has been in place for years and is becoming tedious, but we now seem to have arrived at a new plateau of mass hysteria thanks to the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign. Why?
- Make Sure You Don't Fall: Perspectives on the Recent Social Agitation in Chile, Part One
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Discontent and rage have always been there, but while Social Democracy was in power, the supporters of the regime -- well placed in the open spaces for action and thought in high schools, universities and companies -- were able to use them to channel protests into directions that did not endanger the political credibility of the ruling parties.
- Make Sure You Don't Fall: Perspectives on the Recent Social Agitation in Chile, Part One
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 To understand and make sense of the recent wave of social unrest in Chile, we have to refer to the history of the last half century of this country: the revolutionary upsurge that had its peak in late 1972, the destruction of the social movement after the military coup, the neo-liberal restructuring imposed by the Pinochet regime and the consolidation of that legacy by successive civilian governments.
- Making the Future
Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012
- Making the City
Women Who Made a Difference Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Mama Illegal
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 They gave the smugglers all their money and risk their life on their journey across borders: Three women from a small town in Moldavia, living now in Austria and Italy as cleaning women. On top of their hard job they live a life in illegality without documents, far away from their children and family for years.
- 'The Man Who Knew Everyone' - Gore Vidal Through The Eyes Of The One Per Cent Press
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Since Gore Vidal's death the corporate media have had nothing serious to say about his political dissent warning against the dominance of corporate power. As Vidal himself put it: ‘The bullshit just flows and flows and flows, and the American media is so corrupt and so tied into it that it never questions it.’
- The Man Who Was Chemically Tortured
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The torture of David Hicks at Guantanamo.
- Jean Paul Marat
Tribune of the French Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Biography of Jean Paul Marat and his contributions to the French Revolution.
- The March 29 Strike Against Labor Law Reform in Spain
Outline of the Conjuncture Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The general strike of March 29, although it mobilized a good part of the population, apparently took place with more pain than glory. Once the day of the strike was over, everything seemed to continue as before: namely, the continuation of an aggressive policy against the wage-labor population, in an economic context characterized by recession.
- The March 29 Strike Against Labor Law Reform in Spain: Outline of the Conjuncture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The general strike of March 29, although it mobilized a good part of the population, apparently took place with more pain than glory. Once the day of the strike was over, everything seemed to continue as before: namely, the continuation of an aggressive policy against the wage-labour population, in an economic context characterized by recession.
- Marikana A Point of Rupture?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 South Africa, despite 18 years of majority rule, continues to be one of the most unequal societies on an increasingly unequal planet and is in crisis. Around half the population, mostly black Africans, live below the poverty line. Almost half of all black African households earned below R1670 a month in 2005–06, while only 2 percent of white households fell in that income bracket.
- Martial Matters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A selection of commentaries on Australian martial experience at radical odds with mainstream Australian histories.
- A Marxist Ecological Vision
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The questions facing environmental activists, and socialists in particular, range from the sheer scale of the environmental disasters already underway to the problems of beginning a transition from a system organized around massive consumption of fossil fuels, vast megacities and global agribusiness.
- A Marxist History of the World: Making the future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Historian Neil Faulkner concludes A Marxist History of the World by looking at what that history can tell us about the possibility for radical social change.
- A Marxist History of the World part 100: 1968-1975: the workers' revolt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 As the crisis of capitalism spread around the world, the working class took centre stage – but the revolt did not result in successful revolution anywhere.
- A Marxist History of the World part 101: The Long Recession
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 By the early 1970s, the levers of state economic management had stopped working and the world economy entered a long period of stagnation.
- A Marxist History of the World part 102: What is neoliberalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The ‘free-market’ theory provides a pseudo-scientific justification for the greed and poverty endemic to the system, and the main beneficiaries are the global mega-corporations of neoliberal capitalism.
- A Marxist History of the World part 103: 1989: the fall of Stalinism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The revolutions of 1989 represent great victories for mass action, but they were limited in effect.
- A Marxist History of the World part 104: 2001: 9/11, the War on Terror, and the New Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Al-Qaida terror attacks allowed the great powers to justify new imperialist wars to safeguard the interests of global capital.
- A Marxist History of the World part 105: The 2008 Crash: from bubble to black hole
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The financial crisis represents the end of an era in which greed and casino-madness had been given free rein by market deregulation and rising debt.
- A Marxist History of the World part 106: The Second Great Depression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Four years after the beginning of the crisis, the neoliberal elite is trapped by the contradictions of the system on which its wealth depends.
- A Marxist History of the World part 56: The Indian Mutiny
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Indian Mutiny was the subcontinent’s first war of independence, with Indians of different ethnic and religious backgrounds fighting side-by-side despite the divide and rule fostered by the British.
- A Marxist History of the World part 57: The American Civil War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 One hundred and fifty years ago North America saw the start of a revolutionary war fought between rival systems and opposing political ideologies. Neil Faulkner looks at The American Civil War.
- A Marxist History of the World part 58: The Meiji Restoration
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An event which would shape the history of the Far East until 1945, Japan’s bourgeois revolution ‘from above’ is explored by Neil Faulkner in this week's Marxist History.
- A Marxist History of the World part 59: The Franco-Prussian War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In this week's chapter of the Marxist History series Neil Faulkner looks at how Germany’s ruling elite brought about a bourgeois revolution ‘from above’.
- A Marxist History of the World part 60: The Paris Commune: the face of proletarian revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Franco-Prussian war produced the first proletarian revolution in history, and showed to the world for the first time what a workers’ state looks like.
- A Marxist History of the World part 61: The Long Depression, 1873-1896
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Neil Faulkner writes about the The Long Depression – an unprecedented economic slump which started the countdown to the First World War.
- A Marxist History of the World part 62: The Scramble for Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The imperial competition to control Africa spawned a predatory colonialism of mines, plantations, and machine-guns and propelled humanity towards industrialised world war writes Neil Faulkner.
- A Marxist History of the World part 63: The Rape of China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Neil Faulkner looks at the impact of western imperialism's repeated and bloody attempts to control the wealth of China
- A Marxist History of the World part 64: What is Imperialism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Neil Faulkner looks at how the growth of giant monopolies and the fusing of industrial, bank, and state capital created global competition - and the roots of World War I.
- A Marxist History of the World part 65: The 1905 Revolution: Russia's great dress rehearsal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Neil Faulkner looks at how the Russian Revolution of 1905 helped Leon Trotsky formulate an answer to the century-old riddle of Russian history: what form must the revolution take in order to be victorious.
- A Marxist History of the World part 66: The Ottoman Empire and the 1908 'Young Turk' Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Neil Faulkner looks at how the revolution that began in Turkey in 1908 initiated a process that would transform the middle east over the following two decades.
- A Marxist History of the World part 67: Reform or Revolution?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The world Socialist movement was blown apart as its members supported the First World War. Neil Faulkner looks at how the question of reform or revolution lay behind the split.
- A Marxist History of the World part 68: 1914: descent into barbarism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In the summer of 1914 capitalism tipped humanity into an abyss of barbarism that would leave millions dead. Neil Faulkner looks at the First World War.
- A Marxist History of the World part 69: The First World War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Neil Faulkner looks at how capitalism plunged humanity into an abyss of carnage, destruction, and waste without precedent, as mass production methods produced industrialised slaughter.
- A Marxist History of the World part 70: 1917: the February Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 As WWI turned into a protracted, bloody struggle the initial enthusiasm gave way to growing class tensions which exploded first in Russia's February Revolution.
- A Marxist History of the World part 71: Dual power: the mechanics of revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The centuries old Russian monarchy was overthrown in a matter of days in February 1917. Neil Faulkner looks at the months of turmoil that followed.
- A Marxist History of the World part 72: February to October the rhythms of revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The situation of 'dual power' that emerged after the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917 was marked by a series of major political crises.
- A Marxist History of the World part 73: 1917: the October Insurrection
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- A Marxist History of the World part 75: The German Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 At the end of the First World War, the epicentre of revolution moved from Petrograd to Berlin. Why did the German communists fail where the Bolsheviks had succeded?
- A Marxist History of the World part 76: Italy's 'Two Red Years'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Like Germany, Italy was on the brink of revolution in the summer of 1920, after the strains of imperialist war had levered open deep fractures in an unstable social order.
- A Marxist History of the World part 77 World Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In the five years after the First World War, revolutionary contagion spread around the world. It showed the extraordinary possibilities that arise when the masses become active in making their own history.
- A Marxist History of the World part 78: The First Chinese Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In 1927, the Chinese nationalists smashed the country's first working-class revolutionary movement – a defeat that would shape the whole subsequent history of China.Counterfire
- A Marxist History of the World part 79: Revolt in the Colonies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The anti-colonial revolts of the early 20th century were inspired by radical ideas, but, as the examples of Ireland, India and Mexico show, history exacts a heavy price for political timidity.
- A Marxist History of the World part 80: Stalinism: the bitter fruit of revolutionary defeat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Neil Faulkner looks at the time when the Bolshevik regime turned in on itself and morphed into a mockery of its socialist ideals.
- A Marxist History of the World part 81: The Roaring Twenties
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Although the 'American Dream' became a reality for millions in the 1920s, it was built on shaky grounds - the huge speculative bubble that was building up on Wall Street was waiting to collapse
- A Marxist History of the World part 82: The Hungry Thirties
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Beginning with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the world economy entered the Great Depression. The misguided policies that world leaders pursued ensured that millions of lives were torn apart.
- A Marxist History of the World part 83: 1933: The Nazi seizure of power
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 By the early 1930s, the German ruling class was determined to use the Nazis to make the world safe for German capital. But the fascist victory was not inevitable – it resulted from the failure of those who opposed fascism.
- A Marxist History of the World part 85: June 1936: the French general strike and factory occupations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In the mid-1930s French workers launched a wave of strikes and occupations. Neil Faulkner explains how the Stalinised Communist Party worked to contain this resistance.
- A Marxist History of the World part 86: The Spanish Civil War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In 1936, after General Franco had led an unsuccessful coup against a democratically elected government, revolution swept across Spain. Neil Faulkner explains why the workers were ultimately defeated.
- A Marxist History of the World part 87: The Causes of the Second World War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 As Hitler sought to expand Germany's sphere of influence in Europe, Britain's policy of appeasement reflected the interests of the British ruling classes – until German power became overwhelming.
- A Marxist History of the World part 88: The Second World War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 With the great powers fighting to defend their empires, the Second World War would re-divide the world between competing blocs of capitalists.
- A Marxist History of the World part 89: 1941-1945: barbarism in a world gone mad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Second World War was characterised by primeval savagery. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Militarist Japan waged war with unprecedented brutality, but the ‘democracies’ also committed terrible war crimes.
- A Marxist History of the World part 90: The Second World War: resistance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Large parts of Occupied Europe were liberated by local resistance movements. But the potential for a revolutionary transformation was smothered at birth.
- A Marxist History of the World part 91: The Cold War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Second World War had created a world divided between two imperialist blocs. Their nuclear arsenals acted as a ‘deterrent’, but rivalry and suspicion meant that war was never far away.
- A Marxist History of the World part 92: The Great Boom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In the first three decades after the war, the world economy experienced unprecedented growth rates and falling unemployment. But the boom rested on unstable foundations.
- A Marxist History of the World part 93: Maoist China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 After the revolution of 1949, the Chinese Communists resorted to state capitalism to force the country’s industrialisation. The consequences were disastrous.
- A Marxist History of the World part 94: End of Empire?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In spite of the imperialist powers' attempts to cling on to their colonies, formal empire was finished by the late 1970s. But this was not the end of imperialism.
- A Marxist History of the World part 95: Oil, Zionism, and Western Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 British support for the Zionist movement led to the foundation of Israel in 1948. In conjunction with US imperialism, the Israeli state is an enduring source of oppression in the Middle East.
- A Marxist History of the World part 96:1956: Hungary and Suez
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 1956 was a year of war, revolution, and disillusionment – a year after which nothing could ever be quite the same again.
- A Marxist History of the World part 97: Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The reforms that Fidel Castro introduced after the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship were real, but they were bestowed from above and straitjacketed by poverty.
- A Marxist History of the World part 98: The Vietnam War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 How an army of peasant guerrillas managed to defeat US imperialism in a full-scale war.
- A Marxist History of the World part 99: 1968 - the long sleep ends
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The long sleep of the post-war period was brought to an end in 1968, as revolts erupted across the developed world.
- Mass Incarceration and Black Oppression in America
The New Jim Crow and Liberal Reformism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The singular focus on mass incarceration as the embodiment of racial oppression has a purpose: it poses the fight for black freedom as a matter of "dismantling" that system, much as the civil rights movement dismantled Jim Crow. But mass black incarceration is both a symptom and a means of enforcing the special oppression of black people that is fundamental to American capitalism
- Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932 and the Founding of our National Parks
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012
- Massacres Under the Looking Glass
The ICC and Colombia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The International Criminal Court (ICC) just published its Interim Report on Colombia. In the Report, the ICC explains that Colombia has been under preliminary examination by the ICC since June 2004. The military carried out its most notorious violations while under the ICC’s Clouseau-like scrutiny.
- The Meaning of Mondragon
Fantasties and (Possible) Realities Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We can apply lessons learned from the extensive experience of worker self-management to encourage their unrealized radicality.
- The Media's Dirty War on Occupy
Against The Current vol. 159 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In media portrayals of a protest movement widely criticized for its broad message and vague demands, one picture of the Occupy movement remained consistent across various outlets: the protestors are filthy.
- Medicare Myths and Realities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Since medicare is an extremely popular social program, the media and right-wing politicians have learned that it is unwise to attack it directly. Instead, they propagate myths designed to undermine public support for, and confidence in, the health care system, with the goal of gradually undermining and dismantling it.
- Meme Wars
The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Meme Wars presents a new way of looking at our world that challenges and debunks many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics and brings to light a more ecological model. The book is image-heavy and full-color throughout,
- Memory as Resistance: Grassroots Archives and the Battle of Memory
Preservation as subversion: Do grassroots archives have a future? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 CONNEXIONS and Beit Zatoun are spotlighting grassroots archives this November with an open house and networking event November 24, a talk and discussion November 27, and an exhibit (November 16-27). Grassroots archives play a valuable role in what has been called “the battle of memory”. Mainstream media and institutions of power consign inconvenient histories, struggles, and alternative visions to what George Orwell called “the memory hole.” People’s history projects such as grassroots archives preserve and share stories of resistance, hidden histories, and alternative visions. Their role is particularly important as official archives are forced to restrict acquisitions, limit access and discard materials as funding is slashed.
- The Mexican Student Movement Is Younger & Faster than "Occupy"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It has been decades since I have seen any march of this size include a pledge by participants with that much discipline and awareness that the march is about influencing public opinion (in other words, not about "us" but about everyone). It reminds more of the guidelines from the victorious struggles of Ghandi to win independence from colonial rule in India, the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 70s.
- Micro Militarism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The author explains why the introduction of military messages and advertisements in the everyday lives of the public is troubling and harmful to society.
- The Microfinance Delusion
Marred by Wall Street-Style Greed, Profiteering, Client Abuse, and Market Chaos Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 By celebrating self-help and individual entrepreneurship, and by implicitly discrediting all forms of collective effort, such as trade unions, social movements, cooperatives, public spending, a pro-poor ‘developmental state’ and – most of all – collective moves to ensure a more equitable redistribution of wealth and power, microfinance fits in well with the ideology of neoliberal policy-makers.
- A Middle-Class Diversion from Working Class Struggle?
The New Zealand New Left from the Mid-1950s to the Mid-1970s Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Published in Labour History, 103 (November 2012).
- The Migrations of Roma in the European Union
An Ethnic Minority as the Sport of European Politics Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 France is sending Roma back to Romania, Roma are "voluntarily" leaving the country to go to Macedonia, Czech Roma are seeking asylum in Canada -- these headlines of recent years have repeatedly drawn the eyes of the public to the migrations of Roma in Europe. The resulting debates emphasise the legal status of migrants.
- Monsters of the Market
Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, this book links tales of monstrosity from England to recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, McNally offers a novel account of the cultural economy of the global market-system.
- The Mortal Sea
Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Reveals the long history of warnings against overfishing and that the sea is not an 'infinite resource'.
- The Movement for Peace Marches On Against the Drug War
The Goal Is Clear: Peace With Justice and Dignity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The one-year anniversary of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a grassroots groundswell against the drug war, played out March 28 in a small plaza in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City — absent the cameras and pens of the mainstream media.
- A Movement Without Demands?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons.
- Mumia Faces Life in Prison
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 On Wednesday, Decemerber7, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams held a news conference to announce that the city will no longer seek the death penalty against long-time political prisoner and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jama — convicted in a frameup trial for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
- The Murder of Trayvon Martin
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Popular anger, mass protests and leadership from Trayvon Martin’s parents, the African-American community and its organizations have exposed the racial divisions that run throughout U.S. society.
- My Freedom, Your Freedom
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Knowing nothing but drugs and violence since childhood, Kuebra and Salema have spent their adult years in and out of a Berlin prison, their experiences calling into question the effectiveness of incarceration.
- A Nation of Little Lebowski Urban Achievers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The religion of self-improvement is a way of redirecting criticisms or outrage from socio-economic structures back to the individual, imprisoning any reformist or revolutionary impulse within our own feelings of inadequacy – which is why the process of improving our nation’s schools has taken on the tone of a spiritual cleansing rather than a political reckoning. Now, instead of saying “our socioeconomic system is failing us,” an entire generation of children will learn to say, “I have failed myself.”
- Neo-liberalism and the ongoing economic assault on ordinary Canadians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Two recent stories out of Ottawa underline the ongoing political and economic assault on ordinary Canadians. More Canadians are now working for low wages than at any time in decades, continuing a trend that began in the early 1990s, and Stephen Harper has announced major changes to retirement benefits -- including delaying Old Age Security(OAS) eligibility to age 67. What kind of society beggars those of its citizens who worked all their lives and now want to retire in dignity while privileging the rich and super-rich?
- Neo-Racism in the Southwest
The (Mis)education of the Coming Majority Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 What is taking place in southern Arizona deserves our attention as the most fanatical episode in the war against public education.
- Nestlé: Malevolent Corporation Capitalizes on Global Water Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Demand for water is outstripping supply at an accelerating rate. Nestlé’s goal is to shift government policy away from providing public municipal water supplies to people, and toward a dependency on bottled water to provide basic drinking water.
- New group urges progressives to build 'One Big Campaign' to take on Harper
Sources News Release Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A campaign urging Canadian social activist groups to work together under one massive umbrella to take on the Harper regime and his right-wing supporters was officially launched today.
- The New Police Surveillance State
The Rising Price of Political Assembly Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Police are increasingly being deployed to restrict if not prevent mass political actions, especially directed at the banks.
- The Newsfakers
Whose hands are behind those dramatic YouTube pictures? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 YouTube and blogs have made it easier than ever to fabricate events. The media are happy to run unsubstantiated reports and footage.
- The Next War on Washington's Agenda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It could not be more obvious that Washington’s war preparations against Iran have nothing to do with deterring Iran from a nuclear weapon. So, what are the war preparations about?
- No Heroes in Montreal -- Why Endless Protest Does Not a Movement Make
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 No matter what you've taken to the streets to oppose - no matter how just your cause - your message gets lost when you don’t engage the community, you don't exercise discipline, or you just start acting like assholes.
- No Local
Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won't Change The World Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Local food, local business and buying local won't change the world. Challenging market priorities will. Greg Sharzer outlines why.
- No-Nonsense Guide to Equality
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A wide-ranging exploration of why inequality persists and what can be done about it.
- Noam Chomsky: Palestine 2012 - Gaza and the UN resolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An analysis of the political context of Gaza since the first free elections in the Middle East were held.
- Not a Carwash
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 In the Albanian capital of Tirana, students, professors, activists and film lovers take to the streets when authorities attempt to redevelop the property of the city's only art house theatre for profit. The changing face of post-communist Albania is the backdrop for this classic battle between art, commerce, artistic passion and government indifference.
- Not Quite "Ordinary Human Beings" - Anti-imperialism and the anti-humanist rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In our struggle against Zionism, racism, and all forms of colonialism and imperialism, there is no place for antisemitism or the vilification of Jews, Palestinians or any people based on their religions, cultures, nationalities, ethnicity or history.
- Notebooks 1936-1947
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Published: 2019 Victor Serge - writer, novelist, revolutionary -- left the Soviet Union in 1936 and spent the rest of his life in exile, first in France, then in Mexico. His notebooks, written in the years of fascist and Stalinist ascendency, combine grief at the state of the world with resilience, curiosity, steadfast adherence to his principles, and a love of life and culture.
- Notes Towards a Critique of Maoism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Maoism was part of a broader movement in the twentieth century of what might be called “bourgeois revolutions with red flags,” as in Vietnam or North Korea. To understand this, it is important to see that Maoism was one important result of the defeat of the world revolutionary wave in 30 countries (including China itself) which occurred in the years after World War I. The major defeat was in Germany (1918–1921), followed by the defeat of the Russian Revolution (1921 and thereafter), culminating in Stalinism.
- Nothing Is Ever Won Without Organizing
Remarks to the First Nonviolence Training Session of the Mexican Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2012 All organizing begins with the telling of a story. When we listen carefully to somebody’s story, we learn what motivates him, what she is passionate about. Listening is the first skill and duty of a community organizer. Before we can get somebody to do something, we have to learn what he and she want, which is usually different than what we presumed they wanted.
- The November 2011 General Elections in Spain: Indignation Trapped in the Ballot Box
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The “outrage” expressed in the Spanish streets, deflated after the electoral ritual, is confronted with the limitations of the movement’s citizen-based abstractions (electoral reform, the affirmation of democracy, denouncing corruption, etc.) when confronted with the reality ( labor reform, social cuts) imposed by capital and its democratically elected administrators. Or, perhaps, indignation has completed its cycle and we are at the beginning.
- NYC Transit Workers' Fare Strike 2012: Can Occupy Open Horizons for a Frustrated Labor Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Transit workers belonging to New York City’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 exhibit a familiar sight in the 21st century U.S. labor movement: broke, angry, slandered, disillusioned, directionless and top heavy.
- The NYT's Love Letter to Death Squads
Hymns to the Silence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It is, I confess, beyond all my imagining that a national leader so deeply immersed in murdering people would trumpet his atrocity so openly, so gleefully - and so deliberately, sending his top aides out to collude in a major story in the nation's leading newspaper, to ensure maximum exposure of his killing spree.
- O Caso dos Arquivos de Movimentos de Raiz
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- The Oakland Port Shutdown
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A personal account of the growing dialogue between the labour movement and the Occupy organizing, as seen by someone heavily involved in attempting to build these linkages.
- Obama signs police state legislation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Militarism and aggressive war abroad go hand in hand with authoritarianism and dictatorship at home.
- Obituary: Eric Hobsbawm: 1917-2012
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An obituary for Eric Hobsbawm.
- Obituary: Flint Sitdowner: Olen Ham (1917-2012)
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Obituary for Olen Ham.
- Occupation Diaries
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 An inside look at daily life in Palestine.
- Occupy and the Urgency of Inclusiveness
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Occupy is a social movement that purports to give expression to working class concerns in the absence of working class participation. Occupy has evolved into a form of organization that effectively excludes many who might otherwise participate, and, even worse, may ultimately result in a predominately middle class orientation over time.
- Occupy Atlanta: Privilege Politics of Popular Self-Management for the Post-Civil Rights City
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Occupy Atlanta (OA) movement, like the OWS movement more generally, revealed a national response to the general economic crisis.
- Occupy and Detroit's Crisis
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 What's the new center of gravity on the political landscape? Dan La Botz has provocatively remarked that Occupy Oakland’s November 2 shutdown of the Port of Oakland — one of the largest recent labor actions — was initiated from outside union structures. Earlier, in New York City, on the morning Mayor Bloomberg dispatched police to expel Occupiers from Liberty Park, 5,000 people — many city workers, transit workers and teachers — turned out, forcing him to back off.
- Occupy Everywhere
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The decision by Time magazine to name “the protester” its Person of the Year was largely a response to the two major events that bookended 2011: the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement.
- Occupy Isla Vista for the 99%
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Isla Vista is an unincorporated community within the Santa Barbara County, a gentrified ghetto on the sunny seaside of southern California packing 23,000 people within its meager 1.8 square miles. The core is composed of students studying at the nearby University of California, with a largely ignored community composed of Latino/Latina working-class and other permanent residents, including a houseless population.
- Occupy LA: The Worst of the Best
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A report from the 2011 Occupy movement in Los Angeles.
- The Occupy movement and class politics in the US
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Occupy movement that began in New York in September 2011 and has spread with remarkable speed across the country represents a massive shift in the politics of the United States.
- Occupy Oakland activists take up the question of decision-making
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Exclusionary strategies and tactics alienate those of us who are interested in a slower, more solid, more inclusive approach of mass movement building.
- Occupy Oakland: The Port Shutdown and Beyond - All Eyes on Longview!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Occupy movement – and especially Occupy Oakland – has demonstrated remarkable resilience and an almost unprecedented ability to repeatedly mobilize mass actions against economic injustice and police brutality.
- Occupy Portland Regroups
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Early on a dark and freezing Monday morning, December 12, 2011, more than 800 people descended on terminals five and six at the Port of Portland. Having announced their intention to occupy and shut down the port, the demonstrators arrived to find that the Port of Portland management had beaten them to the punch and closed the two terminals over “safety concerns.”
- The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 The author tracks the development of Bolshevism from its inception in 1904 to the October Revolution in 1917. In the post-October period, the author, drawing on the work of Robert Brenner, shows that any NEP-premised programme of economic advance was destined to fail.
- Office worker's survival guide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The modern office is fraught with dangers. From the risk of getting fired, to stress, repetitive strain injury (RSI), mindnumbing boredom and more. This helpful guide from libcom.org will help you navigate these hazards to a happy work life, and perhaps a slightly better world.
- The Oil Road
Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A look at a particular oil pipeline and its history, both locally and as a part of the global oil industry.
- On Describing the Other
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 My criticism is not primarily about Judith Butler’s style; it is principally about the substance of her arguments and, more broadly, of poststructuralist arguments. I am not opposed to ‘difficult’ writing. There are many philosophers with whom it repays to work through the difficulties, the obscurities and the obtuseness; Hegel, for instance, even Heidegger in parts. Butler, in my eyes at least, is not such a philosopher.
- On the Second Coming of Religion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The question we should ask is not just: ‘What is it about religion that makes people believe or behave in certain ways?’ It is also: ‘What is it about contemporary societies that draws many people, both religious and non-religious, towards nihilistic, narcissistic, anti-modern forms of belief?’
- On Translating Securityspeak into English
In the Land of False Cognates Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Security State has its own language: Securityspeak. Like Newspeak, the ideologically refashioned successor to English in Orwell’s “1984,” Securityspeak is designed to obscure meaning and conceal truth, rather than convey them.
- Once Again on Education: Beyond Ordinary Leftism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An article exploring elements of education in the USA.
- One of the Greatest Environmentalists of the 20th Century
Barry Commoners RIP Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Dr. Barry Commoner, equipped with a Harvard PhD in cellular biology, used his knowledge of biology, ecosystems, nuclear radiation, public communication, networking scientists, political campaigning, and community organizing to become the greatest environmentalist in the 20th century.
- One Thousand Years of Solitude
Life in the SHU Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Indefinite solitary confinement: a large-scale experiment in sensory deprivation and social isolation.
- Our Great Lakes Commons
A People's Plan to Protect the Great Lakes Forever Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2012 A booklet on the proposal to designate the Great Lakes and its tributary waters as a lived 'Commons' that will be protected by a robust legal and political framework.
- Our Harsh Logic
Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2010-2010 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Testimonies from more than 100 soldiers detailing the viciousness of Israel's military in the occupied Palestinian territories.
- Our Land, Our Lives
Time Out On The Global Land Rush Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2012 In the past decade an area of land eight times the size of the UK has been sold off globally as land sales rapidly accelerate. This land could feed a billion people equivalent to the number of people who go to bed hungry each night. In poor countries, foreign investors have been buying an area of land the size of London every six days. With food prices spiking for the third time in four years, interest in land could accelerate again as rich countries try to secure their food supplies and investors see land as a good long-term bet.
- "Our Path Doesn't Depend on Media Coverage"
The Zapatistas and Their Coming Strategy Together with Mexico's Original Peoples Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Communiqué from the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.
- Out of Bounds
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Why do we talk so much about hate speech these days? Largely because hate speech has become a way of rebranding extremist ideas to stress their moral content; in other words, of rebranding obnoxious political claims as immoral arguments. Where once we might have challenged such sentiments politically, today we are more likely to seek criminal sanctions to outlaw them.
- Outsourcing in India and the US Election
Thus Spake the Cyber-Coolies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When Romney criticized outsourcing in his election campaign, he broke with Republican tradition. Outsourcing had been one of the few topics in which both parties appeared to genuinely disagree on, the one issue in which the underlying class dynamics of the pro-business Republicans and labour-backed Democrats were laid bare.
- Overwrought Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Americans lived in a “victory culture” for much of the twentieth century. You could say that they experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real “American Century” -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off.
- OWS and the working class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 As frustrating as this may sound to the left, who are justifiably excited over a revival of radical politics, many workers cannot see the movement’s relevancy to their own lives, yet still feel the pangs of the crisis perhaps more painfully than most.
- Palestine Freedom Battle "will be won": Interview with Author Miko Peled
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An interview with Miko Peled, the Israeli author of The General’s Son.
- Palestine in Israeli School Books
Ideology and Propaganda in Education Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 How are Palestine, and the Palestinians, portrayed in the Israeli school system? Nurit Peled-Elhanan argues that the textbooks used in the school system are laced with a pro-Israel ideology, and that they play a part in priming Israeli children for military service.
- Paraguay: A well-rehearsed coup
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The story behind the overthrow of Paraguayuan President Fernando Lugo.
- The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988
Volume 2: Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-1988 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Part Two of Berry Sheppard's political memoir-cum-history of the socialist movement in the United States.
- The Passion of Bradley Manning
The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 In May 2010, an intelligence analyst in the US Army's 10th Mountain Division was arrested on suspicion of leaking nearly half a million classified government documents, including the infamous "Collateral Murder" gunsight video and 260,000 State Department cables. After nine months in solitary confinement, the suspect now awaits court-martial in Fort Leavenworth. He is twenty-four, comes from Crescent, Oklahoma and his name is Bradley Manning. Who is Private First Class Bradley Manning? Why did he allegedly commit the largest security breach in American history? Is Manning a traitor or a whistleblower?
- Passion, Perversion, and Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Folson Street Fair is the centerpiece of a growing number of gatherings of formally illicit or deviant sexual practices that are taking place across the country. In the 2012 election, sexuality - especially abortion and homosexuality - is a critical issue. The election is about values, a choice between two ethical standards. Once again, Americans have to choose between the humane, the secular, and the religious.
- Paul D'Amato and the Red Condom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Paul Levi: A Luxemburgist Alternative?
A review of In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Among the adversaries of capitalism, some have argued that a revolution could have been achieved differently and better in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote a critique of the Bolsheviks’ undemocratic policies as early as 1918. Paul Levi, Luxemburg’s lawyer, briefly her lover, her follower, and from 1919 to 1921 her successor at the head of German Communism, was the first to defend a Luxemburgist alternative to Bolshevism.
- Paula Broadwell, Whistleblower
It's More Than a Sex Scandal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We await the follow-up to Paula Broadwell’s assertion that two prisoners were being held at the CIA “annex” near the consulate in Benghazi at the time of the assault that left Ambassador Christopher Stephens and three other Americans dead.
- The Pensions Funding Gap
Against The Current vol. 159 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A pension crisis of major dimensions is growing in the United States across all three forms of defined benefit plans (DBPs) — public, private single-employer, and private multi-employer plans. Corporate America and its political friends have begun to use the economic crisis that commenced in 2007 as an opportunity to initiate and expand yet another offensive, aimed at further undermining defined benefit pensions.
- The Pentagon's New Plan to Confront Latin America's Pink Tide
Panetta Down South Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was in Uruguay recently, where he spoke of the need to strengthen the southern hemisphere’s police forces. This proposed policy has a precedent, almost unknown in this country, but potentially indicative of what awaits Latin American governments willing to cooperate with their northern neighbor’s defense establishment.
- Peril from the Right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Many serious observers hold that the crisis in Europe has not come to an end. With the restructuring of the Greek national debt and the enlargement of the European Stability Mechanism, only time was bought, yet the fundamental problems of over-accumulation2 and the imbalances of the current accounts among the members of the Eurozone still persist.
- The Persecution of Wikileaks
Burning the Messenger Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 There is a landmark case, actually more of an affair, involving the US government and WikiLeaks, the online organization that provides anonymity for sources to leak information. The US feels it has leaked too much information about the wrong country, the US.
- Personal histories of the early CIO
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Transcript of a talk given by 5 people who were involved in CIO organizing in the 1930s.
- Perspectives on Putin's Russia
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The demonstrations of December 10 and 24, 2012 in Moscow, in which tens of thousands of people took part, show clearly that the period of social passivity in Russia is nearing its end.
- Pfizer's Elixir of Youth?
Tamoxifen Makes Women Live Longer (Says Manufacturer of Tamoxifen) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It was a great moment in Pharma funded physician “education.” At a symposium at the American Psychiatric Association’s 2010 meeting called “Mood, Memory and Myths: What Really Happens at Menopause,” two Wyeth/Pfizer funded speakers tried to resurrect the benefits of cancer-linked hormone therapy. But the mostly-female audience was having none of it: what can we do about our “tamoxifen brain” from the cancer we already have, they wanted to know.
- Pitfalls and radical mutations: Frantz Fanon's revolutionary life
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In the 1960s and 1970s Fanon was the quintessential Third Worldist. He was taken up by movements that looked to guerrilla struggle in the countryside and in the newly independent Third World. His work became a manual to Maoists and the guerrilla intelligentsia predicting an imminent revolutionary wave that would overturn the world from the countryside.
- Plunder in the Pacific
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Chilean legislators clear the way for legally binding international measures to protect threatened fish across the southern Pacific, after an ICIJ investigation.
- Poetry and Latin American Revolution
Written in Blood and Dreams Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A discussion about the poetry, and about the songs, that have had such a decisive influence on the changes and revolutions in South America.
- The Police Riot at OccupyCAL
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 I remember as if it were just yesterday. I was linked in arms, peacefully protesting in support and solidarity with the students of UC Berkeley and my friend Meleiza. What I would soon have to witness would leave me traumatized and utterly disgusted.
- Police State India
Robert Clive and the Forbidden Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Describing security-mania in India.
- Police Violence and Media Coverup
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Among many tactics used by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD ) to disorient, dishearten, and divide members of Occupy Los Angeles during our detention at city jails, one of the more insidious was denying us access to the news.
- Political Developments in South Africa
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An excerpt from the South African journal Amandla! regarding current political events in South Africa.
- The Politics of the Exodus Myth
Pillar of Superstition Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Cook provides conclusions that would suggest that the Bible as the word of God is rather a fabrication created for the masses for political, religious and cultural reasons.
- Portuguese Workers vs. Austerity
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The General Strike of March 22, 2012 was the second called by the Portuguese trade unions since the IMF/European Commission/European Central Bank (“Troika”) intervened a year ago to impose austerity measures that almost forced the country to its knees. This is the third strike since the financial crisis took hold.
- Preliminary Observations on the Chicago Teachers' Strike
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An insight into the Chicago's teacher strike and its victories.
- Preparing for a Digital 9/11
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In recent years, in one of the more dangerous, if largely undiscussed, developments of our time, the Bush and then Obama administrations have launched the first state-planned war in cyber space. First, there were the "Olympic Games," then the Stuxnet virus, then Flame, and now it turns out that other sophisticated malware programs have evidently followed.
- Preparing the Ground
Left Strategy Beyond the Apocalypse Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2012 Richard Swift considers the fall -- and future rise -- of left politics.
- Press for Conversion #66
Spring 2012 Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2012 In an effort to support the international Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, and the call for an arms embargo on Israel, COAT's two-part report exposes $1.5 billion-worth of CPP investments in 68 companies selling products and services for Israel's wars and the illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
- Press for Conversion #67
Fall 2012 - Profiting from Israeli Apartheid Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2012 In an effort to support the international boycott, divestment, sanctions movement, and the call for an arms embargo on Israel, COAT's two-part report exposes $1.5 billion-worth of CPP investments in 68 companies selling products and services for Israel's wars and the illegal occupation of Palestinian land. (Part 2).
- Price of Gold
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Mongolia is known for its original Nomad culture as well as the spectacular natural landscape. Since gold deposits have been discovered however, both are threatened.
- Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 The first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil, Private Empire is the masterful result of Coll’s indefatigable reporting. A penetrating, newsbreaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of ExxonMobil and the place of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy.
- Privilege politics is reformism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A critique of privilege politics, which the author sees as a demobilizing force that boils down issues of oppression into what happens between individuals.
- Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 In 1907, pioneering labour historian and economist John Commons argued that U.S. management had shown just one "symptom of originality," namely "playing one race against the other."
- Professor's Work Shows People Power Trumps Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Erica Chenoweth’s research is taking the bang out of armed struggles.
- Profit by Fiat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The current bond rigging scandal, in which banks colluded to rig bids on municipal bonds, was a scam that the banks learned from the mafia, who in turn learned it from the Rockfellers and tehri partners in crime.
- Protests, Prosecution And Punishment In Saudi Arabia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Saudi Arabia is experiencing protests, prosecution and punishments.
- Psychologists' Collusion in Ongoing Illegal Detentions
The Status Quo of Torture Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- The pursuit of Julian Assange is an assault on freedom and a mockery of journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Four years ago, a barely noticed Pentagon document, leaked by WikiLeaks, described how WikiLeaks and Assange would be destroyed with a smear campaign leading to "criminal prosecution". We are witnessing the implementation of that plan.
- Pushing Demands at OWS?
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A debate is going on about whether Occupy Wall Street should adopt a list of demands. A number of people I know and respect have supported the Demands Working Group in New York and have called for the General Assembly to adopt their list. The draft includes great demands — there is nothing I’ve seen that I don’t agree with, and I’ve worked hard for some of them for much of my life. Yet I keep thinking that pushing the list of demands is not the way to go right now.
- Putting Syria Into Some Perspective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.
- Racism in Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Reports of anti-African race riots in Tel Aviv in May finally broke western media silence over one of the most contentious issues facing the state of Israel in recent years: the arrival of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan Africa.
- Racist Violence is Used to Maintain an Unjust Social Order
From Trayvon Martin to Wall Street Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 While it would be gratifying and is socially necessary to bring Trayvon’s murderer to justice, the continuation of America’s system of racial oppression must also be ended or we just wait for the inevitable next wrongfully murdered black youth.
- Radical Simplicity And The Middle Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A description of what a life of radical simplicity might look like suggesting radical simplicity is appealing, provided that the transition was anticipated and widely negotiated.
- The Radicalization of Decolonize/Occupy Seattle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A report on Occupy Seattle 2011.
- The Rain On Our Parade
A Letter To My Dismal Allies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we're talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.
- Raising the Workers' Flag
The Workers' Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A history of the Workers' Unity League, the Canadian affiliate of the Communist Red International of Labour Unions.
- Real Justice: Sentenced to Life at Seventeen
The story of David Milgaard Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 An examination of the David Milgaard case, a Saskatoon teenager who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for a crime he did not commit.
- Rebel Cities
From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Harvey places cities at the centre of an anti-capitalist resistance, asking how they might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sustainable ways.
- The Red and the Black
Profit is the motor of capitalism. What would it be under socialism? Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2012 In this essay, I start from the common socialist assumption that capitalism’s central defects arise from the conflict between the pursuit of private profit and the satisfaction of human needs. Then I sketch some of the considerations that would have to be taken into account in any attempt to remedy those defects.
- Redemption Road
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A four-month-long walk on an ancient pilgramage route offers young offenders a different pathway. Adam Weymouth reports on the slow healing of Oikoten.
- Reflections on the New School Occupation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 On November 17th, 2011, the Study Center at 90 Fifth Avenue, an office building leased by the New School University, was occupied by participants in the all-city student assembly in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.
- Religous Freedom and Authoritarian Atheists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Many contemporary atheists adopt an unpleasantly authoritarian stance. Many now demand, in the name of ‘reason’ or ‘science’, state restrictions or bans on views that might cause ‘harm’. It is a strange attitude for those who supposedly believe in free speech and free thought.
- Remembering Another Occupy
Anniversary of the 1937 Sit-Down Strike Wave Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Remembering David Montgomery
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When the organization of American Historians met in Milwaukee in April, its program schedule included one very special session: a memorial tribute to David Montgomery. David, historian and political activist, died of a brain hemorrhage on Dec 1, 2011. He was 84 years old.
- Reports from the Occupy Wall Street Events of Mid-November
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Resistance After Foreclosure
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In 1973, in the class- and race-polarized city of Boston, City Life began as a socialist collective fighting against evictions and gentrification in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Over the years, it has evolved into a radical non-profit organization with a long history of doing tenant organizing and tenants’ rights work all across the city. City Life was able to avoid sectarian debates to maintain itself as a radical center for housing organizing.
- Resistance in China Today
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Cases of resistance in China continue to grow.
- Resistance in China Today
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Cases of Resistance in China continue to grow. Protests both large and small are extremely frequent. These range from workers’ protests against unpaid wages and demands for labor rights to protests against corrupt officials and environmental abuses. While these struggles have often been brought to a swift end through repression, they have also frequently led to protestors being granted concessions.
- Resisting the State
Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 In Resisting the State, Neigh draws attention to the broad range of struggles against the Canadian state, detailing the histories of these movements.
- A Response to Norman Finkelstein
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A response to Norman Finkelstein's attack on the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Tilley says that Finkelstein's insistence that the movement has to adjust itself to mainstream public opinion is bizarre: "Since when do human rights campaigns adjust their arguments to please mainstream opinion? Changing mainstream opinion is their very task. If activists took mainstream opinion as the proper guide to moral action, we would never have had the anti-slavery abolition movement, or the women’s suffrage movement, and apartheid would flourish in South Africa to this day. Indeed, we wouldn’t have most human rights campaigns. The toughest ones, which are often the greatest ones, must often start small and grow slowly."
- Retail Workers Fight 'Just in Time' Scheduling
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 On-call shift scheduling is rough on a largely part-time and female work force trying to keep up with families, school and second jobs. Some workers are asking for better terms.
- The Revenge of History
The Battle for the 21st Century Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A critical account of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
- A Review of Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital and Some Thoughts Prompted by the Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 So much of what parades as Marxism has very little to do with Karl Marx. Mary Gabriel knows Marx and we know him better after we read her book.
- The Revisionaries
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 The Revisionaries follows the attempts of a creationist Board of Education member to revise the science and history curricula to better suit a white, Christian nation.
- Revolution against "progress": the TIPNIS struggle and class contradictions in Bolivia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Evo Morales's green light to a decades-old project to build a highway connecting Villa Tunari north to San Ignacio de Moxos through the indigenous territory and national park known as TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena del Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure), was the catalyst of his government's unpopular ratings.
- The Right Kind Of Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When is an act of terrorism not terrorism? When the victims are officially sanctioned state enemies.
- "Right to Work": Menace to Labor
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A year-long battle ended in January with Indiana becoming the 23rd “Right to Work (RTW)” state — and ominously for labor, now the wedge state for opening the rest of the industrial Midwest to RTW campaigns. In neighboring Michigan, the home state of the United Auto Workers, rightwing state legislators are pushing to follow the Indiana example in the name of “competitiveness.”
- The rise and fall of the Jewish Labour Bund
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The history of the Bund, or Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund in Rusland un Poyln (General Jewish Labour Union in Russia and Poland), is one riven with contradictions. It brought together tens of thousands of Jewish workers during its 52 years of existence in struggle against oppression and exploitation.
- The Rise of Fascism in Greece
Waiting is Not an Option Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In Germany, Spain and Italy (and elsewhere) in the early 1930s during those troubled times, unemployment was high, Left alternatives were weak, resentment against others oozed in the streets, and terrible insecurities pushed nominally good people, the middle classes, into supporting the forces of hatred and nationalistic fervour.
- Robots Kill, But The Blood Is On Our Hands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Killing individuals (and whoever is near them) has become the primary substitute in U.S. public policy for capture/imprisonment/torture. Torturing someone to death is not what former CIA General Counsel John Rizzo calls "clean." Blowing them and anyone near them into little bits is "clean." As Medea Benjamin documents, the United States has avoided detaining people, only to murder them with a drone days later.
- Rolling Back Reconstruction
Against The Current vol. 159 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The 'Reconstruction Amendments” — the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution — are targeted in many of the Tea Party and far-right Republican campaigns against the rights of immigrants and women, marriage equality and LGBT rights, and voting rights for African Americans and other minority ethnic groups.
- Rooted in the neighbourhood: what happened to Spain's assemblies?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Oscar Reyes reports on the successes and setbacks of neighbourhood assemblies in Spain.
- Roots of U.S. Capitalism (book review)
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This is a thoughtful, learned, stimulating, challenging and altogether valuable volume. It reprints a series of reflections by the Marxist sociologist Charles Post on various aspects of the rise and evolution of capitalism in North America between the colonial era and the late 19th century.
- Rosaluxemburgblog
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2012 A blog devoted to debate, publications and scholarship on the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919). The aim is to publicise and share articles, reviews and resources relating to Luxemburg's life, ideas and legacy.
- Russell Means: Warrior for the People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The life of Russell Means, Lakota warrior for the people whose stance of never backing down inspired a generation of Native American rights, was celebrated on Wednesday, Oct. 24, in Kyle, South Dakota. Means' piercing words and clarity of style on American Indian rights, placed him at the forefront of the struggle of the American Indian Movement that spans four decades.
- The Russian Revolution Revisited - Review
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A review of 'The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History' by John Eric Marot.
- Rust Belt Resistance
How a Small Community Took on Big Oil and Won Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Led by an unlikely cast of characters -- an uncommonly stubborn set of civic leaders, a conservative local newspaper publisher, and the city’s determined and progressive mayor—Lima refused to take its place quietly on the industrial scrap heap.
- Sasha and Emma
The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A biography.
- Scattered Sand
The Story of China's Rural Migrants Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Each year, 200 million workers from China’s vast rural interior travel between cities and provinces in search of employment: the largest human migration in history. This indispensable army of labour accounts for half of China’s GDP, but is an unorganized workforce — “scattered sand,” in Chinese parlance — and the most marginalized and impoverished group of workers in the country.
- Schoolhouse Shams
Myths and Misinformation in School Reform Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Written by a parent and school board member, who first embraced many of the ideas of the modern school reform movement, Schoolhouse Shams lays bare much of the mythology and misinformation that underpin many of the failed school reform policies of the last decade. Many of the top strategies of the highly publicized school reform movement already have been tried out in St. Louis with disastrous results. Along with demonstrating the failure of school reform prescriptions to improve education, the experience of St. Louis demonstrates that the ideological premise of the reform movement, that a focus on providing opportunities for private profit-taking will necessarily improve schools, is both wrong and conflicts with the ideals of democracy, accountability, and justice.
- Science, Myth, and History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The story of ‘Kennewick Man’ - the debate around a 9000-year old skeleton and what it reveals about current ideas of culture, race and science.
- The second coming of the radical left
Crunch-time for the eurozone? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Nearly five years after it started, the global economic and financial crisis shows no signs of resolving itself. On the contrary, in Europe it is taking a more virulent form, as the eurozone inches towards some kind of moment of truth. The slow motion catastrophe in Europe threatens to kill off the chronically weak recovery in the US.
- Secret Service
Political Policing in Canada From the Fenians to Fortress America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A history of political policing in Canada.
- Seeds of Death: Unveiling The Lies of GMOs
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2012 An exposition of the massive public health dangers associated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
- Seeds of Fire
A People's Chronology Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Published: 2022 Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.
- Selected Archive Projects
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A list of some archive projects concerned with grassroots movements for social justice.
- The Selective Compassion of the Media & Human Rights Establishment
Ignoring the Victims of State Crimes Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 “Human rights” doctrine has devolved into a mere tool used by the U.S. to carry out its imperial aims, and many times by means (such as war) which cause many more human rights violations than they purport to solve.
- Selective Outrage - Iran And Libya
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Sex work: Solidarity not salvation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An ongoing debate is taking place in anarchist and feminist circles on the legitimacy of sex work and the rights of sex workers. The two main schools of thought are almost at polar opposites of each other. On the one side you have the abolitionist approach led by feminists, such as Melissa Farley who maintains that sex work is a form of violence against women. Farley has said that "If we view prostitution as violence against women, it makes no sense to legalize or decriminalize prostitution." On the other side you have sex worker rights activists who view sex work as being much closer to work in general than most realize, who believe that the best way forward for sex workers is in the fight for workers' rights and social acceptance and for activists to listen to what sex workers have to say. In this article I will discuss why the abolitionist approach discriminates against sex workers and takes advantage of their marginalized status, while the rights approach offer the opportunity to make solid differences in the labour rights and human rights of sex workers.
- Shadows of Liberty
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2012 Examines the new media monopoly by corporations in America and the public battle for truth and democracy.
- Shooting to Kill Immigrants on the Mexican Border
A Border Agent Fired First at Immigrant Smugglers? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Sometimes it takes a small tragedy to call attention to expose a much bigger one.
The small tragedy happened when Nicholas Ivie, a US Border Patrol agent, was shot dead on a dark night in rough terrain along the border with Mexico in Arizona, a state that has been obsessing about illegal border crossers coming into the US from Mexico seeking jobs.
- A Short History of Black Voter Suppression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Right's organized movement to suppress the votes of African Americans and Latin Americans, and the urban and rural poor by means of the passing of voter ID (Poll Tax) laws in states receives no mention in the dominant media.
- Silences on the Suppression of Workers Self-Emancipation: Historical Problems with CLR James's Interpretation of V.I. Lenin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 CLR James believed one of his major intellectual legacies was the clarification of the wisdom of V.I. Lenin. However, James's readings fail in making Lenin's role in history and politics transparent. James's Leninism attempts to reconcile the validity of workers self-management and the aspirations of a political party to seize state power. This is in conflict with James's own genuine and original political legacy: clarifying the direct democratic gathering forces which will create the new society.
- SIU's Community of Resistance
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A solidarity rally to prepare for a joint strike.
- Six Media Companies Control 90% of What We Read, Watch and Listen to
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Six Nations and Dundalk Fight Corporate Crap
Why We Should All Support Their Struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Dundalk is situated at the highest elevation in Ontario, the headwaters of both the Grand and Saugeen rivers, and sits on land deeded to the Six Nations through the Haldimand Proclamation of 1763. Despite the ecological importance of the region and the outstanding land claim, the municipal council and a corporation are attempting to force through a plan to build a “bio-solids” processing facility just a stone’s throw from the town.
- Six Ways the Media Has Misreported Syria
How One-Sided Reporting is Facilitating Escalation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The Western mainstream media’s coverage of the Syrian conflict has been mostly simplistic and black & white with a Hollywoodian good (opposition) and evil (Syrian government) story.
- The Sky is Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn
Class Struggle in the US from the 2008 Crash to the Eve of the Occopations Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We can safely assert that for most working people, the "recession" has never ended, and is about to get worse.
- Slavery still shackles Mauritania, 31 years after its abolition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Rigid caste system and ruling elite have enabled a centuries-old practice to continue into the 21st century.
- Slucaj za arhivsku osnovu
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Ovaj dokument ocrtava razlog za Connexions-ovu arhivu i knjižnicu, projekt baziran u Torontu koji cuva i dijeli informacije i dokumente vezano za osnovne pokrete za društvene promjene. Connexions sadržava fizicku arhivu materijala, kao i opsežnu online knjižnicu na www.connexions.org.
- Smoke Traders
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Smoke Traders tells the story of the contraband tobacco trade and the effect on individual lives and communities from a Native perspective.
- Social Movements in South Africa
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Investigation into the current political movements in South Africa.
- Social Movements and Leftist Governments in Latin America
Confrontation or Co-optation? Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Analyzes what is the position of the social movements after progressive governments take power.
- Socialist Register 2012
Volume 48: The Crisis and the Left Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2012
- "Solidarity" Beats Austerity
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The tumultuous month of November 2011 marked the emergence of a powerful and widespread movement on public university campuses throughout California. Brutal police repression of Occupy encampments at UC Berkeley and UC Davis gained national media attention and sparked massive solidarity actions among social justice movements around the nation and the world.
- Solitary Confinement FAQ
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Solitary confinement is the practice of isolating inmates in closed cells for 22-24 hours a day, virtually free of human contact, for periods of time ranging from days to decades.
- Somebody Else's Atrocities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Atrocities commited by official enemies are routinely condemned, but atrocities for which our own country is responsible are rarely mentioned.
- South Africa After Marikana - Interview
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Suzi Weissman interviews Leonard Gentle.
- The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Paul Preston charts how and why Franco and his supporters set out to eliminate all ‘those who do not think as we do’ – some 200,000 men, women and children across Spain.
- The SP's Roots and Legacy: In the American Grain - Book Review
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Book review of 'American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W.E.B. Du Bois' by Mark W. Van Wienen.
- The State and the Social Movements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The article deals with the systematic, pervasive web of containment of social struggles and class conflict developed by the Brazilian Workers' Party (Partido do Trabalho, or PT) over decades, beginning in the 1980s, and culminating in its ten years in state power since 2002, first under Lula (2002–2010) and now under Dilma Rousseff (2010–).
- Stoking the False War Between Generations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The world seemed to change dramatically in 2011. On the global stage the democracy movement that started in Tunisia spread throughout the Middle East and beyond, eventually settling into tiny Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, just blocks from Wall Street. From there, Occupy Wall Street rippled out to become a global protest movement.
- Stoning in Muslim Contexts: A Mapping Report
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 This report locates where the punishment of stoning still exists, either through judicial or extrajudicial methods.
- Straphanger
Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A discussion of the major modern urban transport systems of the world.
- The Strategy and Organizing Behind the Successful DREAM Act Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Undocumented youth have shown that ordinary people build extraordinary people power, even in the United States.
- The Strike and Its Enemies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Like the progressive labour bureaucrats, today’s generation of young radicals have spent all of their formative years living in the era of capitalist realism — the era of There is No Alternative. And it’s perhaps for this reason that each tenet of the union bureaucrat philosophy finds its distorted mirror-image in the views of the young anti-union radicals. They tend to believe that middle-class intellectuals and full-time activists should take the lead role in strategy and that these groups do not have different material interests than rank-and-file workers. That building “communes,” rather than confronting capital, should be the movement’s main mission.
- The strike that led to Tahir Square
An act of courage that launched a revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Labour struggles at Egypt's largest cotton mill, starting in 2006, laid the groundwork for the revolution of 2011.
- The Struggle for a Different World
The 1971 Gastown Riot in Vancouver Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Published in Debating: Canada and Sixties, edited by Lara Cambell et al. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2012
- The Struggle in Balochistan
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The complicated situation that is modern Pakistan.
- Stuxnet on the Loose
Security for the One Percent Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Suspicions that the Stuxnet computer worm was indeed developed by the United States and Israel has once again exposed American exceptionalism. Espionage and sabotage are presented as intolerable criminal transgressions, normally causing our elected officials and military leaders to erupt in fits of righteous indignation. That is, unless the United States is doing the spying and the sabotaging.
- Subversives
The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Rosenfeld provides an account of the FBI’s secret -- and highly political -- involvement with three iconic figures at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr.
- Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A study of the role of the FBI in the postwar Red Scare, focusing especially on Ronald Reagan's long and creepy relationship with the FBI. It is also a fascinating account of the origins and development the New Left, and a powerful examination of how the FBI corroded due process and democracy.
- Swing of the Pendulum?
Against The Current vol. 159 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The defeat of the Wisconsin recall of anti-labor Governor Scott Walker, along with the Republican jubilation that followed, demands a close examination of the state of U.S. politics. In the post-Citizens United era, it’s certainly true that unlimited Super-PAC funds from the likes of the Koch Brothers and other dark corners of “the one percent” lubricate the political machinery of the right wing’s “ground game,” savage media wars, lying attack ads and voter suppression campaigns.
- SWP: Long March to Oblivion - Book Review
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Book review of 'The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988. A Political Memoir. Volume 2: Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-1988' by Barry Sheppard.
- SYMPOSIUM: Truth and Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Insurgent Notes invited members of Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) that we were able to contact and individuals of organization that we knew had been influenced by one or more of the aspects of STO's theory or practice to respond to a series of questions.
- Syria: Arab Solution Needed
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Of all the Arab regimes that have been toppled since the start of the Arab Spring last year, Syria’s Assad regime is the most dangerous. While it is impossible to quantify oppression and repression, the Assad regime has certainly surpassed its Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Yemeni counterparts in its assault on the rights of its people and other Arabs over the years.
- The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The media have been too passive when it comes to Syrian opposition sources, without scrutinising their backgrounds and their political connections. A nightmare is unfolding across Syria, in the homes of al-Heffa and the streets of Houla. And we all know how the story ends: with thousands of soldiers and civilians killed, towns and families destroyed, and President Assad beaten to death in a ditch.
- The Takeover of Motor City
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In early April the Detroit City Council and Mayor Dave Bing signed a “consent agreement” with Michigan Governor Rick Snyder that essentially turns over the city’s financial management to an appointed board.
- Taking it Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Published: 2014 C. Wright Mills' role in development of public intellectuals and New Left.
- Taking Socialism Seriously
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Raises essential questions about what socialism is and how socialists can reach it.
- Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Teach for America, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.
- 10 Shocking Incidents of Police Brutality Caught on Tape
Finally, a Reason to Like CCTV Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The internet is full of videos exposing police officers’ use of excessive physical force when trying to apprehend or detain “potential criminals”. Every year in fact there seems to be an increase in YouTube video uploads, video views, and news stories depicting this type of injustice.
- Terror in a Christmas Tree
Israel Tries to Ban Non-Jewish Celebrations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?
- The Terrorists that are and the Terrorists that Aren't
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When, apparently, he is 'our' terrorist.
- Their "Recovery" and Ours - Review
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A review of 'Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few' by Jack Rasmus.
- They Are Still Killing Trade Union Leaders
Global Capital's Death Squads and Night-Riders Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Question: So what happens these days in developing countries when a prominent, charismatic union activist - with the courage to stand up to sinister, government-supported business groups who have, on more than one occasion, already threatened his life - attempts to get the country’s underpaid, under-benefited workers to join a labor union? Answer: They kill him.
- Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.
- Thoughts on a Timely Narrative for the Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 "Without a story every battle is lost”, formulated the authors of the Wu Ming group, whose name demonstrators in Rome had on their shields which protected them from the police clubs. With the naming of great authors and narratives of world literature on their book shields they were indicating that power does not shy back from violently attacking even intellect and beauty.
- Three Big Lies of the Super-Rich
Why Being in the Highest Class Doesn't Mean You're a High Class Person Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The conservative spin of the media is designed to protect the rich from challenge.
- Through the Labyrinth of Steel Doors
A Weekend in Texas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Visiting a friend in a Texas prison.
- To Name The Unnameable
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Discussing Salman Rushdie's non-appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival.
- Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Richard Sennett contends that "living with people who differ -- racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically -- is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city."
- Tombstone
The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A look at 'the great famine', a concealed result of the Great Leap Forward in China.
- Tools That Might Help Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A list of ideas that different groups and social movements have suggested for inclusion in the Rio+20 Final Declaration. At the time of writing, only two -- Planetary Boundaries and the Ombudsperson for Future Generations -- appear to have much chance of getting into the official text.
- The Torture Report
What the Documents Say About America's Post-9/11 Torture Program Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 government documents relating to abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the "war on terror," brought to light by Freedom of Information Act litigation. As the lead author of the ACLU's report on these documents, Larry Siems is in a unique position to chronicle who did what, to whom and when. This book serves as a tragic reminder of what happens when commitments to law, common sense, and human dignity are cast aside, when it becomes difficult to discern the difference between two groups intent on perpetrating extreme violence on their fellow human beings.
Divided into three sections, The Torture Report presents a stunning array of eyewitness and first-person reports—by victims, perpetrators, dissenters, and investigators—of the CIA’s White House-orchestrated interrogations in illegal, secret prisons around the world; the Pentagon’s “special projects,” in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; plots real and imagined, and much more.
- Toward Revolution and Collective Leadership - Interview
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An interview with Andrés Antillano. Bolivia.
- Toward the United Front
Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 The proceedings of the last Comintern congress in which Lenin participated reveals a Communist world movement grappling to reconcile the goal of unifying workers and colonial people in struggle with that of pressing forward to socialist revolution.
- Trade Unions: International Solidarity in Action
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 International solidarity can be understood as cooperation between trade-union organisations that, by their nature, share the same objectives because they represent the workers of their countries. It takes on a special importance when the workers are employed by the same multinational company or in the same worldwide type of industry.
- The Tragedy of Norman Finkelstein -- Time to Say Goodbye
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Norman Finkelstein seems to have moved from an anti-Zionist position to believing that the best we can do is create a Palestinian bantustan while Israeli remains as a state where Jews rule and Palestinians remain legally and economically oppressed.
- Trampling Out the Vintage
Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 An of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers and its most famous and controversial leader, Cesar Chavez.
- Truth and Revolution
A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 In the 1970s and 1980s, as the movements of the sixties receded from view, the revolutionary left in the United States went through a series of profound political, demographic, and cultural transformations as it struggled to find its footing in a rapidly changing world. The unorthodox political agenda of the Sojourner Truth Organization represents a small but powerfully resonant thread running through this arc of history.
- Trying to change the world?
We can help. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Getting your story across is an uphill battle when you’re challenging the status quo.
SOURCES can help you get your message out.
- TSA Drug-Running Scandal Betrays Drug War’s Pretense
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The cost of bribing US border and airport security personnel is chump change in the narco-trafficking business.
- A "Tunisia Moment" Coming?
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A prominent commentator and a brother of the former president, Moeletsi Mbeki caused a major stir last year when he announced that South Africa is headed for a “Tunisia Moment.”
- 12 Reasons You'll Be Hearing More About The Commons In 2012
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 "We Power" stands at the convergence of economic and cultural trends.
- Twenty five years of revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The period since 1987 has been, in one sense, extraordinary in the sheer number of revolutions that have occurred. If one thing seems certain, it is that revolution is alive and well across the globe, and is indeed a very “normal” part of the political process in the modern capitalist world.
- Two Cheers for Anarchism
Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, this book offers a defense of an anarchist way of seeing - one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions.
- Two Months in LA's Solidarity Park
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Occupy Los Angeles was the largest of the “Occupy” encampments: In the space of two months, we grew from around 50 to nearly 500 tents. Our camp developed neighborhoods, tribes, collectives, a print shop, a library, a people’s university, a wellness center, a meditation tent, a kid’s village, and all sorts of fascinating community problems to go with them. This is the particular joy and struggle of being an occupation, and not a traditional group of community organizers; the internal conflict of a commune or a family was playing out simultaneously with our movement and message-building.
- 2013 Unoccupied
Sun Tzu's Messages to the Occupy Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The ”Occupy” movement has apparently receded into the long night. The structural challenges remain the same, and opposition is still needed. What has been exposed as fruitless, however, is the idea of occupying parks in chaotic sieges that signify nothing.
- The Unbelievable Inhumanity of Solitary Confinement And Punishment for as Little as Reading a Book
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The majority of those in solitary confinement were given the punishment for nonviolent, low-level offenses such as having unauthorized books or disobeying an order or growing their mustaches too long.
- Understanding Harper's Evangelical Mission
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Signs mount that Canada's government is beholden to a religious agenda averse to science and rational debate.
- Union Power: Solidarity and Struggle in Niagara
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Details how work has been transformed in Ontario's Niagara region since the early 1820s. At that time, workers laboured fourteen-to sixteen-hour days constructing the original Welland Canal that connected Lake Erie with Lake Ontario.
- United in Anger
A History of ACT UP Resource Type: Film First Published: 2012 Examines the birth and life of the AIDS activist movement from the perspective of the people in the trenches fighting the epidemic.
- The Unknown Slave Rebellion
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Though the planters had no difficulty reconciling the wealth they enjoyed and the price the slaves paid, the region’s black laborers did. By aborting their own children, poisoning livestock, lighting fires, and escaping to the cypress swamps, the slaves struggled to dilute, deflect, and if possible demolish slaveholders’ authority. Even open revolt was not beyond question. While it was a card that slaves played only rarely — planters tended to take a dim and deadly view of armed rebellion — the German Coast teemed with violent possibilities. The planters’ world rested on a powder keg to be ignited by the smallest of sparks.
- Unlawful Dissent
New Laws Around the Globe Don't Curb Inequity, They Undercut Social Protests and Gag Free Speech Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The state is increasingly encroaching upon dissent as social conditions worsen.
- The Unsettling of America - book review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A book review of The Unsettling of America by Thomas Berry.
- Untold History of the United States
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 A 2012 documentary series directed, produced, and narrated by Oliver Stone. The ten-part series is supplemented by a 750-page companion book, The Untold History of the United States, also written by Stone and Kuznick, released on Oct 30, 2012.
- US Consulate Killings - Spontaneous Religious or Planned Political?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 On September 11, four Americans, including the US ambassador, were killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The following day, the BBC's Lunchtime News reported that the killings were part of 'disturbances' which were 'linked to an anti-Islamic video'. The BBC's News at Six explained that the US ambassador was killed 'in a protest'. This was mild language indeed given that the consulate had been attacked with assault rifles, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.
- US Military Brands Assange, WikiLeaks As "The Enemy"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Secret US Air Force documents reveal that the American military has branded WikiLeaks and its editor Julian Assange as "the enemy", placing them on a legal par with Al Qaeda and threatening them with the same treatment: indefinite detention without trial, and death.
- The U.S.-Pakistan Co-dependency
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 After a cross-border NATO air strike in November resulted in the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers, Pakistan responded forcefully, closing the Af-Pak border to NATO traffic, expelling the U.S. military from an air base inside Pakistan, and boycotting the International Conference on Afghanistan.
- Using a Black Icon to Sell Apartheid
Israel's Chutzpah Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Apologists for Israel are now using fabricated 'quotes' from Martin Luther King to make it seem that King supported Israeli apartheid.
- The Vertical Farming Scam
Wrong on So Many Levels Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Vertical farming would involve using the floorspace of tall urban buildings for growing food plants through largely hydroponic methods. This is envisioned as a way to integrate food production with dense human populations, increase production per unit of land area, protect crops against pests without the use of chemicals, and take vulnerable agricultural soils out of production by relocating crops to cities. It can, in fact, achieve none of these goals.
- A village about to be demolished
A glimpse into occupation Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Susiya is a microcosm of life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Palestinians living in the little village of Susiya and elsewhere are under constant threat of demolition, expulsion and forced relocation.
- Votescam
The Stealing of America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Are American elections stolen? The Colliers' infamous 25 year investigation, begun in Dade County, Florida, 1970, reveals the origins of today's insider vote-rigging cartels, with their fingers on the electronic keys that control democracy.
- Wade Michael Page and the rise of violent far-right extremism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The man who opened fire in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin was not just a crazed loner, but a vocal neo-Nazi – in fact, his white supremacist ideology reflected a growing form of extremism that expresses its strength through violence rather than at the ballot box.
- Wadim
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 The story of Latvians who sought asylum in Germany, their lives there, and the consequences when harsh immigration policies suddenly tear them apart in this critique of laws written and applied without regard for human consequences
- The Waiting Room
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 The film watches a Californian hospital for a full day, observing what patients and staff go through as they deal with the over-crowded, under-funded US health care system.
- Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball
The Best of Joe Bageant Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 25 essays by the self-proclaimed redneck socialist, edited by Ken Smith.
- The War Crimes of a Sergeant, the War Crimes of a Nation
A Double Standard of Justice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 It is alleged that on the evening of March 10-11, 2012, US Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales left his base in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, fully armed and loaded, and murdered 16 civilians in a nearby village.
- The War of Northern Aggression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A leading Civil War historian challenges the new orthodoxy about how slavery ended in America.
- The War on Women--And Us All
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The war on women’s reproductive rights is being fought in the U.S. Congress, in state legislatures and in the courts, and played out in the media. This war seeks to restrict women’s ability to control their reproductive lives — with each law more outrageous than the last — under the excuse that they are “protecting the unborn.”
- Way Beyond Greenwashing: Have Corporations Captured Big Conservation?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The global organic food industry agrees to support international agribusiness in clearing as much tropical rainforest as they want for farming. In return, agribusiness agrees to farm the now-deforested land using organic methods, and the organic industry encourages its supporters to buy the resulting timber and food under the newly devised “Rainforest Plus” label.
- We Are Legion
The Story of the Hacktivists Resource Type: Film First Published: 2012 A history of Anonymous, the radical "hacktivist" collective that has redefined civil disobedience for the digital age.
- We Are Wisconsin
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 When a Republican Governor’s bill threatens to wipe away worker rights and lock out public debate, six (extra)ordinary citizens join the growing protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol, and spend the next twenty-six days building a movement that not only challenges the bill, but the soul of a nation.
- We Have Still Had It Up to Here: The Year a Movement Was Born
Mexico's Struggle to End the Drug War Is Unlike Any in the World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The truth is that Mexican public opinion has never fully swallowed the fiction – believed by many in the United States – that the drug war is somehow about stopping drugs or their abuse. Almost everybody knows that it is primarily a means to enrich the pockets of corrupt politicians and police.
- We Were Children
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 A 2012 documentary film about the experiences of First Nations children in the Canadian Indian residential school system.
- Welcome to the World’s First Bunker State
Room for Jews Only in Israel’s ‘Villa in the Jungle’ Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.
- The Welfare State of America
A manifesto on building social democracy in the age of austerity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A movement to expand the welfare state has the potential to foster a new majoritarian Left coalition. Republicans know this -- that’s why they manipulate the way welfare is perceived at every turn. The reality is that 96 percent of Americans have benefited from government programs, but the Right works hard to hide that fact.
- What Choice in 2012?
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The outcome of the November 2012 election is clear: It will be the most vicious and racist in modern U.S. history, and by far the most expensive of all time. Are critical issues at stake in this political year? Absolutely, yes — but not the questions we’ll get to vote on.
- What Gandhi Says
About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 If there has been widespread recognition of Gandhi's role in developing the tactics underpinning the revolutionary upsurges of the past year, few have stopped to examine what Gandhi actually said about the relationship between nonviolence, resistance and courage. Norman Finkelstein, drawing on extensive readings of Gandhi's copious oeuvre and intensive reflection on the way that progress might be made in the seemingly intractable impasse of the Middle East, here sets out in clear and concise language the basic principles of Gandhi's approach.
- What If America's Leaders Actually Want Catastrophic Climate Change?
Thinking the Unthinkable Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Our leaders, political and corporate, may be puerile, egocentric greed-heads, but they are not stupid. They surely for the most part recognize that the Earth is heating up and heading at full speed towards ecological, social and political disaster. How else to explain, then, their astonishing unwillingness to take action?
- What Is Wrong With Multiculturalism? [Part 1]
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Thoughts about iimmigration, identity, diversity and multiculturalism.
- What progressive groups must do to defeat, or stymie, the Harper regime
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Canada’s progressive community needs to make some significant changes if it hopes to slow down the assault being carried out on the country by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and their right-wing allies.
- What Really Happened in Gaza
Israel Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had 'every right to defend itself.' The facts, however, suggest otherwise.
- What the American Media Won't Tell You About Israel
The savage punishment of Gaza traces back to decades ago. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”
- What's Wrong With Multiculturalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 My view is that both multiculturalists and their critics are wrong. And only by understanding why both sides are wrong will we be able to work our way through the mire in which we find ourselves.
- Whatever Happened to Al Jazeera?
All the News That's Fit to Slant Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In Al Jazeera’s early days in the mid and late 1990s, the channel took on taboo subjects and proudly challenged the status quo. In recent months, however, Al Jazeera has begun to change course. It has deviated from its journalistic responsibilities in Libya, and is now completely losing the plot with Syria. The channel is in urgent need to revisit its own code of ethics.
- What's Left of Queer?: Immigration, Sexuality, and Affect in a Neoliberal World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We need to refuse the narratives of abjection that are routinely forced upon us. They only render us immobile creatures, begging for help. We are all neoliberals now. We're all selling our bodies, our lives, our stories to the media and to provide comfort to ourselves. Those stories have to be challenged and reworked or we lose sight of the larger story of economic exploitation, at our peril.
- When Chomsky Wept
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A portrait of Noam Chomsky.
- When Plutocrats Blame the Poor
Hard Times Redux Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The image of the self-made man has always been a fiction concocted for the edification of the poor, not a concrete policy prescription, as should be clear by now from the behavior of our very own ‘self-made’ caste of plutocrats.
- When Populism is Dangerous for Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 George Galloway’s stunning victory in last week’s Bradford West by-election afforded a rare opportunity to witness naked imbalance, establishment scorn of any challenges, and blatant anti-Muslim propaganda in the corporate British media.
- When War Passes for Foreign Policy
Who Will Pay the Price? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 “Take the profit out of war,” said activist Kevin Zeese, “and you take out war.” His audience was made up mainly of U.S. war veterans gathered in New York to observe — and protest — the 11th anniversary of the conflict in Afghanistan.
- When Will We See Tanks in Barcelona?
Against The Current vol. 161 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The current situation in Spain regarding an independent Catelonia.
- Where to Occupy Next?
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 I truly don't want to be another sob story. But when the rare opportunity comes along to tell my story and affect many, like a stone cast into the water, it is necessary to at least attempt to grab the hearts of people who will listen.
- Who Are the Control Rods?
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 After losing a war, one of the worst things that can happen to a society is for its people to be told it was a "victory." The inability or failure to learn the lessons of the United States’ defeat in Iraq enables the plunge into the next disastrous adventure: Can you say "Iran"?
- Who Cares?
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Rosie Dranfeld captures the gritty and dangerous world of Edmonton's sex-trade workers. In this post-Pickton era where the unthinkable is now a gruesome reality, women voluntarily provide police with DNA samples for future identification.
- Who Killed Ekaru Loruman?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already existing crises of poverty and violence. By this “catastrophic convergence,” I do not merely mean that several disasters happen simultaneously, one problem atop another. Rather, I am arguing that problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another.
- Who Speaks for the 99%
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The bitter truth about U.S. politics is that neither ruling-class party speaks for the working class or poor.
- Why aid projects in Palestine are doomed to fail
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 So long as aid in Palestine remains detached from the everyday realities of occupation and operates on the aggressor’s terms, it will continue to be ineffective.
- Why Are We The Good Guys?
Reclaiming Your Mind From The Delusions Of Propaganda Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 One of the unspoken assumptions of the Western world is that we are great defenders of human rights, a free press and the benefits of market economics. Mistakes might be made along the way, perhaps even tragic errors of judgement. But the prevailing view is that the West is essentially a force for good in the wider world. Why Are We The Good Guys? is a provocative challenge of this false ideology.
- Why Are We The Good Guys? - Book Review
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 One of the unspoken assumptions of the Western world is that ‘we’ are great defenders of human rights, a free press and the benefits of market economics. Mistakes might be made along the way, perhaps even tragic errors of judgement. But the prevailing view is that 'the West' is essentially a force for good in the wider world. Why Are We The Good Guys? is a provocative challenge to this false ideology.
- Why Do They Hate George Galloway So Much?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The ferocity of the attacks on George Galloway by the British commentariat is one of the most revealing outcomes of his victory in the Bradford West by-election.
- Why I Stand with Occupy
Against The Current vol. 156 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Why is India so bad for women?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Of all the G20 nations, India has been labelled the worst place to be a woman. How is this possible in a country that prides itself on being the world's largest democracy?
- Why Israel Desires to be Hated by Palestinians
Gaza 2012: On the Use and Abuse of Hatred and Violence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Israel desires to be hated by Palestinians. By provoking violence Israel has not merely managed to divert the limelight from its apartheid nature. It has also managed to convince that, as Joseph Massad of Columbia University once captured, it has the right to occupy, to dispossess and to discriminate, namely the claim that the apartheid premise which founds it should be put up with and rationalized as reasonable.
- Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere
The New Global Revolutions Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 From London to Cairo, Wisconsin to Tehran, Paul Mason charts new forms of collective action: fluid networks of agile, Twitter- and Facebook-savvy networks of youthful protesters. The events, says Mason, reflect the expanding power of the individual and call for new ways of thinking about political alternatives, elite rule and global poverty.
- Why Opposing Islamophobia is not a Defense of Extremism
Standing Up Against Knee-Jerk Discrimination and Xenophobia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Recent events have generated a lot of debate about Islam, Muslims, free speech and Islamophobia. Unfortunately, much of that debate has fallen back upon rather tired arguments about not only what "Muslims are like" but also how those who oppose Islamophobia are somehow defending repression or appeasing extremists.
- Why People Vote Against Themselves
Wisconsin and the Collapse of Liberalism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The reasons people vote against their self-interest are numerous and varied but key to them is often a culture under great stress believing false promises being made to it by the powerful.
- Why Race Matters in the 2012 Elections
Against The Current vol. 160 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 We sometimes hear that the drive by the Republican Party and the far right to "suppress the vote" -- attempting to ensure the election of a Republican president and win control of the Congress -- is just hardball politics, not about race or racism. Yet the primary target is people of color.
- Why The Language of the Commons Matters
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Our very language for identifying problems and imagining solutions has been compromised. We may have many unattractive human traits fueled by individual fears and ego, but we are also creatures entirely capable of self-organization, cooperation, a concern for fairness and social justice, and sacrifice for the larger good and future generations.
- Why the Washington Post Killed the Story of Murdoch’s Bid to Buy the US Presidency
Carl Bernstein Caught in the Matrix Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- Why truck driving is one of the deadliest jobs in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 What incredibly important profession combines horrible hours, bad pay, and a poor lifestyle? Truck driving. This is a job that destroys so many lives that it could soon become unsustainable.
- WikiLeaks Begins Publishing 5 Million Emails From STRATFOR
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012
- A Wisconsin Idea Resurgent
Against The Current vol. 158 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 More than a year has passed since the mass protests of February-March 2011, at Madison and elsewhere across Wisconsin, erupted in response to Republican Governor Scott Walker’s effort to bust the state’s public employee unions.
- Wisconsin Uprising
Labor Fights Back Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A collection of accounts from the early stages of the Wisconsin uprising against the corporate world in the of spring 2011.
- Wisconsin Uprising
Labor Fights Back Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 A collection of essays describing the working class uprising that occurred in Wisconsin, in February and early March of 2011.
- With God on Our Side
The Struggle for Workers' Rights in a Catholic Hospital Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012 Adam D. Reich tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California.
- Without Women, No Food Security
Against The Current vol. 157 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 In the countries of the Global South, women are the primary producers of food: the ones in charge of working the earth, maintaining seed stores, harvesting fruit, obtaining water and safeguarding the harvest.
- Won't Get Fooled Again? Hyping Syria's WMD 'Threat'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 Published: 2013 Reading about crimes of state over many years, it is tempting to try to fathom the mind-set of political leaders. What actually is going on in their heads when they order sanctions that kill hundreds of thousands of children? What is in their hearts when they wage needless wars that shatter literally millions of lives? Similar questions come to mind as the US and UK governments once again raise the spectre of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to demonise a target for ‘regime change’, this time in Syria.
- Working People in Alberta: A History
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2012
- A world on workfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The world's richest countries are coercing their citizens to 'donate' their labour to big businesses and other organizations in return for welfare payments.
- The World's Most Fashionable Prison
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 Fashion designer Puey Quinones works with inmates in a Philipine prison to teach them how to sew, work with fabrics and see their ideas go from sketch to finished product.
- The Wrong Solution To The Wrong Problem
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 What is it to have free press?
- Year of the Strike
A Short Story Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A short story about a boy's money-making scheme during the year his father and other workers go on strike at the town glass factory.
- Yes Men punk TPP and US Trade Ambassador with fake "Corporate Power Tool Award"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 US Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk was in Dallas to kick off a corporate power-event to drum up support for the foundering, secretive Transpacific Partnership, a secret treaty that builds on the work of ACTA to establishing punishing copyright laws that include mandatory surveillance and censorship. The Yes Men crashed the gala, taking the podium to present Kirk with a "Corporate Power Tool Award."
- You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 A state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming western democracy.
- The Young Man Was
Part 1: United Red Army Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2012 The start of a film trilogy that traces 1970s ultra left movements' turn to violence; Part One is based on the negotiations of the 1977 JAL hijacking, between the Japanese Red Army members on board the plane and the Dhaka control tower in Bangladesh.
- Zapatista March
The Deafening Silence of Resurgence Resource Type: Article First Published: 2012 The voiceless and the faceless are saying listen up! There is a forgotten Mexico here, a Mexico that is starving and disparate and the march, a silent march is an emblematic message in and of itself.
2011
- About Connexions - Farsi
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- About Connexions - Japanese
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Absurd charges brought against reporters covering Occupy Wall Street movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street movement’s protests and marches are not only exposed to police brutality but also to a sort of judicial lottery when detained. The situation varies from state to state, according to local laws, but the freedom to report news and information is being violated almost everywhere, not only for professional journalists but also for bloggers and for activists who want to cover the protests themselves.
- An Account from Madison
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Among the first publicized actions in opposition to the union-busting Budget Repair Bill was the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA) February 14th delivery of valentines to Governor Walker’s office. Colin, an adjunct professor of English and a new member of Solidarity, recalls: “We marched on the sidewalk, not the street…People would look at each other to make sure others were chanting. Some clearly felt embarrassed and most didn’t know the chants.”
- Acerca de Connexions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Connexions es un proyecto canadiense creado para conectar a las personas que trabajan por la justicia social, con información, recursos y otras personas.
- Activist Toolkit (rabble.ca)
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2011 A wiki-style of resources for activists.
- Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We are subjected to ever more pervasive messages to consume, encouraging dissatisfaction. Yet this column depends on it.
- African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An inclusive account of the source of popular discontent and an insight into the struggle for democratization, from the popular uprisings in Northern Africa all the way into the heartland of the African continent.
- After Residential School, My Path to Healing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Theodore Fontaine's memoir narrating the 12 years he spent in a residential school.
- Air safety pinned on isolated controllers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The problem of acute fatigue among air traffic controllers has been known. It was studied by sleep scientists genuinely concerned about the workers and public safety. Studies have shown that the kind of shift scheduling to which controllers are subjected affects behavior in the same way several alcoholic drinks would. That is especially true of constant shift changes and stacking eight-hour shifts as close together as possible, like working five shifts in three days.
- Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center
- America in Decline
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- American Autumn Part 2
Occupy Wall Street: Organizing the Movement Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- American Dreamers
How the Left Changed a Nation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 History of the radical left in the United States from the abolitionists to anti-globalization activists. The author sees the left as historically championing a pluralist spirit that runs counter to the "born capitalist" American society.
- American Uprising
The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Historian Daniel Rasmussen reveals the long-forgotten history of America’s largest slave uprising, the New Orleans slave revolt of 1811, offering new insight into American expansionism, the path to Civil War, and the earliest grassroots push to overcome slavery.
- The American Way of Torture
CounterPunch Diary Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Among the Dead Cities
Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The author looks at the bombings of German and Japanese civilians during WWII, and asks whether they were justified or a crime against humanity.
- The "Anarcho-Liberal"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The diversity of the global justice movement is undeniable, but to the extent its prominent intellectual voices represented broader trends, we can see the crystallization of a new type of radical that would come to prominence on the Left. The reconfiguration of the Left at the end of the twentieth century created a void. The “anarcho-liberal” filled it.
- Anatomy of Egypt's Revolution
Conditions and Consequences Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Like perfect storms, several factors have to simultaneously and collectively come together for popular uprisings or protests, even massive ones, to turn into a revolution. That is why only a few of them have been successful in world history.
- Another Immoral Adventure
US Troops to Uganda Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When we support brutal governments in foreign countries – be it through aid, training, or troops on the ground – there are real and lasting consequences for the people who live there. There are many reasons to oppose the US incursion into Uganda (the risk of blowback, the chance of escalation, the furtherance of the imperial presidency, the financial cost, the practical fact that we can’t intervene everywhere, and so on), but the most important argument is moral.
- Anti-Capitalism or Anti-Imperialism?
Interwar Authoritarian and Fascist Sources of A Reactionary Ideology: The Case of the Bolivian MNR Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Recounts the evolution of the core pre-MNR intelligentsia and future leadership of the movement and its post-1952 government from anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, pro-Axis ideologues in the mid-1930?s to bourgeois nationalists receiving considerable US aid after 1952.
- Anti-Terrorism Begins at Home
Viva House refuses to sign United Way "loyalty oath" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A Baltimore is refusing to certify that it does not use United Way funds to support terrorism, saying the request smacks of McCarthyism.
- Anti-Imperialism and the Iranian Revolution
Fetters of the past, potential for the future Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Iranian Revolution, and the anti-imperialist ideology that corresponded to its rise and demise, was indeed a tragedy from the perspective of proletarian revolution; to hold such an ideology today is indeed farcical. It does nothing but bring workers, students, and women’s organizations into an illusory harmony with those who maintain their oppression and exploitation.
- The Arab Revolts Against Neoliberalism
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011
- The Arab Revolts and the Cage of Political Economy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Though the Arab revolts of 2011 herald a new era where people have powerfully asserted their inalienable right to protest (and we hope they will continue doing so), the powerful cage of political economy has remained intact even after six intense months of protest. The intent of the imperial US power in the region, along with its allies Israel and the European Union (EU), remains unchanged.
- Arabs and the Holocaust
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Palestinian tragedy, a late product of 19th-20th century colonialism and imperialism in general, must also be understood as a very specific aftershock of the greatest industrial genocide in history, the Nazi holocaust, which shook the ways in which we view human society and history.
- Aroma protest: Toronto: Eaton Centre. December 2011
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Aroma Espresso Bar is part of an Israeli-owned chain. One of Aroma's branches is in Ma'aleh Adumim, a large Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories. Anti-apartheid activists have called for a boycott of Aroma as part of a larger movement by Palestinian civil society to find non-violent means to end the occupation and apartheid.
- Assange and Posada in the Propaganda System
Mixed Media Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Posada's case is a dramatic illustration of the fraudulence of the so-called "War on Terror" and highlights the U.S. refusal to abide by the rule of law. Assange's case shows well the U.S. establishment's fear of the free-flow of information that might interfere with foreign policy and reveal that there are many more Posadas whose service to the empire might be disclosed. And the media's cooperation in this protection of Posada and pursuit of Assange is clear. \
- Assignment 1: LGBT Equality
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 IN OUR IMMEDIATELY post-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell society, Stuart Biegel’s The Right to Be Out invites us to create a public education system where Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) equality is a reality.
- Athenians Teach a New Lesson in (Workers) Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Popular Assembly at Syntagma has been able to go beyond democratic discussion to democratic decisions but the construction of real workers democracy is still under way. While thousands take part in the assembly, there are five million living in Athens and millions more in the rest of Greece. To democratically include all these millions requires a system of delegation, in which delegates from neighborhoods and workplaces attend city-wide assemblies and delegates from these attend a nationwide assembly.
- The Attack on American Muslims
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Flailing after Muslims is a convenient way for the right — extreme and mainstream — to prove their credentials as “genuine, God-loving Americans.” Islam, they charge, is not a religion of peace, of Western values; it’s an ideology of terror. “You can’t trust Muslims.”
- Austerity and U.S. Decline
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The full frontal assault on public workers and their unions in one state after another — stripping collective bargaining rights and dues checkoff, slashing wages and pensions and health benefits, abolishing seniority and tenure for teachers, mandating yearly decertification votes, threatening jail terms for strikers — is as massive and instantaneous as it was unexpected by the labor bureaucracy and many union members. To say “the class war is back” is an understatement. It’s an authentic firestorm sucking the oxygen from labor rights, from Wisconsin to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and other states.
- Authors of Gaza youth manifesto speak to Electronic Intifada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We, the youth of Gaza, who make up sixty percent of Gaza's 1.6 million residents, have increasingly felt repressed in many aspects, starting from the long-standing Israeli occupation of our lands -- particularly the four-year-old Israeli blockade of Gaza -- through the injustice inflicted everywhere by the rulers of Gaza, who we elected four years ago.
- Autonomy zone on Wall Street?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Prefigurationists argue that they can create self-contained, self-governing societies as pockets of autonomy within the capitalist system. While the goal of creating a democratic decision-making process and remaining independent of the mainstream political system is necessary to create a movement that challenges the entrenched power of Wall Street and the corporate elite, the goal of constituting an autonomous authority within capitalism is impossible and can lead to some dangerous illusions.
- The Awakening in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The dynamic of social movements is far more important than their ostensible ideological positions. Revolutions arise out of complex processes of social debate and interaction that happen to reach a critical mass and trigger a chain reaction — processes very much like what we are seeing at this moment. The “99%” slogan may not be a very precise “class analysis,” but it’s a close enough approximation for starters, an excellent meme to cut through a lot of traditional sociological jargon and make the point that the vast majority of people are subordinate to a system run by and for a tiny ruling elite.
- Battle for Brooklyn
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Battel for Brooklyn is an intimate look at the very public and passionate fight waged by residents and business owners of Brooklyn’s historic Prospect Heights neighborhood facing condemnation of their property to make way for the polarizing Atlantic Yards project, a massive plan to build 16 skyscrapers and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets.
- The Battle for Brooklyn
The Abuse of Eminent Domain Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An article about the documentary Battle for Brooklyn, which chronicles the fight waged by residents and business owners of Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood facing demolition of their property to make way for the Atlantic Yards project, a massive plan to build 16 skyscrapers and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets.
- BBC Joins Smear Campaign Against Assange and Wikileaks
Indicting the Messenger Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The campaign by the establishment press against Julian Assange is intensifying.
- BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The case for a rights-based BDS campaign against Israeli occupation and apartheid.
- The Betrayal
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 The filmmaker's personal journey to confront her past, baring her soul to those most hurt by her troubled youth when she ricocheted from far-left radicalism to neo-Nazi fascism out of a desperate need to belong.
- Beyond the Fields
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 There is a strong historical link between the United Farm Workers in its heyday and myriad forms of progressive activism today. UFW alumni, ideas, and strategies have influenced Latino political empowerment, the immigrant rights movement, union membership growth, and on-going coalitions between labor, community, campus, and religious groups.
- Bias in the Eye of the Beholder
"Liberal Media" Misperceptions in the American Mind Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In a time of economic instability, growing poverty, and chronic income and financial insecurity, Americans are increasingly critical of a governing system that they feel has failed in providing for their basic needs. This general distrust, however, can at times manifest itself in ignorant and destructive ways. So it is with the “liberal bias” claims, which misdirect public attention away from the very real bi-partisan, official source bias of the media, and toward some mythic media conspiracy to marginalize conservatives in favor of an “elite liberal agenda.” We should be careful to acknowledge this reality next time we hear friends, family, or acquaintances lamenting the “liberal media elite.”
- Big Boys Gone Bananas!*
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 First there was a film about banana workers saying the Dole Food Company had made them infertile. Then Dole attacked the filmmakers. Now it's time for a new film!
- The Big Thirst
The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A journalistic account of the secret life of water.
- Big Three Auto Contracts: Lowlights of 2011
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 By the end of October, autoworkers at the Big Three will have approved their 2011-2015 contracts. Since Ford was the most profitable corporation, and one that had avoided bankruptcy, it was the logical corporation for the UAW to target. During the economic crisis Ford workers voted down a round of concessions that would have suspended their right to strike until 2015, so by bargaining first at Ford the union could have maximized its potential power to put an end to the concessions.
- Black History and the Class Struggle
#21 Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011
- Bleeding Wisconsin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Bloomberg and NYC's Education Wars
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The New York City school system averted catastrophe on June 24, 2011 when mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew reached an accord to prevent more than 4000 teacher layoffs. Under the deal, the teachers’ union agreed to suspend sabbaticals for one year and to reorganize the way in which teachers without full programs are assigned.
- Bolivia: WikiLeaks Expose US Conspiracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Recently released United States embassy cables from Bolivia have provided additional insight to the events leading up to the September 2008 coup attempt against the Andean country’s first indigenous president.
- Bolivia's Growing Crisis
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A confrontation between the government of Bolivian president Evo Morales and a part of his indigenous social base is leading to a serious political crisis. A violent police assault on indigenous community protests against a road being built through their self-governed Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) have led to a growing confrontation.
- Bolivia's Uncertain Revolution
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales has become a favorite topic among progressives and social democrats, who have likened his ascendency to the nation’s highest post as nothing short of revolutionary. The buzz around Morales, a long time social movement figure and the first Indigenous president of the Andean nation has only lost a little luster since his election almost six years ago.
- Bolshevism, Gender & 21st Century Revolution
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 2017 will mark the Russian Revolution’s 100th anniversary. Socialists will again ask how the revolution was made and why it degenerated.
- Boom for whom? The Canadian Impacts of the Tar Sands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A summary of the devasting impacts of the tar sands as they affect the different regions of Canada.
- The Boomerang Is Almost Home
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power.
- Boycott the state, not just the settlements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 West Bank settlements would not be viable without government aid, so boycotts should target the Israeli state as well.
- Bradley Manning, Solitary Confinement and Selective Outrage
What about the Others? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Calls attention to the widespread use of solitary confinement with Bradley Manning as a specific example.
- Bradley Manning's Torture Commonplace In U.S. Prisons
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The corrosive, solitary confinement being inflicted upon PFC Bradley Manning in the Quantico, Va., brig is no exceptional torture devised exclusively for him. Across the length and breadth of the Great American Prison State, the world's largest, with its 2.4-million captives stuffed into 5,000 overcrowded lock-ups, some 25,000 other inmates are suffering a like fate of sadistic isolation in so-called supermax prisons.
- Brief Theory of the Present Crisis
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 This article is a summary and development of the argument that I have been writing in the journal Critique, both in the Critique Notes and a number of articles. I have left out two issues discussed in Critique, that of the case against the falling rate of profit as the only or fundamental cause and why the ruling class has opted for austerity.
- Britain's Own Pravda-Style Propaganda
Ten Years Of 'Involvement' In Afghanistan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant ‘partner’ in the ‘coalition’. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:
'It’s ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what's been achieved in that time?'
These were the actual words that presenter Fiona Bruce used on the flagship BBC News at Ten:
'It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what's been achieved in that time?'
- British study has the goods on corporate execs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading businesses and compared the results with the same tests on patients at Broadmoor hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses' scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients; in fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.
- Broken Circle
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 A two-part excerpt from Theodore Fontaine's book Broken Circle, a memoir of surviving the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba -- and pursuing his own path to healing.
- The Buckeye Socialist Alternative
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Dna La Botz Socialist for Senate campaign in Ohio represents an important success in the recent context of leftist third party initiatives. Running the first Socialist Party campaign for national office in Ohio since 1936, La Botz garnered 25,368 votes statewide, one of the more successful socialist electoral bids in decades. This experience provides some important lessons for how the left can engage the electoral arena in this period.
- Budget Woes, Class Wars
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The full frontal assault on public workers and their unions in one state after another — stripping collective bargaining rights and dues checkoff, slashing wages and pensions and health benefits, abolishing seniority and tenure for teachers, mandating yearly decertification votes, threatening jail terms for strikers — is as massive and instantaneous as it was unexpected by the labor bureaucracy and many union members. To say “the class war is back” is an understatement. It’s an authentic firestorm sucking the oxygen from labor rights, from Wisconsin to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and other states.
- Burning Truth
Invisible Truth Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Make no mistake about this: Hoang Hung was killed as a warning to other journalists. Make too much noise and you will be roasted alive like this man.
- Margaret Burroughs
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Margaret Burroughs, longtime Chicago artist and activist, died on November 21, 2010 at age 93. Producing poetry, block prints, paintings, sculptures, and participating in theater, she was a modern day renaissance woman. She leaves behind two major institutions — the Du Sable Museum and the South Side Community Art Center — that are her legacy to a life dedicated to promoting African-American art and culture.
- Business as Usual
The Economic Crisis and the Future of Capitalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 In Business as Usual Paul Mattick explains the recession in jargon-free style, without shying away from serious analysis. He explores current events in relation to the development of the world economy since the Second World War and, more fundamentally, looks at the cycle of crisis and recovery that has characterized capitalism since the early nineteenth century. Mattick situates today’s crisis in the context of a capitalism ruled by a voracious quest for profit.
- The Butterfly and the Boiling Point
Charting the Wild Winds of Change in 2011 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.
- Campaigning with Issues
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Ann Menasche. Ann Menasche, who ran for Secretary of State in California on the Green Party ticket, was interviewed by Dianne Feeley for ATC. Menasche is a longtime activist and an attorney concentrating on disability rights.
- Can the Egyptians Come to Canada to Liberate Us?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As I sat glued to Al Jazeera for two weeks watching the Egyptian revolution unfold from my home in Toronto, I must confess to having experienced feelings of jealousy. How nice it must be, I thought, to live a country where people want democracy.
- Canada's Imperialism Without Illusions
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Against The Current interviewed Canadian author and activist Todd Gordon on April 29, 2011, shortly before the May 2 national election in Canada. Gordon is the author of Imperialist Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2010). We followed up with additional questions after the election.
- Canada's Other Red Scare
Rights, Decolonization, and Indigenious Political Protest in the Global Sixties Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 PhD Thesis, Queen's University, 2011
- Canada's right-wing media monopolies move further right
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Canadian news media landscape has changed dramatically since the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications released its underwhelming report on the state of Canadian media in 2006.
- Captive Nation - Egypt And The West
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What mainstream media consumers will find almost nowhere (perhaps literally nowhere) is a detailed analysis of how US-UK support for Mubarak fits with a pattern of US-UK support for dictators across the world over many decades, indeed centuries.
- Captivity
118 Days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World Without War Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An account of a peace activist kidnapped while leading a peace delegation in Iraq.
- Carl Oglesby: A Mentor & Leader
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In my lifetime I’ve heard two speakers whose unadorned eloquence and moral clarity pulled my heart right out of my chest. One was Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, speaking from the roof of the Busy Bee Market in Andersonstown in Belfast the apocalyptic day that hunger striker Bobby Sands died.
- The Case of Occupy and the Longshoremen's Union
Who's Speaking for Whom? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Occupy Oakland should not be pretending to speak on behalf of Oakland's dockworkers, and should not be telling the dockworkers when and how they should strike. Occupy Oakland's actions are the opposite of democratic, and an affront to the basic notiions of worker's self-activity, workers' empowerment, and workers' control.
- The Catherine Ferguson Struggle
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school for teen mothers, has been central in controversies surrounding the closures and charters of Detroit’s public schools. Although the cost of $19,000 per student each year is comparable to the cost of educating students at other similar schools, the operational costs, from an Emergency Manager’s perspective, were excessive.
- Central America Raises Its Voice in Defence of Its Migrants
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Spiralling violence against Central American migrants in Mexico has prompted legal reforms, diplomatic actions, and the creation of new mechanisms to protect citizens in this region.
- A Challenge to Canada’s Wealthiest 0.1%
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Change of the Century
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The heroes of Tahrir Square in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, and in Tunisia, have already changed the course of 21st century history. They have torn a huge hole in the fabric of imperialist dominion over the Middle East. They have begun to reverse what has been 35 years of almost continuous “permanent counterrevolution” in the region.
- The changing meaning of race
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 If the proverbial anthropologist from Mars were to land in Britain today, he would probably regard us as schizophrenics when it comes to the question of race. He would find a population within which there is a general consensus that racism is morally abhorrent and yet is keen to define itself in terms of its ethnic or racial background.
- Chavs
The Demonization of the Working Class Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An analysis of Britain's working class and the sociopolitical attitudes regarding them.
- Chevron's Crude Attacks
Court Sides With Big Oil Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Yet another instance of the increasingly pro-business stance of the US legal system.
- Childhood Under Siege
How Big Business Ruthlessly Targets Children Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An exploration of the corporate manipulation and exploitation of children and childhood and society's (lack of) response.
- A Chill Descends On Occupy Wall Street
The Tangled Purse Strings Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Undemocratic movements are vulnerable to being taken over by a vocal minority or a chraismatic individual.
- Chocolate Nations
Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Speculation, pests, political corruption, taxation, land rights, civil war and the IMF are forces at play in this investigation of cocoa agriculture and export in West Africa.
- Chris Hedges' Vision & Nightmare: Is There a Human Future?
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 There are few writers today who can bring to vision the articulate passion that Chris Hedges directs against the present corporate system; its vile and self-satisfied destructiveness, and the symboitic collusion between this structure of perversion and the betrayal engaged in by “the liberal class.” I believe this aspect of Hedges’ perspective is vitally important and obvious to any reader who begins with the sense that our political culture is in a descending spiral of decay.
- Christians on the Left: The Importance of the Social Gospel in the Canadian Social Democratic Tradition
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 This article looks at the history of the Canadian social democratic movement and highlights the preponderant role played by leftist Christians. Finding their inspiration in a social interpretation of Christ's message, these Christians became heavily involved in the process of creating a new political party, clearly to the left of the political spectrum, and helped shape its discourse.
- The CIA and the Drones
How the Agency Became "One Hell of a Killing Machine" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor
Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old? Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Steve Early explains why and how the 2008-2010 battles within the progressive wing of the U.S. labour movement occurred.
- Claiming the Power to Resist
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Stories and storytelling have power. Stories can help us understand each other as subjects, narrators and protagonists of our own experiences, rather than as objects that are simply being acted upon by forces outside of our control.
- Class Dismissed
Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Argues that poverty and inequality in the United States cannot be solved through education, as it does not address the established social structures that create these conditions.
- Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 John Marsh debunks a myth cherished by journalists, politicians, and economists: that growing poverty and inequality in the United States can be solved through education. Marsh shows that education has little impact on poverty and inequality, and that our mistaken beliefs actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach in them.
- Class & Race in A Modern Catastrophe: Lessons of Katrina
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophic disaster that resulted in over eighteen hundred fatalities, the displacement of at least 1.2 million people, and economic losses that are not yet finally accounted, but may approach $100 billion. Approximately 2.5 million residences were damaged by the category three storm that made landfall on the morning of August 29, 2005.
- Climate Crisis - The Collapse In Corporate Media Coverage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We find that Britain and the US - the two countries responding most aggressively to alleged 'threats' to human security in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - are also the two countries least interested in responding to the very real threat of climate change.
- The CNT in the Spanish Revolution Volume 1
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A comprehensive history of the years of political change and hope in 1930s Spain when the so-called 'Generation of '36' rose up against the oppressive structures of Spanish society.
- Collateral Damage - WikiLeaks In The Crosshairs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The mainstream media have distorted and deceived in their coverage of the Wikileaks story to manufacture, isolate and target a 'threat' for destruction.
- A Comment on Antiwar Strategy
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The debate among antiwar activists on the necessity and movement-building effectiveness of mass demonstrations has been ongoing since the mid-1960s during the Vietnam War, and is not likely to be settled soon. I want to comment here on a related but different argument raised by David Grosser in his stimulating article on antiwar organizing strategy.
- Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Kuyek examines the creation of positive social change based on a coherent and wide-ranging analysis of the context in which the work is done and the principles needed to make it effective.
- Complicating "White Privilege"
Class, Race and Images of Wilma Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The most heavy-handedly enforced rule, and the one we, in the white privilege brigade, still seem determined to protect with the greatest earnestness, dictates that Nobody shall, during a conversation about white privilege, mention any identity that is not a racial identity or any oppression that is not racism. To my knowledge, there is no official rulebook governing conversations about white privilege. If such a rulebook did exist, though, I am sure that this rule would be printed in bold italics.
- A Concerted Effort From Europe Against Israeli Produce Exporter Agrexco
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In Montpellier, France, over 100 activists from 9 countries gathered for the first ever European Forum Against Agrexco. Delegates from Italy, UK, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Palestine joined the French organizers for two full days of workshops aimed at strengthening the boycott campaign against the Israeli agricultural export giant.
- Confederacy Redux?
Why We Should Celebrate Reconstruction Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Reconstruction is the era that some have referred to as the United States' greatest moment of democracy.
- Confronting intimidation, working for justice in Palestine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 If once you do not cave in, you discover that as time goes by, the ability of Zionist lobbies of intimidation around the world to affect you gradually diminishes.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2011
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2011
- Connexions Információ Megosztási Szolgáltató
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Connexions Information Sharing Services - Wikipedia Article - Czech text
Connexions Information Sharing Services Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Consensus decision-making - Arabic text
Connexipedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Consensus decision-making - Japanese text
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Conservative Frank Luntz Has Set a Trap for Progressives -- Here's How to Outsmart Him and Boost the Occupy Movement
Progressives' basic morality needs to be talked about over and over again, in every corner of the country. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Luntz doesn't want progressives pointing out that corporations govern our lives far more than any government does - and for their profit, not ours. He doesn't want any discussion of corporate waste, or military waste, which is huge.
- Conservatives have perfected the trick of defending power by attacking it
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The UK Cameron government is atempting to use a tried-and-proven trick: defending the elite by pretending to attack it.
- Conversation with an Anarchist
Democracy, Authoritarianism & Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Published: 2012
- Corporate-owned media manipulation threatens Canadian democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 How freedom of expression is threatened because corporate-owned media in Canada censor and manipulate the news.
- Counter Power
Making Change Happen Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Argues that no major movement has ever been successful without counterpower, or the power that the "have-nots" can use to remove the power of the "haves." This book sets out to demystify the power dynamics of social change.
- Crayons of Askalan
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 In 1975, at the age of fifteen, Palestinian artist Zuhdi Al Adaw is sentenced and confined in the high security prison of Askalan, Israel for fifteen years. With the help of his fellow prisoners and their families, he manages to stay alive by smuggling in colour crayons and smuggling out his allegorical artwork done on pillowcases, so it finds its way to the outside world.
- Crisis in the encampments: Can the Occupy movement be saved from itself?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The question now is whether the Occupy movement can survive as an effective force for political and social action. The decision made some time ago to set up permanent encampments is turning out to be a disaster and is taking attention away from other more productive activist events.
- Crisis in the EU: From the Periphery to the Center
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The crisis of 2007-2009, coming from the U.S. core of the globalized system, the crisis that threatens the weak links of the euro, and the third crisis that started to affect Eastern Europe in 2009 have a major common point. Whether we are talking about the United States, Greece or the Baltic States, these crises are the repercussions of profoundly unbalanced growth.
- A critique of anti-assimilation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In this piece, Gayge Operaista critiques how anti-assimilation politics of many radical queer tendencies ignores class struggle, and recasts queer liberation in terms of the class struggle, countering the worst excess of identity politics with an introduction to models of class struggle.
- Culhane, Claire - Spanish text
Connexipedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Abolicionista de las prisiones.
- The Dangerous Cult of the Guardian
A Thought Police for the Internet Age Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Guardian includes some fine reporting and occasionally insightful commentary. Possibly because it is farther from the heart of empire, it is able to provide a partial antidote to the craven coverage of the corporate-owned media in the US. Nonetheless, it would be unwise to believe that the Guardian is therefore a free market in progressive or dissident ideas on the left. In fact, quite the contrary: the paper strictly polices what can be said and who can say it in its pages, for cynical reasons we shall come to.
- The Day America Died
Assassinating Awlaki Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As long as the President sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president’s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences.
- The Deadly Costs of Muslim Sectarianism
Sunni v. Shia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A war of extraordinary brutality is being waged across the Muslim world which is largely ignored by the media. It is a war in which victims are assassinated or massacred with no chance to defend themselves. Most of those who die are poor people murdered in obscure places without the world paying any attention.
- Death in a New York Food Sweatshop
The Killing of Juan Baten Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 For thousands of recent immigrants, the eastern section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is where you go to find work in food processing and distribution factories that service many of New York City's markets and restaurants. If you've ever eaten a meal in New York, you can be assured that you've consumed food that has been produced and distributed through one of these food companies and those in a few adjacent neighborhoods.
- The Death of Democracy
Israel's Flood of Anti-Democratic Laws Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Democracy is dying in both Israel and the United States, and much of the world is turning away in revulsion.
- A Death Sentence For Africa
The Durban Climate Deal And Eight Corporate Media Unmentionables Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Carbon emissions, already at their peak, will continue to increase for at least the next eight years, pushing humanity closer to the brink of climate collapse. Rather than address the madness of a global system of corporate-led capitalism that is bulldozing us to this disaster, the corporate media mouthed deceptive platitudes.
- The Debate Around Liu Xiaobo
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We do not entirely share the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s statement on its decision to award the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, praising China for having “achieved economic advances to which history can hardly show any equal” but regretting that it is in breach of several international agreements on human rights and China’s own constitution concerning these rights.
- Debt: The First 5000 Years
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Graeber traces the history of debt from ancient societies to modern economic crises, arguing that debt has often driven revolutions and social and political change.
- Debunking the Fraser Institute's Latest Crusade: Teacher Merit Pay
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Fresh from the triumph of successfully promoting its fallacious school report card, this time in Alberta, the Fraser Institute is already scheming to peg teacher pay to student test scores and create a market for teachers. We should remember that the institute's success with school rankings would not be possible without over-the-top support from the corporate media.
- The "Decent Left" and the Libya Intervention
A Reply to Michael Bérubé Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Western elites were perfectly comfortable with Gaddafi’s oppressive rule, including his use of torture. These states only broke with Gaddafi when his hold on power tottered, in response to the Arab Spring, and he ceased to be useful. He was no longer viewed as a reliable protector of Western access to Libya’s oil resources.
- Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Document accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011.
- Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The authors maintain that industrial civilization is incompatible with life. Technology can't fix it, and shopping — no matter how green — won’t stop it. To save this planet, we need a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. It provides an exploration of organizational structures, recruitment, security, and target selection for both aboveground and underground action. Deep Green Resistance also discusses a culture of resistance and the crucial support role that it can play.
- Defender of the Movement
Albert Goldman for the Defense Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A profile of the radical lawyer.
- Defining an American State of War
Nine War Words That Define Our World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Nine common terms associated with our present wars that probably don't mean what you think they mean.
- Destroying Estonia
The One Per Cent’s New/Old Solution to Economic Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Many economists and financial press writers mimic children on amusement park rides. They think their austerity policies are “steering” their vehicle rather than being guided by underlying structural forces.
- Destroying Libya's Welfare State
NATO's Great Victory Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 For NATO, its corporate allies, and its media mouthpieces, such prosperity for workers simply will not do. We live in a world where austerity for the workers is the order of the day – for those in Libya, Greece, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and the U.S. as well. And those who stand in the way of such austerity measures, whether they be a nationalist government in Libya, Communists in Greece or Occupiers in the U.S., must be dealt with accordingly – by violent reaction.
- Detroit: Disappearing City?
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Forty percent of Detroit today is considered virtually “unoccupied.” The administration of Mayor Dave Bing is trying to figure out how to move the remaining residents of these areas out, in the name of “rightsizing” the city. Of course he hasn’t revealed any specifics — and the devil is in the details! Residents are wary: without the money to relocate people and the services needed, it’s just another round of displacing the urban poor.
- Detroit Public Schools: Who's Failing?
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It's no scret that the Detroit Public Schools have been in a state of chaos for some time. When former Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm appointed Robert Bobb as Emergency Financial Manager in 2009, many hoped that he would make positive changes. The district was carrying a $219 million deficit, not to mention some of the country’s lowest graduation rates and standardized test scores.
- Detroit Symphony Musicians on Strike
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra have been on strike since October 4, 2010. Thirty-five concerts have been cancelled, while the musicians have organized nine magnificent performances with guest conductors in various churches and synagogues in the area. They charged $20 admission and got their friends to volunteer to be ushers and ticket sellers. At a concert of 1100 I attended in a Grosse Pointe Woods church, parishioners seated on either side of me were attending their first symphonic concert.
- Direct Action in Hard Times
Activist Strategies from Brazil to Wisconsin Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Factory occupations, land occupations, and other tactics.
- Dollarization, Democracy & Daily Life in Zimbabwe
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Satellite TV is big in Zimbabwe; owing to the limited and propagandistic programming on state-sponsored Z-TV, and the travails of night travel on a decaying road network, just about every house in Harare, from the poor/working class Mbare township to the luxury suburb of Burrowdale, sports a dish that brings South African soapies, Al Jazeera and, most importantly, the latest in reality TV to living rooms across the land.
- Domestic reality does not match bold words on Internet freedom of expression
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 The U.S. government gives lip service to online free speech but simultaneously acts in ways to drastically limit freedom of expression.
- The Domestic War on Protesters
It's Not Just Egypt Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 While the US claims to uphold right to demonstrate around the world, there have been countless examples throughout the history of this country of protests being shut down by an overwhelming police presence. In recent years, it has become routine for police departments to use a host of tactics to limit and prevent mass demonstrations. These tactics have included mass arrests of demonstrators, preemptive arrests and trumped up charges against protest organizers.
- DREAM Deferred, Fight Continues
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Drought
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 As a result of the persistent drought, an entire community prepares for an inevitable exodus from their homeland in northern Mexico.
- Drugs, Race & the Gulag Industry
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Across the country corrections department officials and captains of the incarceration industry are in crisis. Though the nation’s over bloated prison system is far from breaking, the halcyon days of proliferating maximum security units and juvenile detention centers appear nearly at an end. Prisons are bursting at the seams and states, reaping the backlash of years of neoliberal tax cuts, have no money to “fix” the problem with another round of construction.
- The Earth Grabbers
Fighting the Minerals-Petroleum-Coal Complex Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Climate justice means that the Minerals-Energy Complex will have to take the same course as apartheid.
- The Ecological Rift
Capitalism's War on the Earth Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision -- if we don’t alter course.
- Ecology and Socialism
Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The current environmental movement is at an impasse, stuck on false panaceas like cap-and-trade, cutting individual consumption (“live other so that others may simply live”), and outright reactionary “solutions' that revolve around some form of population control (as if the number of people on the planet was the problem rather than the nature of the relationship between said people and the planet). Williams does an excellent job debunking these notions with a plethora of factual information and empirical data.
- The Economic Crisis in Fact and Fiction
Paul Mattick Jr. with John Clegg and Aaron Benanav Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Paul Mattick Jr., the author of Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Future of Capitalism.
- Education Over Incarceration
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In cities across America, young men from low-income communities are ending up in prison more than they are making it to college — at the rate of seven to one. And during the nation’s protracted economic slump and high rate of unemployment, especially among African Americans and Latino Americans, we can expect that ratio to grow.
- Egypt and Beyond
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Gilbert Achcar. Gilbert Achcar, who grew up in Lebanon, is professor of development studies and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, and author most recently of The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.
- Egypt at the tipping point?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Egypt: Death throes of a dictatorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Fisk joins protesters atop a Cairo tank as the army shows signs of backing the people against Mubarak's regime.
- Egypt Protests Photos
Resource Type: Photo/Image/Poster First Published: 2011
- Egypt Shakes the World
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Suzi Weissman interviewed Yoav Peled and Mark LeVine on her program “Beneath the Surface,” KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, on February 11, 2010. The following are edited excerpts from those discussions. Thanks to Meleiza Figueroa for transcribing.
- The Egyptian Uprising in the American Media
Obscuring the Obvious Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It is no wonder that most Americans are hopelessly in the dark. Middle East “news” in the mainstream is constructed so that people remain in a perpetual state of confusion and fear.
- An Empire of Lies
Why Our Media Betray Us Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites.
- The Empty Press Room - How Corporate Journalism Happily Lost Interest in Climate Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In the media’s coverage of climate change, are we really still stuck on square one of some ghastly board game?
- The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates.
- The Enemy That Barely Exists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Al-Qa’ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend.
- Enlightening Disillusionments
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Memoirs of an Israeli whom the Zionist dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians turned into a humanist and therefore anti-Zionist.
- ER certainties: death and co-pays
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Our society has made choices that dehumanize all of us. Dehumanization is felt inside and outside the shop floor. The HMO's bottom line is not about how well the patient's illness is treated, but how to minimize costs. They remind us employees daily that we're a business. The corporate ethos is the survival of the business above all, over anyone else's survival.
- Ethnic Cleansing of Invented People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Once we connect the dots it is not hard to see that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is only a small part of the Israeli Palestinian issue. The greater issue is the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist state. The way forward for Israelis and Palestinians alike is to oppose the ethnic cleansing by opposing all its manifestations.
- Europe's New Road to Serfdom
Trichet Threatens Greece with Iron Heel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The conditios for Greece's new loan package is that Greece must initiate a class war by raising its taxes, lowering its social spending – and even private-sector pensions – and sell off public land, tourist sites, islands, ports, water and sewer facilities. This will raise the cost of living and doing business, eroding the nation’s already limited export competitiveness. The bankers sanctimoniously depict this as a “rescue” of Greek finances.
- Every Crook Can Govern
Prison Rebellions as a Window to the New World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In their self-organization, the hunger strikers have begun to rupture structures of segregation.
- Evidence Meltdown
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The green movement has misled the world about the dangers of radiation.
- Evolution not "Reinvention: Manning Marable's Malcolm X
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Manning Marable's final book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is a serious political biography of one of the most historic figures of the African-American community. Marable’s interpretation of papers provided by Malcolm’s family estate, along with files from the FBI, New York City Police Department and new interviews from those who knew Malcolm and the Nation of Islam (NOI), add to our understandings and debates about Malcolm’s views and evolution.
- Exploring Imperial Pathologies
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The historical analysis of imperialism as a system of domination and subordination, of colonizer and colonized, of the “developed world” or global North over the “underdeveloped” global South, maintained for the benefit of the “imperial center” or “metropol” continues to evolve. Several recent studies focusing on the distortions, indeed the social and political pathologies inherent in the system, help to deepen our grasp of U.S. imperialism as something far greater and more complex than a system of economic and political relations.
- Exposing Israel's Most Dangerous Secret
What's Really Going On at the Israeli Institute for Biological Research? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Israel's preparations for biological and chemical warfare.
- Extremely Loud: Sound as a Weapon
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 In this disturbing and wide-ranging account, acclaimed journalist Juliette Volcler looks at the long history of efforts by military and police forces to deploy sound against enemies, criminals, and law-abiding citizens. During the 2004 battle over the Iraqi city of Fallujah, U.S. Marines bolted large speakers to the roofs of their Humvees, blasting AC/DC, Eminem, and Metallica songs through the city's narrow streets as part of a targeted psychological operation against militants that has now become standard practice in American military operations in Afghanistan. In the historic center of Brussels, nausea-inducing sound waves are unleashed to prevent teenagers from lingering after hours. High-decibel, "nonlethal" sonic weapons have become the tools of choice for crowd control at major political demonstrations from Gaza to Wall Street and as a form of torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
- The Face of Imperialism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Parenti redefines empire and imperialism to connect the current crisis in America to its own bad behavior worldwide.
- False Prophets of Peace
Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Honig-Parnass unearths the central role played by the Israeli Left in laying the foundation for the colonial settler project and its campaign of dispossession.
- A Family, A Tragedy, A Movement (book review)
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 This book is a gripping account of a fire and a shooting. Yet it is so much more. The lives of James and Annie Hickman, the tragic death of their four children, and James’ trial after shooting their landlord, form the center of Joe Allen’s book. But Allen constructs his narrative with the vivid stories of those who came together around the Hickman tragedy as his building blocks.
- The Fate of Vietnam's First Revolution
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 This book opens with a vivid, gut-wrenching account of the arrest, detention and torture of two young Vietnamese revolutionaries in Saigon in June 1936 by the Sûreté, the political police who defended France’s colonial might. We are spared no details: the electric shock treatment; the kicking; the insertion of a wood plank in the prisoner’s mouth while his wrists are tied back to his ankles and he is beaten.
- The Field of Magic
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Field of Magic is a docu-poem about people living for over two decades in Buda forest near the closed down Kariotiške.s dump, 40 km from Vilnius, Lithuania. A result of four year’s work, the film captures the perspective of the dump dwellers in telling the story of a dissolving community, its uniqueness, daily rhythm, peculiar way of life, every-day joys and sorrows.
- Filipino Maids for Export
'Always be Punctual and Don't Count the Work You are Doing' Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Twelve percent of the Philippines’ GDP comes as remittances from nationals abroad. Many of those are maids, sent all over the world into domestic service to support their children back home. The Philippines government is even training them in servitude.
- First Nations Under Surveillance
Harper Government Prepares for First Nations "Unrest" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 There needs to be unity on the ground with coordinated political actions between First Nations Peoples in order to protect, defend and advance First Nation pre-existing sovereignty, and First Nation Aboriginal and Treaty rights to lands and resources. Divide and conquer tactics can only be met with new strategies of alliance-building, and by bringing the leadership back down to the land.
- 5 Broken Cameras
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 A deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank whose lands are being systematically seized to make room for illegal Israeli settlements. Structured around the violent destruction of each one of Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat's cameras, the low-cost film documents Bil'in's weekly protests against land seizures by Israeli forces and Jewish settlers. Neighbors are killed in the protests and demolition equipment mars the landscape while the filmmaker captures his infant son's rapid loss of innocence, heralded by his first words: "wall" and "army."
- The Fix Is In: Washington's Planned Social Contract Destruction
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 New audit figures show that Bernanke's Fed gave Wall Street and European banksters at least $16.1 trillion (called emergency loans) from December 1, 2007 - July 21, 2010, besides unknown amounts earlier and in the past year. Moreover, it's well known that trillions of dollars are stolen, handed to corporate interests and never returned, as well as gotten in other illegal ways. As a result, taxpayers get stuck with the bill, the nation with unsustainable mounting debt, heading it eventually for ruin.
- Focus and determination required: A call to all progressive organizations to unite under one big umbrella
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We need a movement powerful enough to pressure corporate media owners into providing equal coverage, and with access to enough financing to support the development of alternative, independent media. If the progressive movement is to be successful in improving society, it is hugely important for it to be able to reach the general public with its information creating a balanced view of important issues in Canada.
- The food rush
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Commodity speculators have moved into food - with dire consequences for the world’s poorest.
- Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011
- The Foreclosure-to-Rental Screwjob
Bernanke's Double-Whammy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The US government is preparing to bail out the banks once again.
- Foundations and Social Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Corporate philanthropy is money laundering, pure and simple. It is an institution that serves to legitimate ill-gotten gains, and to hide the fact that were it not for our system of regressive taxation, people could hypothetically exercise some sort of democratic control over money stolen from workers and cheated out of debtors and consumers.
- 451 at Zuccotti Park
"Where man starts by burning books he ends up by burning people." Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The books at Zuccotti Park were hauled away in dumpsters belonging to the sanitation department. The pretext of the destruction was "cleaning" the park which, the Mayor said, was filled with "filth". This is the rhetoric of Mein Kampf.
- 1493
Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Alternate title in the United Kingdom: 1493: How the Ecological Collision of Europe and the Americas Gave Rise to the Modern World. A study of the Colombian Exchange -- the biological cross-proliferation between the eastern and western hemispheres and its ripple effects through history.
- FRANCE: Battling Over Pensions
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 France was rocked in September-October 2010 by some of the country’s largest protests in recent memory, as workers fought to prevent cuts to their public pensions. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s agenda promised to raise the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 and the age for a full pension from 65 to 67.
- Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster: A 'realistic' answer to the ecological crisis
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Resolving the ecological crisis is incompatible with capitalism. We must build a movement that works against capitalist logic with the aim to overcoming it in favour of a properly sustainable and egalitarian form of society.
- From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism
Recollections of a Participant Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What I am going to do today is talk about the 1960s—the last time there was serious social struggle in the U.S.—and why some of us concluded that struggle, even quite militant struggle, is not enough.
- From Cairo to Madison, The Old Mole Comes Up For An Early Spring
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Individual sectors, even as large as public employees in the U.S., have to reach out to all those who have been ground down over the past forty years. Any working-class movement worthy of the name embraces the interests of the most oppressed, and that today includes the 15-20% of the U.S. population currently unemployed and increasingly foreclosed into homelessness, the casuals and temps, the harassed immigrant workers both legal and illegal, the millions of marginalized youth, white black and Latino, and the three million people in prison. We know very well that not every struggle that erupts can immediately enlist all such people, but a “climate” must be created in which that universal outreach—what we might call a “class for itself” orientation– is understood as a necessity.
- From Portugal to Egypt: a Cautionary Tale
The Anti-Empire Report Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The events in Egypt cannot help but remind me of Portugal. Here, there, and everywhere, now and before, the United States of America, as always, is petrified of anything genuinely progressive or socialist, or even too democratic, for that carries the danger of allowing god-knows what kind of non-America-believer taking office.
- From Tahrir to Palestine
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Nabeel Abraham, a professor of anthropology and director of the honors program at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Michigan, is a longtime Palestinian and Arab community activist. Against the Current asked him to comment on the following question: “What impact do you think the Egyptian events might have on the Palestinian struggle — both against the Israeli occupation and for internal democracy — over the next few months or maybe the next year?”
- Fuck Hamas! Fuck Israel! Gaza youth offers up a cry of despair
Rapid global reaction to cyber-manifesto surprises its drafters Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A group of Palestinian youth put out a manifesto that calls for an end to divisive party politics in Gaza and the West Bank. The youth want peace and freedom.
- Fuel For Occupy Wall Street's Fire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Ultimately, the Occupy Wall Street protests have already succeeded. The movement has successfully re-focused the nation's debate on who ruined the economy and who should be targeted, shifting blame away from immigrants, unions, and other groups of working people, like public employees. The protests have also re-fueled working people's energy after the post-Wisconsin letdown, activating the energies of many who want to collectively organize for progressive change in the interests of working people.
- Fury Mounts Among Greek People
"Do you think we are the parasites of Europe?" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Nobody trusts the government or the opposition because people blame them for starting the crisis in the first place.
- The Futile Undertaking of Palestinian Statehood
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Eventually a state that represents all its inhabitants on the basis of equality and genuine respect and dignity for all its citizens is one that the world will some day celebrate, not a phony declaration that legitimizes the oppressive nature of one and confers false hope on the other.
- Generation NGO
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Young Canadians are increasingly active and engaged in global issues. Many are eagerly poised to contribute—in smaller and even larger ways—to international development and the Canadian national politics that, for better or worse, shape the field.
- German autonomen: morality police
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 On the origins of "black bloc" tactics.
- Get Up, Stand Up
Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Levine offers insights into the epidemic of political passivity in America and analyzes how major U.S. institutions have created helplessness and fatalism. He proposes ways of recovering dignity, energy, and unity in order to wrest power away from the corporatocracy.
- Givebacks in a Deepening Crisis
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What can be called the latest phase of “concession bargaining” emerging in the past year — politically imposed concessions taking back working people’s “social wage” — is historic.
- Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis & Resistance
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Global Slump analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. It argues that – far from having ended – the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, Global Slump challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation.
- GMOs, Glyphosate & Tomorrow
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Any time you have a single gene in so many different crops, especially a gene that impacts the normal resistance and defense mechanism in the plant, and you spread that same vulnerability across so many plants, you should anticipate a high level of vulnerability.
- The Golden Rule Of State Violence: Terrorism Is What They Do; Counterterrorism Is What We Do
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A defining feature of state power is rhetoric about a ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ role in world affairs. Errors of judgement, blunders and tactical mistakes can, and do, occur. But the motivation underlying state policy is fundamentally benign. Reporters and commentators, trained or selected for professional ‘reliability’, tend to slavishly adopt this prevailing ideology.
- Goldstone Recants
Richard Goldstone Renews Israel's License to Kill Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 On April 1 2011, in the pages of the Washington Post, the international jurist Richard Goldstone dropped a bombshell. He effectively disowned the massive evidence assembled in the United Nations' report carrying his name that Israel had committed multiple war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Gaza during its 2008-9 invasion.
Israel was jubilant. “Everything that we said proved to be true,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crowed. “We always said that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is a moral army that acted according to international law,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared. “We had no doubt that the truth would come out eventually,” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proclaimed. The Obama administration used the occasion of Goldstone’s recantation to affirm that Israel had not “engaged in any war crimes” during the Gaza assault while the U.S. Senate unanimously called on the United Nations to “rescind” the Goldstone Report.
- Goldstone's shameful U-turn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination.
- Goodwin's Way
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2011 'Goodwin's Way' is a short documentary examining the life and struggling legacy of BC labour martyr Ginger Goodwin, who's politics and untimely death as a WWI draft-dodger continues to cast a shadow of controversy over the community of Cumberland.
- A Great Aridness
Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 In A Great Aridness, William deBuys paints a compelling picture of what the Southwest might look like when the heat turns up and the water runs out. This semi-arid land, vulnerable to water shortages, rising temperatures, wildfires, and a host of other environmental challenges, is poised to bear the heaviest consequences of global environmental change in the United States.
- The Greater Toronto Workers Assembly: A Hopeful Experiment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We are living in a kind of transitional era, where the old forms of working class organization and politics are sorely in need of a replacement, and the theoretical and practical bases of those replacements are still in the process of being born. The Greater Toronto Workers Assembly is one attempt to create a working class institution that tries to address this crisis within the class and on the left on the level of a city, in this case, Toronto.
- Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly Solidarity Platform
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Greece: The Crisis Continues
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What's happened in Greece after the explosive strikes and street protests that erupted over the terms of the European bailout in 2010?
- Growing Up ILWU in Tacoma, Washington
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 I grew up with militancy in a longshore family.
- Gutting Cities and Public Education
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Almost sixty more Detroit public schools are to be closed over the next two years — with up to 45 open to being taken over by charter operators. This is the “Renaissance 2012 Plan” developed by state-appointed “Emergency Financial Manager” Robert Bobb. As Bobb’s two-year term ends it appears to have been a pilot project for the wholesale and anti-democratic restructuring of local governance.
- Has Europe's Crisis Peaked Yet?
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A discussion with Eric Toussaint, president of the Committee for Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM) in Belgium.
- Hate Speech and Free Speech
The Wrong Kind of Climate Control Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Laws against sedition, in whatever guise, are an attack on free speech. Unlike laws against those rare instances of incitement which trigger immediate and actual violence against a present target (as in "get him boys!"), laws against sedition are always couched in vague, open ended terms because the real target is not the alleged "dangers" protected against but some political agenda or ideology that is opposed.
- Hell No
Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 In the Age of Terrorism, the United States has become a much more dangerous place—for activists and dissenters, whose rights are all too frequently abridged by the government. A report on government attacks on dissent and protest in the United States, along with a readable and essential guide for activists, teachers, grandmothers, and anyone else who wants to oppose government policies and actions
- Here's the Key Question in the Libyan War
As the "Humanitarian Warriors" Gloat... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 My principal opposition to this recent war is precisely that, at a time when even some in Washington were hesitant, the "humanitarian interventionists", with their sophistic pretense of "protecting innocent civilians", have fed and encouraged this monster by offering it "the low-hanging fruit" of an easy victory in Libya. This has made the struggle to bring a semblance of peace and sanity to the world even more difficult than it was already.
- Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power
Community Organizing in Radical Times Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The story of some of the most important and little-known activists of the 1960s, in a deeply sourced narrative history.
- Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power
Community Organizing in Radical Times Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Historians of the civil rights movement of the late 60s have often held classist views of those who actually protested and fought for civil liberties by depicting the poor and working-class as lazy racists who did nothing, when in fact poor and working-class radicals inspired the civil rights movement.
- Historic Declaration by Palestinians, Israelis in Support of Israeli Social Protest, Anti-Colonial Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Some 20 political parties and social movements from both sides of the Green Line issued an historic declaration in support of the social protests currently rocking Israel and their necessary linkage to the struggle against Israel’s occupation and colonial policies.
- History, Theory, Politics & Invisible Man
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Paul Heideman's spirited critique of my review of Barbara Foley’s Wrestling with the Left testifies to the reach of Foley’s study. That the politics of Ellison’s novel would be up for debate in a journal like Against the Current would be unthinkable without Foley’s efforts. In multiple articles going back more than a decade, and culminating in Wrestling, Foley challenges the consensus critical position that Invisible Man was made possible by Ellison’s clean break from the left, and that the novel offers an objective and accurate critique of U.S. Communism.
- Home is Where the Hatred Is
A Conversation With Isabel Wilkerson Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Homeless in America
Throw Them Out With the Trash Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets — not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping.
- Hope: The Care And Feeding Of
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Hope is based on uncertainty, on the premise that we don’t know what will happen next.
- The Hour of Sunlight
One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Traces al Jundi's evolution from Palestinian militant to prisoner to peacemaker.
- How Agriculture Can Provide Food Security Without Destroying Biodiversity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 According to conventional wisdom, the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte has achieved something impossible. So, too, has the island of Cuba. They are feeding their hungry populations largely with local, low-input farming methods that enhance the environment rather than degrade it. They have achieved this, moreover, at a time of rising food prices when others have mostly retreated from their own food security goals.
- How Canada Subsidizes Illegal Israeli Settlements
Enabling Crimes Against Palestinians Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Canada's tax system currently subsidizes Israeli settlements that Ottawa deems illegal, however, the Conservative government says there's nothing that can be done about it.
- How Canada's corporate media framed the Occupy movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Occupy movement occupied two parallel, rarely intersecting universes in the corporate media. In one, described frequently in the Toronto Star, occasionally in the Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail and only once in the National Post, Occupy is a worldwide movement created in response to the growing gap between the one percent at the top of the income-and-asset pyramid and the 99 percent below.
- How Change Happens: A Three-Fold Strategy
To build a new economy, we must work on three fronts Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The power of authentic culture stories gives civil society the ultimate advantage in the contest for the human future. Stories alone will not, of course, bring down the institutions of Empire. Nor should we welcome the inevitable chaos that the collapse of Empire will bring if we have not first laid a foundation of the new rules, relationships, and institutions of a New Economy.
- How Israel Empowers Islamist Movements
Shukran, Israel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 If Islamist movements come to power all over the region, they should express their debt of gratitude to their bete noire, Israel. Without the help of successive Israeli governments, they may not have been able to realize their dreams. That is true in Gaza, in Beirut, in Cairo and even in Tehran.
- How Offshoring Has Destroyed the Economy
Nobel Laureate: Globalism Has Been Ruinous for Americans Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 All of economics is predicated on the notion that resources are inexhaustible, and that the only challenge is to use them most efficiently. But if resources are not inexhaustible and cannot be replicated by human capital, the world economy is being ruthlessly exploited to its detriment and to the detriment of life on earth.
- How Smart Are the "Smart" Meters?
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What does it really mean when a corporation calls a new product “smart?” Gas and electric corporations are calling their newest technology “smart meters.”
- How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When, in the 1920s, a botanist and a field marshal dreamed up rival theories of nature and society, no one could have guessed their ideas would influence the worldview of 70s hippies and 21st-century protest movements. But their faith in self-regulating systems has a sinister history.
- How the French pension system works
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Behind the pension reform demonstrations–discontent with politics and politicians, and with the capitalist system itself.
- How The Oligarchy Gets Politicized
A Short History of Elite Responses To Political-Economic Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The political activism of the elite is striking in times of crisis, when the latter takes the form either of severe economic contraction or of working-class militancy, or both.
- How to Change the World
Tales of Marx and Marxism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011
- How to Start a Revolution
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 A documentary on the work and ideas of Gene Sharp, a theorist of non-violent revolution.
- Hunting the CIA's Keystone Kommandos
On the Trail of Agency Kidnappers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 You cannot overstate the CIA’s capacity to bungle things. Sheer incompetence explains far more of America’s espionage fiascos than most of us might think. The other point is the importance of hubris in CIA history—the idea that the CIA operates in such a different universe, is so far above the law, that its people often feel they can’t possibly get caught, and that if they do, they couldn’t possibly be punished.
- I AM NOT MOVING
Short Film - Occupy Wall Street Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 A message to the people that find themselves in a position to be part of the government that is representing the people. Do you want to be like all the other oppressive states around the world oppressing the freedoms and speech of the people
- I am Occupied/Yo Soy Occupado
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Iceland's Loud No
Can't Pay Back, Won't Pay Back Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The people of Iceland have now twice voted not to repay international debts incurred by banks, and bankers, for which the whole island is being held responsible. With the present turmoil in European capitals, could this be the way forward for other economies?
- An Illustrated Guide to Growing Food on Your Balcony
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Published: 2015 A booklet for people in the city who grow or want to grow plants in container. The information is meant to be basic enough for beginners and informattive enough to be a handy reference for even an experienced gardener.
- Imperialism 101
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders.
- In Bad Faith: What's Wrong with the Opium of the People
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011
- In Defense of Grand Narratives
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The postmodernist attack on Marxism conflates the crudities of “Marxism-Leninism” with the thought of Marx himself. Its critique of Enlightenment rationality fails on its own terms, but it also fails to discern Marx’s break with his Enlightenment forebearers. Marx’s goal — the emancipation of the human individual from need and the flowering of “rich individuality” — is not that of rationalism, Hegelianism or classical political economy.
- In Memory of Carl Oglesby
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Forty-six years ago this November, then-SDS president Carl Oglesby stood on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and told those assembled to protest the war in Vietnam that the men who were responsible for that war were not evil, they were “trapped in a system.” They were, like Antony had told the crowd of those who had killed Caesar, “all honorable men.” Indeed, they were all liberals.
- In Praise of Marx
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Why might Marx be back on the agenda? The answer, ironically, is because of capitalism. Whenever you hear capitalists talking about capitalism, you know the system is in trouble.
- India's Autoworkers Behaving Like the Old UAW
The Real Deal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 While it's true that international banks and corporations have their slimy tentacles in everything from foreign governments to foreign armies, the world's workers have two weapons of their own. One is the crippling, paralyzing effect of no-go dockworkers. The other is the logistical potential of the Internet.
- India's Vanishing Vultures
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Can the world's fastest growing nation restore its prime scavenger before there are untold human consequences?
- Injustice: Why social inequality persists
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Dorling examines who is most harmed by social injustices and why, and what happens to those who most benefit.
- The Inquisition of Climate Science
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The Inquisition of Climate Science is the first book to comprehensively take on the climate science denial movement and the deniers themselves, exposing their lack of credentials, their extensive industry funding, and their failure to provide any alternative theory to explain the observed evidence of warming. Lawrence Powell's book clearly reveals that the evidence of global warming is real and that an industry of denial has deceived the American public, putting them and their grandchildren at risk.
- Inside 15M: 48h with the indignants
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011
- Inside the Global Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Inside the Global Crisis
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 “The roots of the modern financial system lie in developments in the early 1980s when investors of capital could not find avenues where they could obtain reasonable returns after a decline, from the early 1970s onwards, in the profit levels of traditional companies.”
- An Inspiration Named Chubby
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Theodore Fontaine's memorr of his 12 years in a residential school.
- The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The economic context points to the paradox of the Internet as it has developed in a capitalist society. The Internet has been subjected, to a significant extent, to the capital accumulation process, which has a clear logic of its own, inimical to much of the democratic potential of digital communication, and that will be ever more so, going forward. What seemed to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets.
- Interpol’s Red Flag
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Interpol's Red Notices used by some to pursue political dissenters, opponents.
- Interrogating the Feminine Mystique
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Stephanie Coontz. Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Dianne Feeley interviewed Stephanie about her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.
- Introduction to Is There a Human Future?
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Following Chris Hedges’ forced retirement as a war correspondent and New York Times reporter (where his reputation was forged by his acclaimed first book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning), Hedges has emerged as a trenchant and increasingly radical critic of the politics and imperial culture of the United States. His prolific articles and speeches paint a picture of a society well on its way to self-destruction through the dominance of corporate power and sheer greed.
- IRELAND: Slaying the Celtic Tiger
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Like most nations, Ireland has its share of myths and legends. Most of us know a few of them — Saint Patrick drove out the snakes, the Children of Lir were turned into swans, the ancient warrior Cúchulainn took on all comers. And, since the mid-1990s, Ireland and the international community trumpeted a new myth and legend, the so-called Celtic Tiger.
- Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?
How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The increasing influence and role of Lockhead Martin, the giant weapons corporation.
- Island of the Widows
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Mysterious kidney disease in Central America.
- The Island President
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Jon Shenk’s The Island President is the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, a man confronting a problem greater than any other world leader has ever faced -- the literal survival of his country and everyone in it.
- Israel Shamir and Slavoj Zizek
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Despite my general aversion to Slavoj Zizek, I want to defend him against the misrepresentations found in Israel Shamir’s Counterpunch article from July 14th titled “Doing a Full Monty for Tel Aviv: Zizek and the Gaza Flotilla“. Zizek is not above criticism but Shamir’s article is nothing but a hatchet job.
- Israeli Tree Campaign "Judaizes" Expropriated Land
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2011 This article explores the role of the JNF (Jewish National Fund) in expropriating Palestinian land. Focusing on the Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb, Lia Tarachansky interviews residents about their experiences.
- It Doesn't Matter to Them If It's Untrue. It's a Higher Truth.
The Anti-Empire Report Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The lies used to justify the US/NATO attack on Libya.
- Jai Bhim Comrade
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 India’s Dalit (oppressed) castes were abhorred as “untouchables”. The film, shot over 14 years follows the music of protest of Maharashtra's Dalits. In an age of increasing bigotry and superstition, it is both a record of recent history as well as eloquent testimony to a tradition that has survived amongst the subaltern for thousands of years.
- Journalists, community groups need to develop independent Canadian media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It is shocking that – in the 21st Century – we still have a system under which corporate over-lords – not the journalists who produce the news – control the process that determines the content of mainstream media.
- Keep the TTC public
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Privatization of public transit around the world has been a disaster for taxpayers and riders. In this video, we learn of some of these disasters and why Toronto should avoid TTC public-private partnerships. Narrated by Canadian actor Eric Peterson.
- Keller's Hatchet Job
The NYT vs. Assange Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 For evidence of the sorry state of honesty and integrity in American public life, one need go no further than the New New York Times.
- Know Your Rights!
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Your computer, your phone, and your other digital devices hold vast amounts of personal information about you and your family. This is sensitive data that's worth protecting from prying eyes - including those of the government.
- Koch Entertained Justice Thomas At His Private Club
Supreme Court Scandal Widens Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- The Koch Whisperers
Big Brothers Buy in at Big Media Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A review of documents and tax records for the dizzying, interconnected web of corporate front groups, frequently created, supported and influenced by Charles or David Koch, shows just how dangerous these groups espousing free markets and liberty have become to a free society. The game plan is to devalue the rights of actual citizens by seeking human voices dangling from a corporate marionette string, that might be willing for the right amount of cash incentive to broadcast the Orwellian reverse-speak: liberty means more liberty for corporations (corporate serfdom for real citizens); freedom means corporate freedom to privatize national resources, pollute the environment and fleece the consumer with impunity; free market means the freedom to draw a dark curtain around how the corporations are actually screwing us and stealing our liberty.
- The Lasting Legacy of Florynce Kennedy, Black Feminist Fighter
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Several decades after the 1960s political upheavals, very few people recognize the name of the Black feminist lawyer and activist Florynce “Flo” Kennedy (1916-2000). However, during the late 1960s and 1970s Kennedy was the country’s most well-known Black feminist. When reporting on the emergence of the women’s movement, the media covered her early membership in the National Organization for Women (NOW), her leadership of countless guerilla theatre protests and her work as a lawyer helping to repeal New York’s restrictive abortion laws. Indeed, Black feminist Jane Galvin-Lewis and white feminists Gloria Steinem and Ti-Grace Atkinson credit Kennedy with helping to educate a generation of young women about feminism in particular and radical political organizing more generally.
- Latin America's Pink Tide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Current governments in Latin America – not quite red and hardly cresting the wave – are discovering that policies of redistribution, for which they were elected, now have limits.
- Laughing at the People of Walmart While Class Warfare Rages in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What is it that POW and the TSG are really selling? Conformity, my friends. You there, in your comfortable suburban house or your hipster urban condo pad, yes, you are one of the cool people. You’d never be caught dead out in public dressed like one of these freaks.
- Laying the Groundwork for Change
A Review of Michael Riordon, Our Way to Fight: Peace-Work Under Siege in Israel-Palestine. Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Michael Riordon's new book (published in Toronto by Pluto Press/Between the Lines, 2011, 242 pages) explores what a just peace between Israel and Palestine might look like and how it might be built. It does so by describing the work of a wide range of NGOs and movements, both Palestinian and Israeli, involved in a non-violent struggle for peace and/or justice.
- Leave the libraries alone. You don't understand their value.
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.
- The Left's Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It was indicative of the left's sorry lack of ambition in the crisis that its calls for salary limits on Wall Street executives and transaction taxes on the financial sector were far more common than demands for turning the banks into public utilities.
- The Left's Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It was indicative of the left's sorry lack of ambition in the crisis that its calls for salary limits on Wall Street executives and transaction taxes on the financial sector were far more common than demands for turning the banks into public utilities.
- Lenin
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011
- Lessons from COINTELPRO
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We can best honor those who have been murdered by our government and their agents, not by mourning but by organizing, by building movements that put into practice solidarity across borders that are inclusive in all the important ways - class, gender, race, sexual orientation, language, immigrant status and age - that resist boldly and courageously all forms of inequality and environmental degradation.
- Let Them Eat Cuts
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The good times are flowing again for Wall Street and bank executives, and U.S. corporate profits have rarely if ever looked so lush. But it’s a brutal moment for working people, with much worse possibly to come. These twin realities set the economic and political agenda heading into 2011-12. Everyone knows the Republicans are hell-bent on “making Obama a one-term president,” but few expected that they’d capture the White House in 2010. If that’s an exaggeration, it’s a mild one.
- Let Them Eat Diversity
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Alter Benn Michaels says that “'left neoliberals' are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things."
- Letter from Tokyo: In "The Zone" of Disaster
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 On the morning of Thursday, March 17th, six days after the earthquake and tsunamis, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper had just one advertising supplement: a full-color glossy piece from a Buddhist temple, selling grave sites.
- Letter to the Next Left
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The problem of agency is especially relevant to what remains of the Left today, and it is the part of C. Wright Mills’ Letter to the New Left that is the most problematic.
- Libya
From Colony to Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Provides the background to the Libyan revolution by discussing its history from colonization up through the 2011 rebellion/foreign intervention that ousted Mu'ammar al-Qadafi.
- Libya and the Arab Uprisings
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2011 The sweeping upheavals in Arab countries and North Africa continue to unfold. Among these events, the uprising in Libya and the subsequent United Nations/NATO intervention have provoked intense controversy within the international left and antiwar movement. The debate is an inevitable and necessary one — given both the imminent massacre that appeared likely to occur if the Qaddafi regime recaptured Benghazi and other opposition population centers, and what we well know to be the far-from-humanitarian motives of the imperialist intervening powers.
- Libya and the World We Live In
The Holy Triumvirate Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like “humanitarian”.
- Carl Lichtenstein
1942 - 2011 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Obituary for archivist for the Prometheus Research Library.
- Living and Working Uncovered
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Sonya Huber. Sonya Huber (www.sonyahuber.com) is the author of Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir.
- Living "Illegal"
The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011
- Local and Organic Food and Farming
The Real Gold Standard Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When the local chemical grower tells you that local is better than organic, tell them that they should switch to organic so that you can trust their food to be safe, clean, inspected, and environmentally friendly. Local food is not the gold standard, and may not even be safe. Local-organic is the gold standard.
- Local Harvest for an Urban Landscape
Laying the Foundations for Sustainable Local Food Systems Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 How do you create a locally harvested food system for a city of 100,000?
- Lockdown High
When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Schools in the U.S. are increasingly imposed unprecedented restrictions on students' rights, dignity, and educational freedom. In what is being called the school-to-prison pipleline, the police and practices of the juvenile justice system, including so-called "zero tolerance" policies, are pushing students out of schools.
- Looking North for Labor Revival?
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It isn't news that the U.S. labor movement is in profound crisis, and has been for some time. Readers of this magazine are by now all too familiar with the symptoms: waves of concessionary contracts, eroding labor laws, vicious government and employer attacks, defeated strikes, the precipitous decline in union membership.
- Love and Capital
Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A biography of Karl and Jenny Marx.
- Lower classes quicker to show compassion in the face of suffering
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Researchers have found that people in the lower socio-economic classes are more physiologically attuned to suffering, and quicker to express compassion than their more affluent counterparts. By comparison, individuals in the upper middle and upper classes were less able to detect and respond to the distress signals of others.
- Lupercalian Valentine's Day
Whip It Good Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The tradition of honoring all-inclusive, natural LUST around February 14 pre-dates classical times when Ancient Romans celebrated the Lupercalia, an archaic festival of the now obscure old shepherd god Lupercus (or perhaps Faunus, the Roman Pan), and a celebration of communal sexuality, purification, fertility, the rush of hormones, the howl of the wolf, the crack of the whip and the coming of Spring.
- The Making of Egypt's Revolution
People Power in Action Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- The Man Who Recorded the World
A Biography of Alan Lomax Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Documentarian of the folk culture of American life,, Lomax was diligent and tireless in preserving the irreplaceable vernacular cultures that have fallen into the past.
- Manning Marable and Malcolm X: The Power of Biography
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Social movement theorists have written much about the political opportunities, constraints, and levels of organizational readiness enabling or inhibiting popular insurgency. We still know less, however, about the complex framing processes involved in forging and maintaining activist identities and self-narratives.
- The March on Blair Mountain
A Historic Day in West Virginia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The coal industry is an industry which has admitted it can not make a profit without breaking laws.
- Martov and Zinoviev
Head to head in Halle Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A new chapter in understanding the significance of a congress that shaped the 20th century European workers’ movement.
- Marxism and organization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- A Marxist History of the World part 26: Africa: cattle-herders, iron-masters, and trading states
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Neil Faulkner looks at the early civilisations in Africa and how geography ensured the continent would develop differently from Eurasia.
- A Marxist History of the World part 27: New World Empires: Maya, Aztec, and Inca
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The early civilisations of the Americas were limited by its geography - in only two areas did urban revolution occur and civilisations develop: in parts of Mesoamerica, and in the Central Andes.
- A Marxist History of the World part 28: The cycles and arrows of time
me Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In Part 9 of A Marxist History of the World, we paused to discuss ‘how history works’. It would be useful to pause again to review some general lessons of the history of the ancient and medieval civilisations we have looked at since.
- A Marxist History of the World part 29: The peculiarity of Europe
e Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Why Europe? Why was it that the second great transformation in human existence - the development of capitalism and industrial society - was pioneered on the western edge of the Eurasian land-mass?
- A Marxist History of the World part 30: The rise of western feudalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Following the collapse of the Roman Empire Western Europe became a politically fragmented region of warring states from which a radically new social, military, and political order developed.
- A Marxist History of the World part 31: Crusade and Jihad
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Crusades lasted 200 years and represented the most extreme expression of the futile violence inherent in western feudalism - a murderous attack on the Middle East by western feudal thugs under the banner of religion.
- A Marxist History of the World part 32: Lord, burgher, and peasant in medieval Europe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Feudalism is often portrayed as a stagnant system where little changed over centuries. The reality was a system that was more dynamic and productive than anything before it argues Neil Faulkner.
- A Marxist History of the World part 33: The class struggle in medieval Europe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Despite dominating western Europe in the 11th century by the 14th century Feudalism was faced with a crisis that generated a wave of revolutionary struggle. Neil Faulkner looks at the causes and outcomes.
- A Marxist History of the World part 34: The new monarchies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Neil Faulkner looks at how the transition from feudalism to capitalism introduced a new model of unified states, centralised government, royal armies, internal repression and national-dynastic wars.
- A Marxist History of the World part 35: The new colonialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires founded at the beginning of the 16th century were soon followed by Dutch, English, and French empires. Neil Faulkner looks at how the transformation of the world by European colonialism began.
- A Marxist History of the World part 36: The Reformation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Reformation after 1521 tore apart church and state. Neil Faulkner looks at how the new social forces formed inside late medieval Europe helped undermine the thousand year domination of the Roman Catholic Church.
- A Marxist History of the World part 37: The Counter-Reformation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Neil Faulkner looks at how the Reformation was followed by a counter-revolutionary response which involved a dogmatic reassertion of Catholic orthodoxy: the Counter-Reformation.
- A Marxist History of the World part 38: The Dutch Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 For more than 40 years, with wildly fluctuating fortunes, the Dutch Revolution of 1566-1609 took the form of a protracted popular war of national defence against the Spanish Empire.
- A Marxist History of the World part 39: The Thirty Years War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Between 1618 and 1648 Germany was wrecked by insecurity, depopulation, disruption to trade, the destruction of property, and military plundering. Neil Faulkner looks at The Thirty Years War.
- A Marxist History of the World part 40: The causes of the English Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Neil Faulkner looks at the how the unresolved contradictions in English society and the attempt to establish Continental-style absolutism led to the execution of the king, and the establishment of a bourgeois republic.
- A Marxist History of the World part 41: 1640-1645: revolution and war in England
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The attempt to impose Absolutism by Charles I led to a revolutionary civil war in which the King would be executed - Neil Faulkner looks at the English Civil War.
- A Marxist History of the World part 42: The Army, the Levellers, and the Commonwealth
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Neil Faulkner looks at how even the most radical bourgeois forces, if they are to preserve their property and status, must break the momentum of the movement that has brought them to power.
- A Marxist History of the World part 43: Colonies, slavery, and racism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Capitalist contradictions were most evident in the 18th century, when the wealth of the merchant-capitalist class of Britain’s port-cities was contrasted with the untold human misery of the slaves, ramping up the historical significance of racist ideology.
- A Marxist History of the World part 44: Wars of empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The English Revolution transformed Britain into a capitalist economy engaging in geopolitical competition. Neil Faulkner looks at how Britain became the dominant global superpower of the 19th Century.
- A Marxist History of the World part 45: The Enlightenment
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What gave the Enlightenment its subversive, politically corrosive character was its critique of institutions and practices which appeared comparatively irrational in the light of modern thinking, argues Neil Faulkner.
- A Marxist History of the World part 46: The American Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In 1764, Americans thought of themselves as British subjects of King George III. By 1788, they would, by their own decisions and actions, have made themselves the free citizens of a new republic forged in revolution and war.
- A Marxist History of the World part 47: The French Revolution - Storming of the Bastille
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In the latest of his series on the Marxist understanding of history, Neil Faulkner explores revolution and counter-revolution in 18th-Century France.
- A Marxist History of the World Part 48: The French Revolution - The Jacobin Dictatorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In his latest instalment, Neil Faulkner explores the rise of the Jacobin dictatorship and the ever-present threat of counter-revolution in 18th Century France.
- A Marxist History of the World part 49: The French Revolution - Themidor, Directory and Napoleon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In his third chapter on the French Revolution, Neil Faulkner discusses the contradictions of bourgeois revolution - but celebrates the gains it won.
- A Marxist History of the World part 50: The Industrial Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Frederick Engels was sent to Manchester, centre of the Industrial Revolution, to dispel his radicalism. Instead it made him the revolutionary he is remembered as today, Neil Faulkner explains.
- A Marxist History of the World part 51: The origins of the Labour Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Capitalism's industrial revolution gave birth to its own gravediggers, argues Neil Faulkner as he examines the rise and fall of Chartism.
- A Marxist History of the World part 52: The 1848 Revolutions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Even when progress is reversed, some hard-won gains are permanent. Neil Faulkner examines how the counter-revolution in 1848 failed to entirely turn the clock back.
- A Marxist History of the World part 53: What is Marxism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In his latest instalment, Neil Faulkner explores the complex history of Marxism - and how capitalism produced its own gravediggers.
- A Marxist History of the World part 54: What is Capitalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In this critical chapter of his world history, Neil Faulkner explores capitalism and what it means from the Industrial Revolution to the present day.
- A Marxist History of the World part 55: The Making of the Working Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The development of capitalism entails two complementary processes. The first, explored in MHW 54, is competitive capital accumulation. The second, explored here, is the making – and continual re-making – of the working class.
- The Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism
Kenya's independence struggle in the 1950s Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In Kenya the colonial rulers imprisoned in concentration camps a large proportion of the million and a half Kikuyu people, the country’s largest ethnic group. The Mau Mau rebellion was essentially a peasant-based revolt of the landless Kikuyu people against colonial rule that had dispossessed them of their lands, the basis of their existence. Although it was ultimately defeated, the uprising forced an end to colonial rule.
- May Day at 125
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In the spring of 1886 workers at Chicago’s McCormick Harvesting Machine Company struck for the eight-hour workday. They were locked out by the employers, who hired strikebreakers in their place. On May 1 a protest parade was held outside of the plant; two days later police attacked the demonstrators, killing one.
- Maybe 99% is a bit much, but...
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It is a fact that over the last couple of decades, much of the growth in total income in the U.S. has gone to the upper reaches of society.
- The Meaning of the Revolution
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 These are the words of Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26-year-old woman whose January 18 blog is said to have helped mobilize the million that turned up in Cairo and the thousands in other cities on January 25. Asmaa’s blog, like the stories of many Egyptian women of this revolution, offer a challenge to two key questions framing U.S. discourse on the Egyptian revolution.
- The media consensus on Israel is collapsing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Across the political spectrum, once-taboo criticism is now common.
- Memories of [my] Syndicalism
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A handful of friends, old and new, have asked me about the path that my ideas and activities have taken me, some 50 years after I happened across a civil rights picket line in my hometown of Champaign, Illinois in the summer of 1960. The following is a radical memory unusual in some ways, but with many similarities to the memories of my New Left contemporaries in the outcome.
- Julian Mer-Khamis
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We mourn the tragic and senseless assassination of the brilliant revolutionary filmmaker Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was gunned down April 4 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. His documentary film “Arna’s children,” about his mother’s lifelong struggle and her work in founding the Jenin Freedom Theater, and the realities of life for Palestinian youth under occupation, is a masterpiece. The Freedom Theater is a priceless center for resistance as well as the healing of these young people.
- Michael Lebowitz's "The Socialist Alternative" - Book Review
Proyect, Louis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Migration
Changing the World Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The author discusses the increasing trend of migration in the modern world, its causes and effects, and peoples and governments responses.
- Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Militant Minority tells the compelling story of British Columbia workers who sustained a left tradition during the bleakest days of the Cold War. Through their continuing activism on issues from the politics of timber licenses to global questions of war and peace, these workers bridged the transition from an Old to a New Left.
- Milton Rogovin: Portraitist to the People
He Gave Them Respect Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 His photography did not turn people into victims, nor did it make them heroes.
- Mining companies funded Indonesian abuses
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Two mine operators have cosy ties with the Indonesian military, who have a long history of human rights abuses.
- Miss Representation
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2011 Explores the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America, and challenges the media's limited portrayal of what it means to be a powerful woman.
- Mistranslating Marx? The "idiocy of rural life"
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 One often hears the criticism that Marxism was from the beginning an extreme modernizing philosophy that looked with complete disdain on rural existence. Did not Marx himself in The Communist Manifesto, it is frequently asked, refer to "the idiocy of rural life"? Here a misconception has arisen through the mistranslation of a single word in the English translation of the Manifesto. In fact, Marx's criticism of the isolation of rural life then had to do with the antithesis of town and country under capitalism as expressed throughout his work.
- Moral Poverty and the Riots
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Because the right has appropriated the arguments about moral failure, many on the left have rejected moral arguments altogether. The left talks much about the social and economic impact of neoliberal policies. But little about their moral impact. Such willful blindness is dangerous. Morality is as important to the left as it is to the right, though for different reasons. There can be no possibility of a political or economic vision of a different society without a moral vision too. Moral arguments lie at the heart of our understanding of social solidarity, and of the distinction between notions of social solidarity and pious rightwing claims of ‘we’re all in it together’.
- Mountaintop Removal: Environmental And Human Destruction For Profit
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW) is an initiative "to stop the destruction of our communities and environment by mountaintop removal, to improve the quality of life in our area, and to help rebuild sustainable communities."
- Mubarak's Last Gasps
From Counter-Attack to Departure Day Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt.
- Mubarak's third force terror tactic
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 President Mubarak unleashed his 'personal' thugs in a failed attempt to silence protestors seeking an end to his regime. The tactics of deploying so-called third forces is a tried and tested method of autocratic regimes, usually utilised when the regime realises that it is on the strategic defencive politically.
- The murder of the Mon Valley
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Only the combined struggle of the international working class can overcome the tyranny of capital and transform the world into a place fit for human beings. This must be our goal. Otherwise the murderer of the Mon Valley may become the murderer of humankind.
- The Murdered Women of Juarez
Trails of Impunity Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The murder of young women, often raped and tortured has brought international infamy to Cuidad Juarez.
- Murfreesboro vs. Islamophobia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When the Muslim community in Murfreesboro, Tennessee sought a permit to build an expanded Islamic Center, local bigots saw an opportunity to exploit the same "moral panic," invented by the Tea Party, the Christian Right and much of the corporate media, that would also emerge in New York around the so-called "Ground Zero mosque."
- My Reaction to Osama bin Laden's Death
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
- The Myth of Greek Profligacy
Destroying the Livelihoods of Thirteen Million People Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The top 20 per cent of the income distribution in Greece pay virtually no taxes at all, the product of a corrupt bargain reached during the days of the junta between the military and Greece’s wealthiest plutocrats. No wonder there is a fiscal crisis.
- The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion
From Serbia to Libya Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The weapons makers love the marriage of high-cost precision weapons to coercive diplomacy, because it generates an astronomical need for a never ending flow of money into their financial coffers with orders for new weapons.
- Nearly $2 Trillion Purloined from U.S. Workers in 2009
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The upward redistribution has remained as hidden as possible. The forms it has taken—as bonuses, bloated salaries, elephantine stock options, padded consulting fees, outsized compensation to boards of directors, sumptuous conferences, palatial offices complete with original artwork, retinues of superfluous “support” staff, hunting lodges, private corporate dining rooms, regal retirement agreements, and so on—defy exact categorization. Some would appear as profit, some as interest, some as dividends, realized capital gains, gigantic pension programs, retained earnings, or owners’ income, with the remainder deeply buried as “costs of doing business.”
- The need to protect the internet from 'astroturfing' grows ever more urgent
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to ... astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it?
- Neither Allah, Nor Master!
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2011 A cinematic exploration of secularism in the Muslim country of Tunisia before and after the deposition of Ben Ali.
- Never Neutral
On Labour History/Radical History Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- New Orleans' Police Death Squads
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Malcolm Suber, a New Orleans community activist and fighter for justice, and a former candidate for city council. Against the Current asked him to comment on the struggle around murders by police during Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing fight over police brutality.
- The Next American Revolution
Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Why revolution is not only possible and necessary, but in some places already in the making.
- The Next Step for Occupy Wall Street: Occupy Buildings, Occupy Workplaces
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The occupation movement needs to build on the creative militancy in the streets of thousands of people (as shown in Oakland, Portland, Seattle, New York and elsewhere) to reach out to that large majority which sometimes seems, a block or two from the street battles, to be going about business as usual. The growing number of anti-eviction and anti-foreclosure actions has made that outreach.
- Nim and Noam
Skinner, Chomsky and the Chimp Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 How psychologists abused a chimpanzee in a failed attempt to prove that Noam Chomsky was wrong about language.
- 9/11 and the "War on Terror" - Had the U.S. done the right thing, thousands of lives could have been saved
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In reflecting on the disastrous last decade we might ask, What would the world be like today if the United Sates, Britain, Canada and the other countries using their military might to kill fanatical young people had instead used that money to buy school books, drill wells, educate people, and promote religious tolerance throughout the Middle East – and at home?
- The 9/11 Conspiracists: Vindicated After All These Years?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The 9/11 conspiracists seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical.
- No Debate
The Israel Lobby and Free Speech at Canadian Universities Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 During 2008-2009, Israel lobby organizations made concerted efforts to block a planned conference on statehood for Israel and Palestine at Toronto's York University. Thompson probes the facts and context of the case and explores the meaning of academic freedom in Canada.
- No Fooling - Corporations Evade Taxes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Closing corporate loopholes so that corporate income tax revenues in the United States match the 3.4% of GDP collected on average by OECD corporate income taxes would add close to $200 billion to federal government revenues—more than five times the $39 billion of devastating spending cuts just made in the federal budget in 2011. Returning the corporate income tax revenues to the 4.0% of GDP level of four decades ago would add close to $300 billion a year to government revenues.
- No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way
Voices from Symphony Way Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Accounts from Symphony Way pavement dwellers, joined together in an anti-eviction campaign, living in shacks insisting that the government provide permanent housing.
- The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 In the world of CCTV, email and DNA, this book shows the extent to which Big Brother is watching us all.
- The No-Nonsense Guide to World Population
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Are we heading for a population ‘explosion’? How many people can the planet sustain?
- "No one represents us": the 15 May movement in the Spanish state
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 On 15 May 2011 thousands of people, mainly young, demonstrated all over the Spanish state under the slogans "For real democracy now" and "We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers". The demonstrations explicitly rejected the participation of political parties or trade unions.
- The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change
The Science, The Solutions, The Way Forward Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An accessible and friendly pocket-sized overview of climate change, combining all the basics with the latest facts and analysis.
- Notes on the Fly
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Published: 2012 A report from Occupy Wall Street
- Nuclear opponents have a moral duty to get their facts straight
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 My request to Helen Caldicott was a simple one: I asked her to give me sources for the claims she had made about the effects of radiation. Helen had made a number of startling statements during a television debate, and I wanted to know whether or not they were correct. Scientific claims are only as good as their sources.
- The Nuts and Bolts of Occupy Wall Street
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Obama Crowned Himself on New Year's Eve
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- The Obama Reality Disconnect
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 There is a sharp reality disconnect in the Black community. On the one hand, the Black population continues to support the first African-American president, Barack Obama, by more than 90%.
- Occupy and the Tasks of Socialists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Occupy Giving Why do the 1% give less than the rest of us?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Nearly two thirds of Americans donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. This year, when the stark divide between the 1% and the 99% has begun to inform our thinking and our approach, it might be instructive to examine the world of giving through that lens.
- Occupy Movement a valuable partner
'Idea' to build a united Canadian progressive Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 The progressive community must learn it has to confront power with power – something we don’t do well in Canada. It seems enough to most Canadians to simply point out that something is wrong, and leave it to someone else to shoulder. This doesn’t cut it any more. We need to stop being nice, and start fighting harder!
- Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An unofficial record of the New York branch of the Occupy movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections.
- Occupy Wall Street vs. Kingian Methods
Where are the Demands? Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 The students, the labour unions, the working poor, the immigrants, the activists all over the country should come up with the solutions and make the demands. There can be dangerous consequences in organizing efforts when there is no clarity. It’s often a matter of life and death.
- Occupy Wall Street - Wikipedia article
Connexpedia article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 About the demonstrations in New York City, 2011.
- Occupy Wall Street! Observations from a New York Public Sector Worker
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A lot remains to be seen, but if Madison is any indication, upping the ante in this struggle and achieving real results will require more than crowds ... it will require the focused activity of significant layers of the organized working classes, that have the roots and the experience to help leverage the power that is being built against the establishment here and nationally. Even if we don't get concrete wins, this will have been a hugely important protest but there is a potential for it to be concretely effective as well.
- Occupy's A**hole Problem: Flashbacks from An Old Hippie
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Watching the OWS organizers struggle with drummers, druggies, sexual harassers, and racists brings me back to a few lessons we had to learn the hard way back in the day, always after putting up with way too much over-the-top behavior from people we didn’t think we were allowed to say no to. It’s heartening to watch the Occupiers begin to work out solutions to what I can only indelicately call the a**hole problem.
- Of Forest and Trees Part Two
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Capitalism is first and foremost a system of accumulation. Value is, if not nothing today, pretty much nothing tomorrow. The reproduction of value is pretty much everything. Swindles, looting, theft certainly exist but only phenomenally, as expressions of moments in the organization, and disorganization, of value production.
- Ohio Workers, Services Under Fire
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As in so much of the country after the recent election cycle, a newly-elected Republican administration has taken the reigns of state government in Ohio. The centerpiece of their ambitious austerity agenda is the notorious Senate Bill 5, which will severely restrict the collective bargaining rights of most public sector workers in the state. The bill has galvanized a section of Ohio workers to a degree not seen a decades. On March 31, Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed SB 5 into law, but the movement to defeat the bill still carries on.
- Oil-sands protesters descend on Parliament Hill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Council of Canadians and Greenpeace Canada hold a rally featuring a civil disobedience sit-in against the tar sands on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday, September 26, 2011.
- On 9/11 and the Politics of Language
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Martin Espada. Called "the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published more than 15 books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator.
- On a Cross of Coal
How Massey Crucified Miners Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Federal investigators investigated the Massey mine disaster in which 29 miners died discovered that Massey Energy was keeping two sets of books (safety logs). One log reflected actual mine conditions, which, alas, were demonstrably unsafe, and the other log was a fictionalized showpiece, a veritable Potemkin village, used to mislead government safety inspectors.
- On Egypt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Historical compromise over an attempt at democratic change.
- On "Occupy Wall-Street" and the Demobilizing Interpretation of Postwar American Protest Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Adams discusses the Occupy Wall Street protests.
- On the day Yafa's refugees return
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 A video prepared especially for the exhibition "Towards the Return of Palestinians Refugees" presented at the gallery of Zochrot in September 2011. In the video, filmed in the refugee camp of Balata in Nablus, Yaffa refugees speak of return to the city from which they had been expelled in 1948.
- On Troy Davis
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A letter to the editor by Theresa El-Amin, regional director of the Southern Anti-Racist Network.
- On Tunisia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When proletarians are willing to defy the forces of repression with bare hands and not retreat from the bullets of the police, they bring to oppositional ferment a determination that can shake state power, despite the more than 100 deaths reported. This is exactly what happened in Sidi Bouzid during the final days of December 2010 and in the first half of January 2011. Thus, in three stages, the movement which began in the south spread to all regions of Tunisia, to finally conclude in Tunis beginning on January 11.
- One Fine Day
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 The documentary One Fine Day, shows six people from different cultures and religions who all, through a small nonviolent act, have had a significant and positive influence on society. Director Klaas Bense investigates how frustration can be turned into positive actions. He looks at what one single individual can achieve, and the often severe, personal consequences.
- The 1% of the 99% and an Anti-Capitalist Alternative
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What we need right now is for autonomous political organizing in both unionized and non-unionized workplaces, schools,and in the streets.
- One Year of the BP Blowout
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In the years after Hurricane Katrina, I saw New Orleanians suffer from lack of health care. The storm and subsequent flooding caused immediate illness, with infections from the foul flood water and debris. As time passed, ever-present mold exacerbated respiratory conditions and mental health deteriorated in the face of immense stress.
- Organic and Beyond
Friendship, Solidarity and Patriotism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Organic is not enough. Organic will be an effective proposal for change only to the extent that it is integrated into the local and global movements that carry on the fight for food sovereignty, climate justice, ecological debt, women's rights and labor organizing; and against enclosures of common goods.
- The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto
What Now? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Unprecedented wholesale and retail control of the organic marketplace by companies employing a business model of selling twice as much so-called "natural" food as certified organic food, coupled with the takeover of many organic companies by multinational food corporations, threatens the growth of the organic movement.
- Organizing Around Transit: At the Intersection of Environmental Justice and Class Struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 For the older big cities in North America, public transit is critical to their daily functioning. Organizing among workers and riders on public transit has a strategic importance.
- The origins of racism
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Racism is so embedded in our society that many people assume it has always existed. But, says Yuri Prasad, it is really a modern phenomenon that developed with capitalism.
- Ottawa Action Against Tar Sands
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 More than 200 people risked arrest on Parliament Hill in the largest climate-related civil disobedience action in Canadian history. The rally and the civil disobedience remained peaceful through the day-long event on the Hill. The main message of the action was to urge Prime Minister Harper to turn away from a destructive tar sands industry and start building a green energy future that promotes climate justice, respects Indigenous rights and prioritizes the health of the environment and communities.
- Our Way to Fight
Peace-work under siege in Israel-Palestine Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Documents the lives and work of grassroots peace activists, Israelis and Palestinians fighting for justice and human rights on both sides of the wall. The book also explore events that stirred people to action, and the escalating risks they face in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The title is borrowed from a young Palestinian who makes and teaches film in the Jenin refugee camp. "This is my way to fight," he said. Like other people featured in the book, he is a peace activist. Like them he is also, in his own way, a freedom fighter. If a just peace can grow in this beautiful, hard land, the seeds for it will have been planted by people like these.
- Ours to Master and to Own
Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Traces the historical tradition of worker control and organization.
- Over 200 arrested at Ottawa tar sands protest
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Over 200 protesters objecting to the federal government's enthusiastic support for Alberta's tar sands and the Keystone pipeline XL were arrested Monday morning as they attempted to stage a sit-in in the House of Commons. The protesters wanted the chance to air their grievances with the environmentally reckless policies of the Harper-led Conservatives inside Parliament but were blocked from entering by fenced barricades and over 50 RCMP officers. The protesters were encouraged by hundreds of boisterous supporters as they passed the media scrum and calmly hopped over police barricades.
- Pakistan's Dark Journey
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The recent verdict of a lower court sentencing a Christian woman to death in a “blasphemy” case, and the subsequent murder of the Punjab Governor who supported the imprisoned woman, has posed the very vital question of whether Pakistani society has become intolerant, violent and extremist to the point of incorrigible.
- The Palestinian Facebook Movement: Can it take up the baton of revolution?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 At the heart of the new movement is a proposal that Palestinians should return to the methods of the first, unarmed, intifada – similar to what has recently been happening in many Arab states. This, they believe, is the right way to achieve the political and social aspirations of the Palestinians, and an alternative to the two failed strategies previously attempted: armed struggle and futile negotiations.
- Pappe and Israel's New Historians
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An irony of Israeli political culture is that Zionism is exceptionally rigid in comparison to the democratic philosophy that legitimizes the U.S. political system, yet the breadth of political debate that appears in Israeli mainstream media is much wider than one would find in the United States.
- Party and Class in Revolutionary Crises
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Russian Revolution of October 1917, the first successful revolution made by and for workers in world history, posed an immense paradox for revolutionary socialists. On the one hand, the combination of the most advanced forms of industrial capitalist development with a largely non-capitalist countryside and autocratic-absolutist state institutions made Russia “the weak link” in world capitalism, the society where a workers’ revolution could first succeed. On the other, Russia’s economic underdevelopment and the minority status of the working class in the population made the prospects of constructing a viable, democratic post-capitalist society impossible.
- Party and Class in Revolutionary Crises
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 While the pre-World War I Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not leave original theoretical tools to guide the reconstruction of revolutionary workers’ organizations, the study of their historical experience remains invaluable.
- Peace Out
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Charles Wilkinson explores the costs of damming, fracking, and extracting, and how they implicate every gas tank and light switch in this country.
- Pentagon Fingered as a Source of Narco-Firepower in Mexico
The Big Clubs in Mexico's Drug War Aren't Slipping Through the Gun-Show Loophole Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars.
- The People's Police Commission
Trial By Amateur Video Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Now we have a people’s police commission of our own. It’s called amateur video. And it will do to criminal scum like Lt. Pike what a whole world of police commissions, pretending to act on our behalf, couldn’t.
- Perpetual War
"Grand Strategy" after 9/11 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A decade after the attentats of 9/11, the United States and its European allies are trapped in a quagmire. The events of that year were simply used as a pretext to remake the world and to punish those states that did not comply. And today the majority of Euro-American citizens flounder in a moral desert, now unhappy with the wars, now resigned, now propagandized into differentiating what is, in effect, an overarching imperial strategy into good/bad wars.
- The Persecution of Pvt. Bradley Manning
A Sick Game Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The torture and prolonged confinement without trial of Pvt. Manning are the tactics of a totalitarian state. They are exactly what is done in countries like China, Iran, and Burma.
- Pham Binh's historical survey of demands
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Phil Ochs Lives!
"There But For Fortune" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Phil Ochs and his influence.
- Philippines: Resisting Gobble-ization
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In his latest book, Epifanio San Juan Jr. uncovers the concealed operations of power and the historic inequalities of political economic systems that have impacted Filipinos in an age of globalized crisis and contradiction. While the definition of globalization is often debated, for the majority of people in the Philippines the process of globalization can be more accurately described as “gobble-ization.”
- A Plague of Prisons
The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Drucker sees prisons as the problem, not the solution.
- Police Violence, Resistance and The Crisis of Legitimacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What clearly sets a number of recent cases apart is not the fact of police violence, but the fact that that violence is being challenged. The controversy, in other words, is not only about violence, but about authority. It is a crisis of legitimacy.
- Police Violence, Resistance and The Crisis of Legitimacy
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 On September 5, 2010, Los Angeles police shot and killed a Guatemalan day laborer named Manuel Jamines.
- Political Repression in Russia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When someone in Russia today calls himself a Communist, in most cases it will turn out that what you have is a particular version of a National Socialist; all too many anarchists turn out to be “national anarchists.”
- Political Repression in Russia
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The full implications of the extraordinary drought that struck the European part of Russia this past summer became apparent only in the third quarter of 2010, when accurate statistics on the human casualties and economic losses became available. But from the outset a solid foundation on which to base projections emerged from amongst the potpourri of facts and expert opinions.
- The Politics (and Anti-Politics) of Occupy Wall Street
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 At present, the occupation reveals a lot about where people's politicization begins in the United States.
- Politics and the Prayer Warriors
Dominionism Hits the Big Time Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Dominionism is a totalitarian movement within Christian evangelicalism that aims at taking over the centers of power—law, culture, government and the like—and establishing a dictatorship. Once having gotten power, Christian Dominionists would then impose their religious practices on the rest of America.
- Politics without Democracy, Democracy without Politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The aim of the Occupy movement is to create a big tent, to represent the 99%, in the name of democracy. But democracy requires not big tent politics, but the very opposite. It requires the drawing of political lines, the engaging in political conflict, the making of political choices.
- Postmodern Imperialism
Geopolitics and the Great Games Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An analysis of the development of imperialism over the past century.
- The Power of Nonsense
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Slavoj Žižek's diagnosis of late capitalism is of genuine interest. His remedies, however -- dictatorship and terror -- are a disgrace.
- Power and Terror: Conflict, Hegemony, and the Rule of Force
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 This updated and revised edition explores the dynamics of power relationships and international negotiations, and the use of terror between the Western countries and the nations of the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. Chomsky looks back to patterns since the Second World War to show how acts of terrorism today cannot be understood outside the context of Western power and state terror throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. This new edition offers the best opportunity to follow Chomsky’s analysis in its development during the ten years since 9/11.
- Prescription for Survival
A Debate on the Future of Nuclear Energy Between Anti-Coal Advocate George Monbiot and Anti-Nuclear Activist Dr. Helen Caldicott Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The crisis in Japan has refueled the rigorous global debate about the viability of nuclear power.
- The Price of Torching Mosques
Burning Rage Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 By reminding Palestinians on either side of the Green Line of their common fate, Israel may yet unleash a force too powerful to control. The price tag – this time demanded by Palestinians – will be high indeed for the Jewish supremacists.
- A Primer on Immigrant Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The struggle for immigrant rights is one of the most important struggles of our time, and it occurs under a working-class banner.
- The problem of autonomism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Direct action is crucial to win – but it needs to be orientated to building a mass movement, through strikes, civil disobedience and occupation.
- A Profound and Jarring Disconnect
The Writing on the Wall Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 How the US government has gone against the wishes of the public majority on key issues.
- A progressive dialogue on the future: Six questions for leftists
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Leftists don't spend enough time or energy working on important strategic questions. If we could resolve a handful of these, even tentatively, and try out some solutions, we would be far more successful. Here are six from my list of the most important questions, as well as my answers, which by their very incompleteness and inadequacy should suggest that more people should work on them.
- Prospects for African Americans
Against The Current vol. 150 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Much of the debate in Washington and Wall Street is about the ongoing world economic crisis and what to do about it. The ruling elites’ solution: cut taxes for the rich, who will “trickle down” their investments to hire more people who will then jumpstart the economy. The fact that this hasn’t worked for the past 10 years is irrelevant.
- The protest march of September 3 -- where to?
Efrat, Yacov Ben Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We, workers from all sectors, Arabs and Jews, marched to the square on Saturday with a clear message: Bibi, your time is up, go home! We marched with a socialist worldview, according to which the economy should exist to serve society, not capital. Those who truly struggle for social justice must seek universal justice. There will be no true welfare state until the occupation is ended!
- The public reaction to new power lines could kill renewable energy: they must be buried
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Anti-wind campaigners are highly selective. The Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales, obsessed by wind farms, says nothing about the opencast coal mines ripping south Wales apart. Nor do you hear a word about the destruction of the ecosystems of upland Wales (and England and Scotland) by sheep grazing. These champions of the countryside want to save it from only one threat.
- Publish It Not!
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 How Israel controls the way the international 'liberal' media portray its illegal and vicious occupation of Palestine and why the media allow them to get away with it.
- Queer theory and politics
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Queer theory and politics originated in the 1990s and continue to be influential today. This article traces the development of queer theory and politics, and assesses their claim to provide a radical alternative to what they see as the LGBT mainstream.
- Querying Young Chomsky
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Chomsky offers observations on what a desirable society might look like from the perspective of the heritage of libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist views.
- rabblepedia
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2011 An encyclopedic-like section containing definitions and descriptions of organizations, people and things related to activism.
- The Radical Camera
New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Artists in 'the Photo League', active from 1936 to 1951, were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life.
- Rebuilding the Antiwar Movement
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 First, thanks to David Grosser for starting an important discussion. However, as two socialists who have been involved in antiwar organizing, we think the problem is more complex than he suggests. Further, the specific solution he calls for would mistakenly shift the focus of the movement away from mass action as a strategic orientation.
- Rebuilding the Left in a Time of Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The type of organizers we need to develop need to be those who have developed the skills and capacities and depth that allow them to be good at taking a defensive struggle and saying we can both fight it, and maybe fight it more effectively, if we can link it to a set of demands that are forward looking. They need to be visionary in terms of a socialist strategy.
- Rediscovering Radical History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 This essay studies the early days of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History Society (ASSLH).
- Reflections for the US Occupy Movement
From Barcelona's Neighborhood Assemblies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The deeper a struggle’s historical roots, the greater its collective knowledge.
- A Rejoinder on Antiwar Strategy
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Let me first restate as concisely as I can the main points of my essay “A New Strategy for Antiwar Organizing: Going Where the Millions Are”.
- Remembering Manning Marable
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Malcolm X has been getting quite a bit of the attention lately, especially with respect to A Life of Reinvention — and deservedly so — but as Professor Marable himself would tell you, no one shaped his intellectual development more than W.E.B. Du Bois.
- Remembering the Paris Commune
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Marking the anniversary of the revolt that led to the establishment of the world's first workers’ government, the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune has always had a special place in the hearts and minds of revolutionaries, and can inspire today’s activist generation with the potential for "power to the people."
- Renewing New York
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Howie Hawkins. Howie Hawkins, a Green Party and socialist activist, ran for Governor of New York State. Dianne Feeley interviewed him for ATC.
- Report Confirms Gang Rapes at Canadian-Controlled PNG Mine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 One of the world's largest mining organisations, Barrick Gold, is in damage control this week following the release of a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report outlining longstanding incidents of sexual and physical violence at the company's Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) mine in Papua New Guinea.
- Report from Spain: On the May 15th Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A brief account of the culmination of the “May 15th movement” in Barcelona in 2011.
- The Repression Strengthened Us!
Letter From Bolivia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- A response to Paul LeBlanc’s “Marxism and Organization”
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We need to be flexible tactically and organizationally while remaining steadfast on our goals.
- Restless Cities
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A collection of narratives and visual art that strive to capture the essence of life in the city. For the author, the urban dweller is a wanderer, a people watcher, a daydreamer attuned by virtue of his life in the metropolis to potentially transformative experiences.
- Rethinking Educational Failure and Reimagining an Educational Future
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 If we start not from the goal of acculturating most children to the demands of an economy which promises only to make things worse, but from the goal of preparing all children to live in a world worthy of human beings, we will find a very different kind of education reform to advocate for. It will have some things in common with some parts of current reform efforts
but it will go beyond and transform them.
- Rethinking The Idea Of 'Christian Europe'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Looking to the traditional, moral and identity platform of Christianity in Europe.
- The Return of the Albuquerque Death Squads
Police War on the Poor Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 APD is at war with the poor because it has come to equate any expression of poverty or drug addiction not as an effect of structural inequality, but rather as another opportunity to dispose of what its officers call “human waste.” Like elsewhere being poor, suffering from a mentally illness or battling a drug addiction is a crime.
- The Revolt of the Aganaktismeni
Huge Popular Uprisings in Greece Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The 'Outraged' movement is getting more and more rooted among lower classes against a Greek society that has been shaped by 25 years of total domination of a cynical, nationalist, racist and individualist neoliberal ideology that turned everything into commodities.
- Revolution and counter-revolution take world stage
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2011-2012 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Revolution and counter-revolution have forced their way back to the center stage of history. First in Tunisia, then in Egypt, revolutions have opened up tremendous new possibilities and spread the fire of their passion from Libya and across the Arab world to Iran, Europe, the U.S. and China. Counter-revolution has reared its head in many forms as well.
- A Revolutionary Marxist History of May Day
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The revolutionary heritage of May Day
- A Revolution's Heritage (book review)
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 S. Sándor John's Bolivia’s Radical Tradition explores in detail the emergence in Bolivia of what became the strongest Trotskyist tradition in the Americas, thanks in large part to militant tin miner unions.
- Rights vs. Privileges
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We now owe our 'liberties' to the good will of the government, which can withdraw them at any time, rather than to our ability to force the government to respect them.
- Rightwing Manipulation of the Wisconsin Revolt
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Manipulation of opinion surveys is easy enough for those seeking to muddy the waters of political debate regarding the current war on unions.
- The Rise of the Tea Party
Where Did They Come From? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Tea Party has never been a genuine social movement or political outsider but rather an elite-dominated group that was closely linked to the Republican establishment from its inception.
- The Rise of the Tea Party
Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A socio-political analysis of the Tea Party that probes its history, organizational structure, membership, ideological coherence, and relationship to the mass media.
- Robert Wedderburn: race, religion and revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As a Scottish-Jamaican “mulatto” radical preacher and leader of working class movements in 19th century London, Wedderburn has been identified as a “linchpin” of the “Atlantic Working Class” — that group of amorphous, multi-ethnic, subaltern peoples linked by the ocean in suffering and resistance around the Atlantic continents of Africa, the Americas and Europe.
- Rupert's Empire of Slime
Murdoch's Knife in the Heart of Journalism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In the name of freedom of the press Rupert’s Fox News and commentators spew verbal venom on notions that smack of socialist, pink or liberal thought – like taxing billionaires and regulating their corporate and banking behavior. Indeed, the Foxers promote billionaires not paying taxes as an example of virtue and freedom. “You don’t want your government squandering taxpayers’ money.” Sure, imagine life without cops, firemen, schools, road repair service, etc.
- The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath
Kenan Malik's "From Fatwa to Jihad" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Rushdie affair is shrouded by myths—that the hostility to The Satanic Verses was driven by theology, that all Muslims were offended by the novel, that Islam is incompatible with Western democracy, that in a plural society speech must necessarily be less free.
- Sacred Roots of A People's Music
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The goal of Timothy Brennan’s Secular Devotion is an ambitious one, to create an historical map of African culture’s influence on the social politics of the Americas in general and the United States in particular.
- The sad, sad world of Israel's big-time liars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Stuart Littlewood views Israel’s propaganda minister, the self-confessed racist and squatter Yuli Edelstein, and takes a close look at the manual to which Edelstein and other Zionist propagandists work, the “Global Language Dictionary”.
- Saving Face
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Every year in Pakistan, there are at least 100 people attacked with acid -- the majority women. Many more go unreported. This documentary Saving Face is the story of two survivors of such attacks — their battle for justice and their journey of healing. Saving Face follows their personal stories and that of the nation of Pakistan as it attempts to tackle this vexing social problem.
- Scarlet Road
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Scarlet Road follows the extraordinary work of Australian sex worker, Rachel Wotton. Impassioned about freedom of sexual expression and the rights of sex workers, she specializes in a long over-looked clientele – people with disability.
- The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Stephen Jay Gould was not only a leading paleontologist and evolutionary theorist, he was also a humanist with an enduring interest in the history and philosophy of science. The extraordinary range of Gould’s work was underpinned by a richly nuanced and deeply insightful worldview. Richard York and Brett Clark engage Gould’s science and humanism to illustrate and develop the intellectual power of Gould’s worldview, particularly with regard to the philosophy of science.
- The Secret Lives of Terrorists
Struggles that Change Little in the Real World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 European groups who took part in violence in the 1970s and 80s did not gain the wide popular support they had hoped for. Interest in terrorism has grown since 9/11, but the motivations for it are not well understood: the transition from radicalisation to violence is neither systematic nor inevitable.
- The SEIU as Case Study
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 About 40 years ago I had a job in a rubber molding factory in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where the union in the shop was the IUE (International Union of Electrical Workers). We all knew that there were negotiations going on between the Company and the Union, but we were never told what was happening.
- Selective indignation on the streets of Israel
Who are 'the people' and what is social justice? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Middle-class Israelis, aware they have lost social security and affordable housing, are protesting by pitching tents and demonstrating in city streets. But will they demand equality for all? For now, they seem intent only on their own lost privileges.
- Selective Sympathy
War's Mayhem and Murder is Somehow Less Hard to Bear than the Humane Termination of an Injured Animal Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 How strange that we as human beings can be so sensitive and warm-hearted about an animal, and yet can be so detached from reality and so compartmentalized in our emotions and our moral sense that we can simply dismiss as "collateral damage" the lives of tens, hundreds or even thousands of innocent men, women and children who, for cold, calculating geopolitical reasons of dubious merit, will be killed by our or our allies' actions.
- 9/11 and the Clash of Atrocities
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Responding to the terrorist attacks of September 2001, Against the Current’s “Letter from the Editors” made an impassioned plea that the alternative to war was a political movement for social justice. Like many on the left, the editors pointed out that only an agenda for social justice could save the people of Afghanistan and Iraq from America’s military wrath and help curb the attraction of individual terrorist solutions.
- Serious Guns and White Terrorism
Two Unasked Questions in Tucson Mass Murder Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Sexual Prey in the Saudi Jungle
Lorena's Tale Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The working conditions of many domestics, which include 18-22 hour days and violent beatings, cannot but be described except as virtual slavery. Apparently among the items of the "job description" of a domestic slave in Saudi is being forced to minister to the sexual needs of the master of the household.
- Shining a light on the black bloc, part 1: Italian autonomism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The combination of autonomist thuggery and Red Brigade terror had a lot to do with the implosion of the Italian left. While the Italian bourgeoisie was ready to carry out a repression even if the left had been far more intelligently organized, this was no excuse for carrying out tactics calculated to drive the average working class person into the arms of the government in the name of “security”. Revolutionary politics is really a project that is designed to win people to a cause. This involves patient explanation. Once someone develops a revolutionary consciousness, there is little that the state can do to vanquish it. A broken window can easily be replaced, but a revolutionary mind is permanent.
- The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a lucrative way to cash in on the incarceration surplus: private for-profit prisons.
- Shoot the Messenger
WikiLeaks: Journalism or Espionage? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In setting up WikiLeaks, Julian Assange wanted to bring to light secret agreements between countries. That he succeeded is clear from the number of companies and governments who have tried to shut him down.
- Shot in the Head
Gabrielle Giffords, Tom Hurndall and Palestinian Children Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In the past 10 years Israeli forces have killed at least 255 Palestinian minors by fire to the head, and the number may actually be greater, since in many instances the specific bodily location of the lethal trauma is unlisted. In addition, this statistic does not include the many more Palestinian youngsters shot in the head by Israeli soldiers who survived, in one form or another.
- Should we 'take down' the banks or try to save the best of capitalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 If Canada is to rid itself of the destructive neoliberal Conservatives, perhaps the best that we can do, given present conditions, is to push the New Democrats and Liberals to embrace some aspects of traditional liberalism and combine those policies with some tough, new measures to protect the public.
- The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In what ways does the Occupy movement of 2011 resemble the French Situationists of the 1960s?
- The Situationists and the Occupation Movements: 1968/2011
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- The 60-Year Unemployment Scandal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites.
- Slavs and Tatars Presents Molla Nasreddin
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Molla Nasreddin was an Azerbaijani magazine published from 1906 to 1930 in Azeri, a Turkish dialect. Named after a traditional figure of fun, the text and numerous illustrations lampoon hypocrites of the period in the clergy and the government. It has been reissued by a group of artists called Slavs and Tatars.
- Smoking Typewriters
The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Describes the emergence of an underground press in the 1960s. Writers and participants reflected the spirit of cultural and political protest and encouraged the development of the New Left's highly democratic "movement culture".
- Smoking Typewriters
The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Provides an examination of the underground press in the 1960s; offers new interpretation of the New Left and explores the origins of 'zines and new media.
- So Much Aid, So Little Development
Stories from Pakistan Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An explanation of why so much international aid gets "wasted", with a focus on Pakistan.
- Socialist Register 2011
Volume 47: The Crisis This Time Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2011
- Soft-Powering Cuba
Regime-Change in a Box Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 How the U.S. uses "soft power" to undermine governments abroad and democracy at home.
- Wilebaldo Solano, 1916-2010
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Wilebaldo Solano, the last member of the original leadership of the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (POUM — Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), died in Barcelona on September 7, 2010, at 94. As an anti-Stalinist communist party, the POUM helped lead the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
- Some Big Things Ha-Joon Chang Doesn't Tell You About Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Chang exposes deadly falsehoods in many of the prevalent neoliberalism's supposedly self-evident "free market" truths. But Chang's book is plagued by key difficulties that belie its claim to iconoclasm, suggesting Chang's own conservative adherence to dominant Western power structures and doctrines.
- Some thoughts on Whiteness and the 99%
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Someone's Watching You!
From Micropchips in your Underwear to Satellites Monitoring Your Every Move, Find Out Who's Tracking You and What You Can Do about It Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An expose and explanation of the little-known secret surveillance programs run by both the public and private sectors, including practical steps on how to keep your private life private.
- Soundbitten
The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Sobieraj argues that activist groups' efforts to get media attention for themselves and their concerns often ends up undermining their capacity to communicate with ordinary people.
- Sources (portal for journalists and writers) - Wikipedia article - Russian
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- South Africa: Early Years of the Communist Party
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A brief history of the beginnings of the Community Party of South Africa.
- SPAIN: Women's Crises
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Over the past three years there have been numerous debates within the Spanish political and social left about the impact of the current economic crisis on working people, and the (in)efficacy of the measures the government adopted to ameliorate them. There has not been much talk, however, about the specific consequences that both the crisis and governmental response have had on women.
- Staff at 'Grinch' KPMG well looked after while advocating 'workers' comp' cuts
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 KPMG – which operates across Canada and internationally – performs “hatchet jobs” for governments – often governments that don’t have the nerve to take the lead themselves when they want cutbacks.
- Statement by Jewish Activists and Organizations active in BDS against Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A Jewish response to the February 2011 Statement of Jewish Zionist Organizations on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
- Stieg Larsson in the Struggle
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Stieg Larsson came to support the Vietnamese liberation struggle in 1968, when he was only 14 years old. He joined the Kommunistiska Arbetarförbundet — (The Communist Workers League), the Swedish section of the Fourth International –– around 1974 in the northern town of Umeå. There he distributed the party’s paper for soldiers –Röd Soldat (Red Soldier) — among the conscripts in his infantry regiment.
- The Stones Cry Out: The Power of the Occupation in the City Square
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Gathering in the city, taking strength from its history, remembering its past and our past, we stand firm.
- Stop Signs
Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A global ecological critique of the American automobile addiction.
- Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline!
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Keystone XL is a proposed 1700-mile pipeline that would transport tar sands oil (also called oil sands) from Alberta, Canada into the United States, crossing six states from Montana to Texas and Louisiana. The proposed pipeline, which has a price tag of $7 billion, would add to the extensive existing network of oil pipelines, carrying tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
- Strategies of Resistance: Challenging the Cultural Disempowerment of Women
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The article deals with the strategies used to advance women’s rights in the face of culturally justified disempowerment.
- A Strategy for Antiwar Organizing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 There is a paradox here: The organized antiwar movement’s effectiveness has declined, even while public opinion polls showed that antiwar sentiment among the public as a whole has grown steadily. A movement which declines while opportunities for growth are becoming more favourable is a peculiar one indeed.
- Strategy and tactics: how the left can organise to transform society
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 John Rees draws on the experience of recent mass movements and past revolutions to suggest ways in which the left can maximize the effectiveness of all those who want to transform society.
- Strike Wave Sweeps Brazil
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Workers in Brazil—in heavy industry, services, the public sector, and agriculture—are involved in a series of strikes and mass protests such as the country hasn’t seen in decades.
- Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Support the New Freedom Riders
End US Support for Israeli Apartheid Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Palestinian Freedom Riders are seeking their rights to be treated as equal human beings free to move about in their own land.
- The Swing of That Truncheon Thing
The Nature of the Beast Revealed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Historically, police violence is a fact of life in every society. In a society based on a capitalist economy, the police serve those that have the most money and property. When the authorities and their policies are under attack, the police will always be called in to protect them. No one should be shocked when the police act brutally. There is a reason the most thuggish of the uniforms are often the ones called to disperse angry crowds.
- 'Taking back the media', effective campaigning required to empower Progressive Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Taking liberties: When elite representatives define 'national security'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Most reporters assigned to the national security beat are not physically embedded within the RCMP and CSIS in the way those covering the occupation of Afghanistan seem to become stenographers for the Canadian military. But they tend to write as if they were, buying the assumptions created and sustained by those who benefit most from them while generally ignoring the fact that these agencies have a historical profile that reads "pathological liar."
- Taksim is not Tahrir—yet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Much of the talk of “neoliberalism” coming from such leftist organizations is often a call for a return to state-administered enterprises under “workers’ control”, which is nothing more than bureaucratic state capitalism. It should be remembered that even under the most intense periods of nationalization in Turkey, often glorified among the social democrats and the like, was fought against by the working class.
- Tales of Tyrants: Ben Ali, Mubarak & Suleiman
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 On the overthrow of Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak.
- Tearing Away the Veils: The Communist Manifesto
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 At the dawn of the twentieth century, there were workers who were ready to die with the Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.
- The 10 Dumbest, Most Offensive Political Ads in Recent Memory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Not a single election cycle goes by without some attempt to use fear of the "other" to win votes. Sadly, the results are sometimes successful.
- Ten Points for the Occupied Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Against Wall Street’s culture of economic exploitation, environmental degradation and human oppression we stand together to testify that another world is possible, a decent and humane world, a democratic world of liberty, dignity and solidarity.
- Ten Years Later: We're Less Free
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The abuse of government/police power in this country is not a new or recent phenomenon — as evidenced by the government’s court-sanctioned internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during WWII, the red scare of the 1940s-1950s to repress the labor movement and other progressive causes, the use of grand juries and COINTELPRO during the ’60s to repress the civil rights and anti-war movements.
- Tennessee: Another Battle Front
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As attacks on public sector workers heat up around the nation, Tennessee has experienced its own battles over collective bargaining — even though few segments of the public sector workforce belong to unions.
- The Tent Intifada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The bug that had spread from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Del Sol in Madrid now landed in Tel Aviv. The slogan coined in Cairo, "Social Justice!" became the main slogan in Israel.
- A Theater for the Poor
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Each phase in the nine-year-history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) now reads like a chapter from a cautionary tale for future generations of young radicals.
- Theses for Discussion
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 Programmatic points.
- Theses for Discussion - Korean text
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- They Found Nothing. Nothing.
The IAEA, Iran And ‘Fantasy Land’ Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What is so breathtaking is that the apparent consensus on Iran, like the case against Iraq, is a fraud.
- Thinking About Equality
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Back in 1937, as fascism seemed poised to seize power in much of Europe, George Orwell noted in A Road to Wigan Pier that a “genuinely revolutionary socialism” would have no chance of reversing the tide unless its supporters put aside their factionalism, ceased using jargon that few people could understand, and mobilized around propaganda stressing justice, liberty, and the plight of the unemployed.
- This Is What Complicity Looks Like: Palestine and the Silencing Campaign on Campus
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The campaign to silence Palestine solidarity reaches its annual crescendo during Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW).
- 'This Time We Went Too Far'
Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 For the Palestinians who live in the narrow coastal strip of Gaza, the Israeli invasion of December 2008 was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions: In the 22-day-long action 1,400 Gazans were killed, several hundred on the first day alone. And yet, while nothing should diminish Palestinian suffering through those frightful days, it is possible something redemptive is emerging from the tragedy of Gaza. For, as Norman Finkelstein details, the profound injustice of the Israeli assault was widely recognized by bodies that it is impossible to brand as partial or extremist.
- Three Ways Labor Can Fight Back
Time to Declare War Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Unions need to streamline their message, make it less cerebral and more visceral.
- Three Years After "Yes We Can"
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 No, he didn't. That’s the epitaph on the tombstone of liberal and left-wing hopes that greeted the historic election of Barack Obama in November 2008. Did anyone imagine then that the election itself, more than anything he’d do in office, would be the high point of the Obama presidency? Or that three years later, the power of “Yes we can” would be the eruption of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) spreading to one city after another — essentially nothing to do with President Obama?
- Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House
Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Diversity of tactics does not mean that anything goes and that democratic decision-making doesn't apply. If you want to be part of a movement, treat the others with respect; don't spring unwanted surprises on them, particularly surprises that sabotage their own tactics -- and chase away the real diversity of the movement.
- To Interpret the World and To Change It
Interview with David McNally Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Published in Socialist Studies, 71/2 (Spring/Fall 2011)
- To Rebuild Teamster Power
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An interview with Sandy Pope. Sandy Pope is the candidate for General President of the Teamsters Union in the election this coming October, running against incumbent James Hoffa Jr. She’s a longtime member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and president of Local 805 in New York City.
- To The American Media: Time To Face The Reality Of Election Rigging
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The gruesome truth is that American elections can be rigged and are being rigged because the American media treats election rigging as something that -- all evidence notwithstanding -- could never happen here. Period, end of story, move on.
- Tokyo Letter: After the Disaster
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Just before 3pm on March 11th, I was standing in the intersection of two small streets in central Tokyo, saying goodbye to my partner before leaving for a work trip to the United States. Earthquakes are common in Japan, but we knew right away this one was different. The earth rumbled and rolled, shifting back and forth and around, the intensity rising and falling and rising again.
- Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 An expose of the environmental and human costs of turning tomatos into an industrial product.
- Toward A Queer Marxism?
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Scholarly approaches to sexuality since the 1980s have become increasingly divorced from practical sexual politics, and both have largely given up on earlier attempts to engage with Marxism. Now this may be changing. A stimulating new book by Kevin Floyd maintains that people in queer studies are paying more attention to Marxism’s “explanatory power.” From the activist side, Sherry Wolf of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has made an impressive effort to sum up LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) theory and practice from a Marxist perspective.
- The Tragic Ironies of Breivik's Terror
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We need to challenge neo-fascism and anti-Muslim bigotry, just as we need to challenge Islamism. But in both cases we also need to keep a sense of perspective about the nature of the threat.
- Traite du Savoir-Vivre for the Occupy Wall Street Generations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Once upon a time, twenty thousand people descended on Wall Street, the capitol of capital, occupied it nonviolently, and won exactly what they demanded. This is not a fairy tale. It really happened. This is the story of how it happened.
- Triangle Fire Remembered
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 March 25 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 145 workers, mostly young women immigrants. The factory, located on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch building near Washington Square in New York City, employed 500 workers.
- Trotskyism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Tunisia, Then Egypt
Why Now? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Under what circumstances does passivity turn into revolt?
- The Tunisian Intifada
"Yezzi Fock!" (It's Enough!) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- 12 most absurd laws used to stifle occupy movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Here are 12 desperate and unsuccessful measures the authorities are using to discourage, deter and crack down on peaceful protests.
- 12 Most Absurd Laws Used to Stifle the Occupy Wall St. Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As Occupy Wall Street protests spring up in cities across the country, authorities are thinking up creative ways to contain this peaceful and inspiring uprising. Although laws and municipal ordinances vary from city to city, there is a consistency in the tactics being used to stifle the movement.
- Two Systems of Justice
One for the Corporate Class; One for the Rest of Us Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 We have two systems of justice. One for the corporate class. And one for the rest of us.
- The UAW vs. Indian Casinos
Which Side Are You On Boys Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The issues raised by Indian gambling casinos and their opposition to labour unions.
- UK and France: far right’s opposing fortunes
Le Pen stands for president, Griffin can’t get elected Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 France’s Front National is pushing to become part of the political mainstream, while the UK’s British National Party has returned to the fringes.
- Una diferente forma de democracia
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, the New Left, and the Hip counterculture in Toronto, 1965-1975
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Published: 2021
- Under the Red Star (Punatähden alla)
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Under the Red Star (a.k.a. Big Finn Hall), is a feature length docu-drama, in Finnish and English, about the vibrant culture and politics at the heart of Canada’s most significant worker’s hall, in Thunder Bay.
- Understanding Class and Species
A Lesson From Thaddeus Russell Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 University remains a rigidly class-based institution—not only in what it teaches but also in how it operates.
- Understanding the Egyptian Uprising For Democracy, Report from the Ground
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 After decades of autocratic rule, state propaganda, institutionalized government corruption, police brutality, and suppression of basic freedoms, frustrated Egyptians are taking to the streets seeking change and demanding democracy, dignity, and civic reforms.
- An Unfinished Revolution
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A study of Marx's analysis of the American Civil War as a conflict about slavery, not tarrfifs. Marx saw the north as a bourgeois republic, and the south as expansionist.
- The Unfolding Arab Uprisings
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Suzi Weissman interviews Mark LeVine.
- The Union in Academia
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Cary Nelson is a distinguished professor of English and the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a group that is part professional association and part union. This book is perhaps half about academic freedom and half about the AAUP, and Nelson’s struggles to have it become a less staff-dominated institution.
- The UN & the Future of Palestine
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 “You can't make this stuff up,” the Prime Minister of Israel lectured the UN General Assembly. Binyamin Netanyahu was referring to the history of Libya under Qaddafi, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, chairing UN Commissions on Human Rights and Disarmament respectively.
- Unlocking Uncle Sam's House of Horrors
Smashing Plato's Cave Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The effects of Wikileaks in showing the public what is really happening.
- The Unnatural History of the Sea
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A history of the commercial fishery and an update on its precarious and untenable siituation. The age old delusion that the sea is an inexhaustible resource has resulted in a fishing arms race that could spell extinction for some species.
- Unpacking for a Disaster
What You Need to Survive the Unexpected Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In crises, for some authorities, the media, and many outside observers, civilization tends to consist mainly of property relations, and so they pay more attention to whether someone’s taking crackers than whether a grandmother is dying in the wreckage (while law enforcement goes after the cracker-taker).
- 'Upstanding Citizens' Escape Justice in Tory 'In-and-Out' Scandal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The "In-and-Out" Scandal: Case should have proceeded against 'Upstanding citizens'.
This is a story about illegal activities, deceit and lying involving an overzealous group of Canadians who seemed prepared to do just about anything to accomplish their mission – win a federal election.
- The Urge to Surge
War is a Drug Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Englehardt describes the effects of the US surge addiction with the military issue as an example.
- US and Colombia Escalate Attacks on Liberation Church
In the Lion's Den Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The war on liberation theology.
- Us and Them
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 To move beyond wishing and hoping, our self organization has to overcome and overwhelm the limits, the divisions, the separations of workers and poor by categories of “organized,” “unorganized,” “immigrant,” “native,” “legal,” “illegal. No one’s illegal. Nobody’s organized until everybody’s organized.
- U.S. Government Assassination Plots
An appendiex to Killing Hope, by William Blum Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A list of prominent foreign individuals whose assassination (or planning for same) the United States has been involved in since the end of the Second World War.
- US Justice on Trial
Why Cameron Should Tell Obama to Get Stuffed Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The US justice system and extradition treaty.
- US Teaching "Counterinsurgency" Courses To Mexican Military in Drug War
State Department Report Details Special Forces "Mobile Training Teams" South of the Border Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 To fight the drug war in Mexico the US military conducted specialized trainings both inside and outside of the country with a focus on combating "narco-terrorism" and "counterinsurgency" conflicts.
- Venezuela from Below
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A review of Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle by Rafael Uzcategui
- The Video Activist Handbook
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Explains the basic skills and know-how required for those beginning video activism,as well as a wealth of ideas on video strategies to those with some prior experience, and numerous examples of contemporary video activism from around the world.
- 'Vietnam: It's our war too'
The Antiwar movement in Canada: 1963 - 1975 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 PhD Thesis, University of New Brunswick, 2011
- A View from Israel
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Michael Warschawski, a founder of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, spoke with The Real News Network on Israeli reactions to the Egyptian uprising.
- A View of the Occupy Wall Street Movement from the Inside
A Participant's Critique of the Occupation of Wall Street Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 The Occupy Wall Street movement was supposed to be a revolt against a hierarchal, dehumanizing oligopoly. In reality, all that was created was a microcosm of the same system, but with new leaders. Like our nation's leaders, Occupy Wall Street’s leaders listened to everyone’s grievances, then decided upon a pre-determined plan of action that cleverly borrowed the language of their constituency.
- Violence Goes to College
Are We Going to Hell? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The priorities of the campus are clear. An Assistant Professor earns an annual salary in the low $60,000 range; a Lieutenant in the campus safety department (the man who fired the pepper gas, for instance) brings home $110,000.
- Wall Street occupation ignites mass movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The simple, horizontal structure originally created around a GA using modified consensus has become a barrier to practical and political work by the occupiers and those involved through working groups.
- Wall Street's Role in Narco-Trafficking
"Business is Booming" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels.
- War Colleges
The Politics of Militarization and Corporatization in Higher Education Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 One consequence of the increasing militarization of American society can be seen in changes that have taken place in public and higher education. Schools have become the testing grounds for new modes of security and military-style authority.
- War of the Killer Robots
Four Realities About Drones Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Drones are "killer robots," they do make war easy and game-like, and therefore likelier, drone strikes do kill too many civilians and they do violate the International Law of Armed Conflict. I am puzzled and disturbed that some feel that the debate over the use of drones in warfare can be enhanced by denying these facts.
- Was There an Alternative?
Looking Back on 9/11, a Decade Later Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered.
- Wealth, Illth, And Net Welfare
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Wellbeing should be counted in net terms -- that is to say we should consider not only the accumulated stock of wealth but also that of "illth;" and not only the annual flow of goods but also that of "bads." The fact that we have to stretch English usage to find words like illth and bads with which to name the negative consequences of production that should be subtracted from the positive consequences, is indicative of our having ignored the realities for which these words are the necessary names.
- Wealth in America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The greatest wealth transfer in America history goes on – into the bank accounts of the nation's 2% upper crust from the increasingly threadbare pockets of the lower 85% - to the sounds of silence.
- Leonard Irving Weinglass
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Len was not a ’60s radical. He was something more unusual, a ’50s radical. He developed his values, critical thinking and world view in a time when non-conforming was rare. He told a newspaper interviewer in Santa Barbara in 1980 that “I would classify myself as a radical American. I am anti-capitalist in this sense — I don’t believe capitalism is now compatible with democracy.”
- The well-intentioned dolts putting a price on nature are delivering it into the hands of business
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It’s the definitive neoliberal triumph: the monetisation and marketisation of nature, its reduction to a tradeable asset. Once you have surrendered it to the realm of Pareto optimisation and Kaldor-Hicks compensation, everything is up for grabs. The well-intentioned dolts who produced the government’s assessment, have crushed the natural world into a column of figures. Now it can be swapped for money.
- What Did They Know...?
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What did they know and when did we know it?
- What Every Environmentalist Needs To Know about Capitalism
A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 A manifesto for those environmentalists who reject schemes of “green capitalism” or piecemeal reform. Magdoff and Foster argue that efforts to reform capitalism along environmental lines or rely solely on new technology to avert catastrophe misses the point. The main cause of the looming environmental disaster is the driving logic of the system itself, and those in power — no matter how “green” — are incapable of making the changes that are necessary.
- What happened to the SWP (U.S.)?
Recent memoirs stir discussion Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The goal of socialist political cadres must be the development of a broad team leadership working together in a democratically functioning organization, practically united in strategic perspective and tactical projects, allowing multiple tendencies and pluralism, thus balancing out strengths and weaknesses over time and in different places.
- What We Got Away With
Rochdale College and Canadian Art in the Sixties Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 MA Thesis, Concordia, 2011
- When Push Comes to Shove
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When the police are ordered to move against the OWS demonstrators, we must move to counter the police. Our response should be that workers in all different kinds of jobs act immediately to interrupt business as usual-regardless of what union leaders say or do. For example, transit workers should refuse any request to assist in the transport of individuals who are arrested. Truck drivers should refuse all deliveries to city agencies-other than those providing health care or emergency services. The more interruptions, the better!
- When Qaddafi Was Our Friend
The CIA's Libyan Helpers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 It was counterterrorism cooperation, together with Qaddafi’s abandonment of his nuclear ambitions, that cemented U.S./Libyan ties. Qaddafi’s intelligence services opened their files to the CIA, were given CIA training, and took in the CIA’s prisoners.
- Where Heaven Meets Hell
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Drawing strength from their families and their Muslim faith, Indonesian sulfur miners face gruelling labour and treacherous conditions on an active volcano, while struggling to overcome the desperate poverty and illiteracy that plague their community.
- Where is Phil Ochs When We Really Need Him?
There But For Fortune Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Where is politics?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 This question might seem odd to some. To seasoned libertarian communists, the answer 'everyday life' trips off the tongue without a second thought. But it seems like a productive question to work through in light of recent events, from the parliamentary expenses scandal to the August riots to the #occupy movement. So, where is politics?
- A Whiff of Jim Crow
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Republican party and its rightwing base are on a concerted drive to suppress the vote in coming elections. The targets are African Americans, other ethnic minorities, the elderly and young.
- Who Speaks for the Climate?
Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 This book helps students, academic researchers and interested members of the public explore how the media portray climate change and how they shape the spectrum of possibilities for policy action. Providing a bridge between academic research and real world developments, Boykoff makes sense of media reporting of climate change.
- Who threatens us most -- peaceful campaigners or a private militia run by police chiefs?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The people challenging corporate power are often defamed as destructive anarchists. Yet they are seeking to defend the fabric of our lives from the anarchic destruction of market fundamentalism. The police, on the other hand, are fighting – often without obvious justification – to shield destructive companies from both unlawful and lawful challenges. They are defending neoliberalism’s atomising, kleptocratic projects from those who question them.
- The Whole World is Watching
Chinese Diggers? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Thousands of villagers at Wukan, in China’s Guangdong province, are protesting the theft of their communal land by a corrupt local government in collusion with developers.
- Whose side are you on? The mundane decline of labour history
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The following polemical intervention by Humphrey McQueen is published as a contribution to understanding the nature, and practice, of radical history.
- Why aren't people voting?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 There is much ado about "voter apathy", with a focus on young people, who in creative and desperate ways are urged and "mobbed" to vote. Unfortunately, much of this effort is barking up the wrong tree: unless we can guarantee that hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are eager to vote can actually do so, we are subjecting them to a nasty piece of Catch 22 where the victims of voter obstruction get the blame for being apathetic and not doing their civic duty.
- Why Is BDS A Moral Duty Today?
A Response To Bernard-Henri Levy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The reality of the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
- Why Kosovo But Not Palestine?
The Right to Exist Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Barak Obama pretends that he is vetoing UN recognition of a Palestinian state because it did not come about as a result of negotations. But meanwhile the US has recognized Kosovo, which came into being without negotations, and in violation of international law.
- Why Marx Was Right
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Eagleton takes common objections to Marxism and demonstrates how and why they are wrong.
- Why No Reporters in Suez?
The Real Revolution Will Not Be Televised Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 What is happening in Tahrir Square Cairo has been built on the backs of millions of Egyptian workers who waged 3,000 strikes over the past eight years.
- Why Supermarket Tomatoes Suck
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Excerpted from the book "Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit".
- Why the Revolt in Egypt?
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Why has the Arab world suddenly erupted in revolution from Tunisia to Egypt, from Bahrain to Yemen? Above all, why Egypt, the largest and most important of the Arab nations?
- Why We Loved the Zapatistas
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2011 It would be absurd to admonish the Zapatistas for failing to overcome generations of poverty in a single sweep, but is it too much to ask their privileged supporters abroad to pay more attention to the material conditions in Chiapas and less on the innovative ways they use their laptops to conjure “resistance”?
- Why Wikileaks Matters
The Lies of Diplomats Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 On the secret diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks.
- A Wikileak on the US and Al-Jazeera
Blaming and (Killing) the Messenger Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 A Wikileaks-released cable from the U.S. embassy in Doha, Qatar, shows that U.S. officials were angry with Al Jazeera in the wake of Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza, because, alone of news networks the world over, al-Jazeera had actually shown what was happening on the ground to Gazan civilians besieged by an unrelenting Israeli air, artillery, and ground attack.
- Wikileaks, the US, Sweden and Devil's Island
The Anti-Empire Report Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
- Wilebaldo Solano As I Knew Him
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 I first met Wilebaldo Solano in Paris in 1997 after corresponding with him since the late 1980s. I had translated an article Wilebaldo wrote about Victor Serge and the POUM,(1) and finally meeting him was an inexplicably emotional occasion, a moment of warmth, solidarity and enthusiasm for us (Wilebaldo, his wife Maria Teresa and myself).
- A Winter's Tale Told in Memoirs
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The Socialist Workers (SWP), now a curious sidebar in the history of radicalism, is a linear descendant of the political movement initiated in the United States by pro-Bolshevik followers of Leon Trotsky on the eve of the Great Depression. For 45 years, until the mid-1970s, the movement associated with the SWP was at the crossroads of the Far Left.
- Wisconsin and Beyond
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As the last decade or more have demonstrated, unions don’t grow incrementally as a result of their patient, even persistence efforts to recruit. Rather, unions grow more or less rapidly in periods of intense conflict and labor upheaval. Such was the clear experience of the 1930s. In a somewhat more uneven fashion, the period from the mid-1960s through the 1970s saw rising numbers of strikes, increased rank and file rebellion, and the addition of four million members to the ranks of organized labor.
- With My Heart in Yambo
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2011 Twenty-four years ago director Fernanda Restrepo's two teenage brothers disappeared. A year later, the family finally learned the worst possible news: the brothers had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Ecuadorean police, and then dumped. Restrepo embarks on the painful journey of recounting her family’s story, and documents yet one more search in Lake Yambo, where the boys’ bodies were dumped.
- Women and Class
Towards a Socialist Feminism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Draper situates the origins of the modern feminist movement in the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century.
- Women in the Paris Commune
Against The Current vol. 153 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 During the Seige of Paris, women organized their own Vigilance Committee in Montmartre, the political center of the working class. La Révolution politique et sociale devoted a major portion of its pages to reporting on the Vigilance Committee and a variety of women’s clubs and societies. This included the Union des Femmes, the women’s union that was a section of the First International.
- Women, Revolution and the Future
Against The Current vol. 151 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Valentine Moghadam is director of the Women’s Studies Program and a professor of sociology at Purdue University. She responded to some questions from Against the Current early on February 11, 2011, shortly before the announcement of Hosni Mubarak’s resignation.
- Work
Capitalism. Economics. Resistance Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 About work in capitalist society.
- Workers and Environmentalists Unite!
Obama Has Betrayed Both Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 When there are zero jobs available, any job will do. This fact has been exploited by corporations now re-labeling themselves ”job creators,” since being a job creator in a time of depression brings a religious status similar to a rain god during a drought. Democrats and Republicans have lavished eternal praise on the “job creators” and in consequence have created a political atmosphere that is rabidly pro-corporate “job creators” and anti-everything else. In practice this means that ANY new law or regulation that hinders the power or profits of “job creating” corporations is instantly attacked as a “job killer.”
- Workers’ Assemblies: A Way to Regroup the Left?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Herman Rosenfeld is a member of the Canadian Socialist Project and the General Toronto Workers’ Assembly, a new initiative aiming to reinvigorate working class and radical politics in the city. He spoke to Tom Denning about the methods and activities of GTWA and the challenges it faces.
- Workers Guarantee the Egyptian Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The middle class, which sacrificed much in this astonishing revolution, faces the task of choosing an ally at this critical juncture. If these young, educated people choose the army and the Muslim Brotherhood (who are also part of the middle class), the result will be the foreclosure of freedom. However, if they choose their natural ally, the working class, they will discover a powerful partner in protecting the achievements of the revolution and in building a new democracy.
- Workers' Revolts of the 1970s
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 In my world as a teenager becoming politically aware in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the issues that mattered most were the war in Vietnam and race relations at my school. The events that shaped my high school years included fights between Black and white students, watching the families of white friends leave the city for Ferndale and Oak Park, the racially charged mayoral race in 1969, the election of the city’s first Black mayor in 1973, and my own increasing involvement in the movement to end the war in Southeast Asia.
- Working in the Shadows
A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 Combining personal narrative with investigative reporting, Thompson shines a light on the underside of the American economy, exposing harsh working conditions, union busting, and lax government enforcement — while telling the stories of workers forced to live with chronic pain in the pursuit of $8 an hour.
- Workmates: direct action workplace organising on the London Underground
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 An online pamphlet detailing resistance in the late 1990s by London Underground employees to outsourcing via a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) scheme. Workers organized outside the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) to form a new collective, dubbed the Workmates.
- A World at Financial War
Will Greece Let EU Central Bankers Destroy Democracy? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The crisis for Greece – as for Iceland, Ireland and debt-plagued economies capped by the United States – is occurring as bank lobbyists demand that “taxpayers” pay for the bailouts of bad speculations and government debts stemming largely from tax cuts for the rich and for real estate, shifting the fiscal burden as well as the debt burden onto labor and industry. The financial sector’s growing power to achieve this tax favoritism is crippling economies, driving them further into reliance on yet more debt financing to remain solvent.
- World Development An essential text
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 The ultimate introduction for school students of World Development, Geography and General Studies.
- Wrestling with Ellison
Against The Current vol. 155 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Nathaniel Mill's review of Barbara Foley’s Wrestling With the Left (ATC 152, May-June 2011) raises a number of very important issues for understanding the politics of Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece, and by extension 20th-century African-American literature as a whole. In particular, Mills’ criticisms of Foley’s neglect of potentially liberatory moments in the text foregrounds the crucial issue of how revolutionary critics should go about the task of investigating novelistic politics.
- The Years of 9/11
Against The Current vol. 154 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 The decade that opened with the attacks of September 11, 2011 may have symbolically closed with the elite U.S. death-squad assassination of Osama bin Laden. But the turmoil of these post-9/11 years, notably the self-inflicted wounds of U.S. capitalism, have exceeded the terrorist mastermind’s wildest dreams. There are the wars that George W. Bush, with the support of congressional Democrats, launched in Afghanistan and Iraq — wars that the government promised wouldn’t have to be paid for — leading to a major U.S. defeat in Iraq, a defeat all the more damaging because it is not acknowledged as such, and a quagmire in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
- The Young Activist's Guide to Building a Green Movement and Changing the World
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2011 If you want to make a significant and sustainable impact on the health of our planet, this powerful and practical guide can help. Author and activist Sharon J. Smith shares proven strategies and lessons learned from the winners of Earth Island Institute’s Brower Youth Awards—America’s top honor for young green leaders. Here are all the tools you need—from planning a campaign and recruiting supporters to raising money and attracting media attention—to turn your ideas into actions and make changes that matter.
- Youth Subdued
8 Ways Young Americans Have Been Dominated Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. But now young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.
- Zionism's Many "Returns"
Against The Current vol. 152 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 Zionist historians — like their counterparts in Australia, South Africa, the United States and other settler societies — hold the dispossession of the Palestinian people to be extraneous to their general history, rather than the integral part that it is. Studying Israel’s foundational myths and historiography through the lens of comparative settler colonialism allows Gabriel Piterberg to keep the Palestinian half of the relational history ever present.
- Zizek and the Gaza Flotilla
Doing a Full Monty for Tel Aviv Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011 As long as we misunderstand the importance of Palestine for the world’s future, we shall be trapped in an endless “Middle East Crisis”.
- Zuccotti Park's Burgeoning Micro-Neighborhoods May Indicate Deeper Divisions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2011
2010
- About Connexions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Published: 2011
- Abraham Serfaty, communist, anti-Zionist, democracy activist, Moroccan Jew, dies aged 84
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Towering Moroccan activist Abraham Serfaty died Thursday aged 84, after a lifelong struggle for freedom, first against the French colonial rulers and then against King Hassan II's monarchy.
- The Absurdity of Hi-Tech Servitude
What You Sacrifice to Hold a Job in the New Economy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In terms of "jobs," war is evidently a burgeoning growth-industry. Back in the "Homeland," the demands of "internal-security" offer new openings for countless other "surplus-persons" in need of some "employment"—as law-enforcement and anti-terrorism personnel, prison guards—or prison inmates.
- Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-Capitalist Formations
Luxemburg and Marx on the non-Western World Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- An Act of State Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We have to appeal to the core of people who have already been active on one level or another around the Palestinian question, or those who are already convinced, to re-galvanize the movement, and go out and convince yet wider layers of people. We must argue the Palestinian case, and also push the case more generally to very wide layers of people.
- African-American Socialist Pioneer
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America, Winston James singled out Hubert Henry Harrison for his “pioneering role in what became known as the New Negro radicalism of the 1920s.” Yet, James noted, Harrison remained an understudied figure who had not been the subject of a major biography.
- African Americans' Forced Labor
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 As Americans we are taught that slavery was abolished after the Civil War. A close reading of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution reveals, however, that this was not exactly the case. Although this amendment did outlaw slavery for the majority of American citizens, anyone convicted of a crime could still, quite legally, be kept in a state of bondage without claims on civil liberties and without remuneration for their forced labor.
- AFSCME 3299 Fights Back
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In February 2009, four months after the economy crashed, the members of AFSCME Local 3299 ratified a contract with the University of California that has rightfully been called “historic” for the relative gains won by the union on wages and the wage structure. The union represents service and patient-care technical workers, who struggled for more than 18 months to win this agreement.
- After Oaxaca's Popular Rebellion
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 “Think about it,” a popular bumper sticker read, “6 more years would be 86.” On July 4, 2010, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca held statewide elections. Despite open vote-buying and other fraud perpetrated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), it was not enough to ensure victory on this occasion, thereby ending 81 years of uninterrupted PRI rule in Oaxaca.
- After Obama's Health Care Law
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 How can the single-payer health care movement move ahead after Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? The right wing wants to repeal the law, which it sees as “intrusive big government.” Single-payer activists are rightly angry that the bill fails to produce the universal national health insurance that our society desperately needs, and instead provides massive subsidies to the private corporate insurance vampires.
- After the Democrats' Debacle
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 How far have politics “moved to the right” in the United States — and for how long? Although we’re going to press before the November 2 midterm elections, you’re probably reading it after the anticipated Democratic debacle and the attendant speculation about the viability of the Obama presidency. Whether the Democrats have retained slim majority control of one or both houses of Congress obviously matters for some legislative purposes and power relations, but our view of the broad trends is pretty much the same either way.
- After the Floods, the IMF
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Pakistan in recent years has found itself in the headlights of the international press with increasingly regularity. As Obama’s surge into Af-Pak has taken shape over the last 12 months, the country and its people have been thrust to the forefront of political discussion for forces left, right and center.
- After the Wheeler Occupation
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 One astute observer of the Wheeler occupation noted that the events of November 20 represented a synthesis of the twin strategies of the current student movement: “popular organizing” in the form of general assemblies on the one hand, and a “militant resistance” enamored of occupations on the other.
- All That We Share
A Field Guide to the Commons Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons is a wake-up call that will inspire you to see the world in a new way. As soon as you realize that some things belong to everyone -- water, for instance, or the Internet or human knowledge -- you become a commoner, part of a movement that's reshaping how we will solve the problems facing us in the twenty-first century.
- American Taliban
How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 America's main international enemy- Islamic radicalism - favors theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, reviles homosexuality, subverts science and education, and reveres force over diplomacy. Markos Moulitsas shows how the American right shares those very same traits. He argues that our domestic jihadists are a greater threat to American democracy than any Islamic terrorist.
- Americans talk about love: How we chose an open marriage
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Bowe presents an American couple's conversation revealing their history of polyamory.
- America's Complicity in Evil
Barbarism on the High Seas Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Once again the US government has permitted the Israeli state to murder good people known for their moral conscience. The Israeli state has declared that anyone with a moral conscience is an enemy of Israel.
- Amid Censorship, Israel's Media Does Its Part
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel's media has once again chosen the low road, the one carefully couched in patriotism and praise for the right-far-right coalition government.
- An analysis of the G20 protest and the black bloc
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 It should be clear that the actions of the black bloc reflect their politics. The actions in Toronto mirror those tactics used elsewhere. The tactics and politics regardless of their intent are inherently elitist and counter-productive. In fact they mirror the critique of reformism many on the left have. The NDP says vote for us and we’ll do it for you, the black bloc says in essence the same thing – we will make the revolution for you. At best the tactics of the black bloc are based on a mistaken idea that the attacks on property and the police will create a spark to encourage others to resist capitalism, at worst they are based on a rampant individualistic sense of rage and entitlement to express that rage regardless of the consequences to others. The anti-authoritarian politic they follow is imposed on others. Very rarely will you see a black bloc call its own rally, instead the tactic is to play hide and seek with the police under the cover of larger mobilisations.
- Analyzing the Crash
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The present economic crisis, which began in the United States late in 2007 and picked up speed early in 2008, may have caused production in the American economy to fall precipitously, but had the opposite effect on the production of books seeking to analyze the world economic crisis.
- Anarchism & Socialism
Reformism or Revolution? Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 In these essays grouped around common themes, Wayne Price draws on decades of extensive practical experience in antiwar and student movements, marxist tendency groups and affinity-based anarchist organizations, to make an insightful case for "pro-organizational," class-struggle anarchism.
- Anarchy is struggle for life, freedom and dignity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A communique by the Circle of Fire anarchist collective and the Anarchist Bulletin BLACK FLAG on the events of May 5th, 2010 in Athens, when three bank workers were murdered by 'anarchist' arsonists. The murders came as an ultimate result of an irrational, meaningless and needless violence which is promoted by an autistic, un-political and anti-social concept that has become a parasite to the anarchist/antiauthoritarian movement, sucking its blood and disparaging it, leading it to criminalisation and social isolation.
- An Answer to Charlie Post
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Charlie Post is an old friend of mine and I respect his views. But I beg to disagree… In our book, Olivier Besancenot and myself pointed to several limitations of Che Guevara concerning issues as workers’ democracy and the critique of Stalinism. But we tried to grasp his thought not as a monolithic body of theory, but as thinking in movement, a movement going towards a more democratic conception of socialism. Did he come to a full understanding that socialism is “the democratically organized power of the working class”? No, he didn’t, but that doesn’t mean that he “rejected” it.
- Anticapitalism and Climate Justice
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The current crisis raises the urgent need to change the world from below and do so from an anticapitalist and radical eco-socialist perspective. Anticapitalism and climate justice are two struggles which must be closely linked.
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu to UC Berkeley: Divesting is the Right Thing To Do
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.
- Arizona's Racial Profiling Push
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is quick to blame the federal government for the economic and social ills of her state. Responding to a growing movement to boycott Arizona for its new “show me your papers” law as “thoughtless and harmful,” she complained that the outraged response “adds to the massive economic burden Arizonans have sustained for years due to the federal government’s failure to secure its borders.”
- The Armageddon Factor: The rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010
- Aroma protest: Toronto: Bloor & Albany. September 2010
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 Aroma Espresso Bar is part of an Israeli-owned chain. One of Aroma's branches is in Ma'aleh Adumim, a large Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories. Anti-apartheid activists have called for a boycott of Aroma as part of a larger movement by Palestinian civil society to find non-violent means to end the occupation and apartheid.
- Arundhati Roy on Obama's Wars, India and Why Democracy Is "The Biggest Scam in the World"
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy on President Obama, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, India and Kashmir and much more. Roy also talks about her journey deep into the forests of central India to report on the Maoist insurgency.
- Asia Inhales While the West Bans the Deadly Carcinogen
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Asbestos, a known carcinogen banned in much of the world, is a common and dangerous building block in much of Asia's development and construction boom. This white powder causes 100,000 occupational deaths per year, according to Medical News Today.
- The Assault on Israeli Legitimacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel has consciously orchestrated acute misery and poverty in the Palestinian territories over the past two decades in an effort to subdue and ethnically cleanse the captive population. Israel, despite warnings from many within the Israeli establishment, has embarked on a course that will see it, like the South African apartheid regime, become ever more isolated and reviled.
- Australia Rejects Israeli-Ordered Media Censorship
A Little Justice for Al Manar TV Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Australia rejects politically motivated censorship attempts.
- Authentic journalism: weapon of the people
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The path out of the crises wrought by commercial journalism opens when citizens steal back the mission that big media claimed but failed to do: Honest, coherent storytelling.
- Auto Industry Strikes in China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Strikes in China are nothing new, but the recent strike wave was remarkable in at least three respects: the amount of concessions granted to workers; the degree of publicity it initially received in the Chinese media; and the prospects for showcase union reform that it has helped push onto the agenda.
- Banamex v. Narco News Precedent Protects WikiLeaks, Too
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The story – one that defines the times we live in - has been going on for a while now: State power (and that includes private-sector “states” such as corporations and commercial media organizations) can no longer hide behind commercial (and State-owned) media to consolidate and centralize power when citizens deploy decentralized, small scale, and even temporary media resistances outside of those institutions in these ways that make big media irrelevant.
- Banning of Books Alarms Freedom Advocates
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The confiscation and banning of books by Malaysian authorities is sending alarm bells ringing among activists, who want the repeal of laws that the government is using to suppress freedom of expression.
- Daniel Bensaïd: The Power of Indignation
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Daniel Bensaïd, the lively and inspired French Marxist thinker and activist, has left us. This is a great loss, not only for us, his friends, his comrades of struggle, but for revolutionary culture. With his irreverence, his humor, his generosity, his imagination, he was a rare example of a militant intellectual, in the meaning of these words.
- Beyond the dross
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Pilger and Platt discuss the craft of journalism.
- Beyond the Echo Chamber
Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 According to the authors, a new breed of networked progressive media are informing and engaging millions. By harnessing a participatory media environment, they have succeeded in influencing political campaigns, public debates, and policymaking.
- Beyond the Profits System
Possibilities for a Post-Capitalist Era Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Shutt offers an analysis of the collapse of the capitalist system by determining factors inhibiting its revival and goes on to offering an alternative to the current system.
- Bigger Slicks, Sicker Society
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Corporate crime is strikingly analogous to the BP slick. The visible stuff is the slime on the surface that gets most of the attention. You can see it, taste it, smell it. The bigger part stays underwater where it poisons and kills silently, out of view, gets caught in the currents and escapes containment — just like those oil “plumes” poised to swirl around the Florida peninsula and head up the Eastern seaboard.
- The Billionaires' Tea Party
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 Both a journey through a unique moment in American history and a thoroughly researched piece of investigative journalism. Through an examination of astroturfing and disinformation, we see how citizen democracy has been captured by powerful corporate interests that threatens not only the heath of American democracy, but that of its citizens and the planet as a whole.
- Black Liberation and the Fight for a Socialist America
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 From slavery to convict labour, from the chain gang to the assembly line, American capitalism has been built upon the lash-scarred backs of black labour. Any organization that claims a revolutionary perspective for the United States must confront the special oppression of black people and their forced segregation at the bottom of capitalist society and the poisonous racism that divides the working class and cripples its struggles.
- Blasted in a West Virginia Mine
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Conditions in the mines are caused by capitalism. The 25 dead miners in the latest mine disaster in West Virginia are dead because union-busting and the disregard of safety precautions for the sake of speed-up and higher profits.
- Blau-Kamm case exposes the dark underbelly of Israel's security state
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defence against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile. But this is Israel. Here, despite a desperate last-stand for the principles of free speech and the rule of law in the pages of the Haaretz newspaper today, which is itself in the firing line over its role, there is almost no public sympathy for Kamm or even Blau. The pair are already being described, both by officials and in chat forums and talkback columns, as traitors who should be jailed, disappeared or executed for the crime of endangering the state.
- Bob King and the "New" UAW
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Last June the 35th UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit elected new national officers headed by Bob King. Even before his election, King had been heralded in the media as desirous of transforming the UAW into an activist union. He supported the US Social Forum, co-sponsored the August 28th Detroit march for “Jobs, Justice and Peace” and encouraged UAW participation in the October 2nd “One Nation Working Together” demonstration in Washington DC.
- Body Parts and Bio-Piracy
Tissue, Skin, Bone and Organ Harvesting at Israel's National Forensic Institute Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A report on the tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting conducted for many years at Israel’s L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine.
- Bogus, Misdirected and Effective
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Tea Party movement is steeped in misinformation and denial. But it has a lot to teach the left.
- Book Review: "Anarchism & Socialism: Reformism or Revolution?" by Wayne Price
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010
- Book Review: Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins (2010)
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Anderson’s argument is based on a careful and comprehensive reading of the writings of Marx (and, to the extent necessary, Engels) on: (1) the history, economics and politics of societies and nations outside Western Europe (but including Ireland); (2) movements of national liberation, as in Ireland, Poland and India; and (3) the relationship between ‘race’ and class in countries such as England and the United States.
- The Borrower and the Billionaire
A Foreclosure Story Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In this excerpt adapted from The Monster, Michael W. Hudson writes about the nation’s largest subprime lending empire through the fortunes of its owner and one of its customers.
- Breaking windows is not a revolutionary act
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Black Bloc vandalism in the middle of a big protest is not only a diversion from the issues but puts everyone into unneccessary jeopardy without their consent.
- Bring In The Paper, Bring On The Torches
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The ideologists of capitalism are paid handsomely to proclaim the rationality of the free market system, where all men are recreated equal by their commodities as buyers and sellers. Finance capital, however, recreates itself in the irrationality of the markets, in the divergence between prices; in the disparity between particular prices and particular values.
- Brothers-in-Arms: Capitalism and Corporate Journalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An essential role of corporate journalism is to shore up public confidence in an unjust, crisis-riven financial and economic system. Although plenty of gloom and doom is permitted, especially in the face of obvious crisis, the legitimacy of the system is rarely questioned.
- Dennis Brutus: Honored by the Enemies He Kept
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 So much has been said about the loving and nurturing characteristics of Dennis Brutus and his political and literary contributions. Those who knew him understood how much he wanted to encourage future generations of radicals and poets.
- Burmese media combating censorship
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Bye Bye, Miss American Empire
Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America's Political Map Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Breakaway movements large and small are rising up across the US. Activists of various stripes want to form new states, even new nations. According to Kauffman, the American Empire is dying, in this investigation into modern-day secession.
- California Is Not Dreaming
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Discussion of March 4, 2010 Day of Action in California.
- Calling Bono
Your Palestinian Gandhis Exist ... in Graves and Prisons Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Palestinians have been engaging in nonviolence for decades. The reality is that nonviolence is only as powerful as its visibility to the world.
- Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Engler documents the fact that the essence of Canadian policy has always been support for the establishment and continued dominance of an expansionist Zionist state in the territories that now comprise Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
- Canadian Labour History Bibliography, 1976-2009
Resource Type: Database First Published: 2010 Recognizing the limitations that must be set on a project that relies primarily on a single individual, the bibliography has been limited to English-language monographs, pamphlets, journal articles, articles from edited collections (each item in an edited collection is entered separately) and graduate theses. Items are included if they were published between 1976 and 2009.
- Canadian Media in Crisis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 How so-called "business journalism" is often biased and tends to give readers a distorted picture of the news.
- Canadian Mining Corporation Receives Permits in Mexican Indigenous Territory
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Canadian mining companies have found a way to expand their operations in Mexico. Recently the Mexican government awarded 22 permits to British Columbia-based First Majestic Silver to mine for silver in the western region of the country.
- The Canadian War on Queers
National Security as Sexual Regulation Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 From the 1950s to the late 1990s, agents of the Canadian state spied on, interrogated, and harassed gays and lesbians in a series of so-called national security campaigns. This book traces this history, revealing acts of state repression and forms of social resistance.
- Capitalism is a Waste of Time
Godwin, Malthus & the Ideology of "No Alternative" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The "no alternative" of permanent scarcity is both the all too familiar essence of our daily politics as well as the ideology at the heart of the discipline of economics, defined in the most widely used economics textbook of the 20th century as "the study of how men and society choose to employ scarce resources."
- Capital's War on the People
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It is time to change the parameters of the debate, from “when or by how much social spending should be cut?” to “why should the people pay for something they are not responsible for?”
- Capital's War on the People
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Instead of calling the recent G-20’s brutal austerity declaration (issued at the conclusion of its annual summit in Toronto) an orchestrated declaration of class war on the people, many progressive/Keynesian economists and other liberal commentators simply call it “bad policy.” While it is true that, as these commentators point out, the Hooverian message of the declaration is bound to worsen the recession, it is nonetheless not a matter of “bad” policy; it is a matter of class policy.
- Cars and Class
"A Reckless, Blood-Thirsty, Villainous Lot ... " Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Making life difficult for cars could be, in fact, described as a form of class war, but one that works in the long-term interests of the poor and working class.
- A Case of Decency Deficit
Eden's Photoshoot Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 According to the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence, taking humiliating trophy pictures of Palestinian prisoners are such a "widespread phenomenon" that taking them constitutes "a norm." Why so? Because it is the "necessary result of a long term military control of a civilian population."
- Celebrate People's History
The Poster Book of Resistrance and Revolution Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Since 1998, Josh MacPhee has commissioned and produced over 100 posters by over 80 artists that pay tribute to revolution, racial justice, women’s rights, queer liberation, labor struggles, and creative activism and organizing. Celebrate People’s History presents these essential moments — acts of resistance and great events in an often hidden history of human and civil rights struggles — as a visual tour through decades and across continents.
- Celebrating the Past -- the Legacy of the Free Speech Movement
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement took place at the University of California at Berkeley last December 2nd. As the years fly by anniversaries become more significant as the students who participated exit the stage of life. The usual 10-year anniversary is now shortened to five years. Just recently the FSM gang that met for a potluck dinner decided to celebrate each year!
- Chevron's $80 million ad campaign gets flushed
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A day-long comedy of errors, and Chevron's waking nightmare, began when Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch, together with the Yes Lab, pre-empted Chevron's multi-million dollar "We Agree" ad campaign with a satirical version of their own. The activists' version highlights Chevron's environmental and social abuses -- especially the toxic mess the oil giant has left in Ecuador, which Chevron has been attempting to "greenwash" for years.
- A Chinese Alternative? Interpreting the Chinese New Left Politically
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In China, the terms 'left' and 'right' or 'radical' and 'conservative' produce somewhat different associations in the popular mind than what we are used to in the West. While in most capitalist countries 'left' and 'right' are understood largely in economic terms, in China these concepts tend to be deeply entangled within a framework defined by the state, the Communist Party, and nationalism. As a result, Chinese political debates have tended to presume a rigid dichotomy between 'left-wing' state socialism and 'right-wing' capitalist liberal democracy.
- Chronicle of a Labor Victory
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Most union members see nothing but hugging and kissing between their leaders and their bosses on a daily basis. It takes a different kind of union to break with this culture, which has become second-nature to U.S. unions and is arguably the main reason for their current weakness. Leonard Riley’s longshore workers union in Charleston, South Carolina is a different kind of union, however, and On the Global Waterfront by Suzan Erem and Paul Durrenberger tells their gripping story.
- CIA Experiments in Torture
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Over the last year there have been an increasing number of accounts suggesting that, along with the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" torture program, there was a related program experimenting with and researching the application of the torture.
- City of Love and Revolution
Vancouver in the Sixties Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010
- The Class War at Home
The Rich Getting Richer Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 There is a class war – the war of the rich on the poor and the middle class – and the rich are winning.
- Climate Crisis Hits Pakistani Women
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Pakistan is among the countries that will be hit hardest in the near future by effects of climate change, even though it contributes only a fraction to global warming. The country is witnessing severe pressures on natural resources and environment. This warning has recently come from the mouth of Pakistan’s prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, who alarmed the countrymen by disclosing that Pakistan is the 12th most vulnerable country in the world to environmental degradation.
- Coal's Ruptured Landscape
Navigating the Ruins of Appalachia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It is more apparent now than ever before that coal mining, especially mountain top removal, is unethical and inhumane. It displays stark irresponsibility in land stewardship as well as depraved practices within a diverse region. It's time to shake off the flawed belief that we are reliant upon coal and other fossil fuels.
- The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The mass mobilization of black people in the Southern civil rights movement, and the subsequent Northern ghetto rebellions, disrupted and challenged the racist American bourgeois order. It shattered the anti-Communist consensus and it paved the road for the mass protest movements that followed—against the U.S. dirty war in Vietnam, for the rights of women, gays, students and others.
- The Collapse of Western Morality
The Indispensable People? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Moral degradation is reaching new lows.
- Connexions Archive Case Statement
In search of a new home for the Connexions Archive Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Working together to secure a future for the past
- Connexions Archive Information Sheet
Working together to secure a future for the past Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Looking for new space for the Connexions Archive and those who work on it.
- Connexions Calendar Expired Events 2010
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2010
- Connexions Informacijas Apmainas Pakalpojumi
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Connexions (pilns nosaukums: Connexions Informacijas Apmainas Pakalpojumi - Connexions Information Sharing Services) ir centrala tiešsaistes biblioteka un arhivs, kas apkalpo Kanadas iniciativas par izmainam sabiedriba. Šis bezpelnas projekts uztur ari izsmelošu Kanadas asociaciju un NVS raditaju.
- Connexions Information Sharing Services - Wikipedia Article - Dansk
Connexipedia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Connexions Information Sharing Services er det centrale online bibliotek og arkiv for Canada's bevægelser for social forandring.
- Consensus decision-making
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Article about the group decision making process known as consensus decision-making.
- Consumer Hell
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The problem with gross domestic product is that there are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.
- Contemporary anarchism
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Contemporary anarchism has some important differences, but also a great deal of continuity, with historical anarchism. Where it focuses on building an alternative in the “interstices” of capitalism, it accommodates to, rather than challenges, capitalism; and where it fetishizes street tactics, it generates more press than tangible success in either building the struggle or in challenging the state.
- The Copyright Police
First They Came for the Hip Hop Sites ... Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Understand this: the seizure of websites without due process, corporate interests lobbying and then writing laws that allow them to be the police and t personally enforce, the battle over net neutrality is all about concentrating power in the hands of a few. This is about controlling the flow of information and being a gate keeper in the communications arena. Its the first step in moving a democracy toward a dictatorship.
- Corporate Watch - Tracking Corporate Complicity in the Occupation of Palestine
Resource Type: Website First Published: 2010 A blog to track companies profiting from the Israeli occupation of and apartheid policies in Palestine. In addition to research blogs, the site also includes all Corporate Watch's recent articles on Israel/Palestine.
- Could a 'mini-paper' nip at the heels of mainstream press?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A mini-paper would be incredibly inexpensive to publish. There would be no requirement for newsprint, a huge printing plant or large delivery system.
- The Cover-Ups That Exploded
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Covering Pakistan: How Journalists and Experts Reproduce Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It appears irrelevant to many policymakers, journalists, and people in the US generally that Pakistan has, for example, peasants, unions, working-class politics, LGBTQ organizations, feminist groups—that, in short, the overriding ethic of Pakistani democracy and resistance movements is secular.
- The CPCCA should be reconfigured to combat racism against all peoples
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Confronted with evidence of a decline in anti-Semitism, Irwin Cotler creatively claims that it is anti-Semitic to accuse Israel of apartheid. Since this accusation seems to be growing and is being promoted by campaigns on Canadian campuses, Cotler then has "evidence" of anti-Semitism.
- Creation of Sustainable Free Media Would Be Huge Breakthrough
Part 4 of The Crisis in Canadian Media Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Independent media organizations would approach news differently compared to the coverage provided by corporate-owned media.
- The Crimewave That Shames The World
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It's one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of 'honour'.
- Criminalizing First-Graders
Arrested and Handcuffed for Tantrums Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 All across the nation, schools have adopted draconian zero-tolerance policies that treat children like criminals and turn schools into prison-like environments.
- The Crisis and the Potential
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A veritable civil [war] erupted in the past year among several of America’s leading unions. At a time when over eight million jobs were disappearing, unemployment reaching highs unseen for nearly three decades, home defaults and foreclosures hitting all-time records with no end in sight, and labor’s major legislative goals being cut to pieces, some of the country’s biggest, most aggressive unions went to war — not against capital or Congress, but against one another.
- Crisis in the US
Social and Economic Effects, Restructuring and Methods of Adapting Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 The cause of the crisis in the US must be found in the context of the world capitalist economy and not credited to internal causes. These internal causes of course exist but in fact only shape the way this crisis is expressed.
- Cuba's Prisoner Release
Surprise! Mainstream Media Omits Context and Key Facts Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Double standards and hypocrisy abound in American media coverage of Cuba's recent prisoner release. For example, the U.S. government holds more political prisoners on Cuban soil than the Cuban government does.
- The Cuts and the Fightback
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The accelerated privatzation taking place at the University of California is transforming the institution. For faculty, students and workers the changes are devastating. Programs and services are cut, student fees are raised over and over again, workers face both furloughs and layoffs while the faculty’s shared governance shrinks.
- Dancing with Dynamite
Social Movements and States in Latin America Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 The complex ways in which grassroots movements work for, with, against, and independently of national governments in Latin America.
- The Danger of SB1070
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The recent passage of SB 1070 in Arizona must be a wakeup call not only for those of us of Latino heritage, but for all progressives who cherish freedom and justice. A draconian law [partially blocked by a court injunction] that basically legalizes racial profiling, it compels the law enforcement officers in the state of Arizona to stop and question any person that they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally.
- The day the Klan messed with the wrong people
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 By the mid-1950's the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and the KKK decided they had to fight back. James W. "Catfish" Cole, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, made a critical mistake that couldn't be avoided by a racist mind - he was completely ignorant of the people he was about to mess with.
- The Dead End of Climate Justice
How NGO Bureaucrats and Greenwashed Corporations are Turning Nature Into Investment Capital Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The notion of climate debt, highlighted as the principle avenue of struggle for the climate justice movement, poses some large problems. Contemporary demands for reparations justified by the notion of climate debt open a dangerous door to increased green capitalist investment in the Global South. Everything from energy to agriculture, from cleaning products to electronics, and especially everything within the biosphere, is being incorporated into this regime of climate markets. One can only imagine the immense possibilities for speculation and financialization in these markets as the green bubble continues to grow.
- Death in the Desert
Migrants Risk Everything to Cross the Border Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This is a NAFTA border. Money moves freely, people with money do too, but the poor are pushed into a dangerous cycle of crossing the desert.
- The Death of NUMMI
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 During the 1980-82 recession, U.S. automobile corporations were closing factories, reflecting growing international competition and overproduction. One of the plants closed was a large General Motors facility in the city of Fremont, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Death of the university?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers. There is, however, a fundamental difference between being a student and being a consumer. Education is not a product but a relationship and a process. Once students become consumers, their whole relationship to education changes. They come to look upon ideas, not as ways of understanding the world, but as possessions that they can trade for a better job or greater social prestige.
- Debate with the International Socialist Organization Continued
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 From a libertarian socialist point of view, the "self-emancipation of the working class" can't happen unless the working class builds organized mass movements that they control, such as labor organizations. This is the fundamental basis of syndicalism as a revolutionary strategy.
- The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.
- Defending Palestinian solidarity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Electronic Intifada, the online publication about Palestine, finds itself at the centre of a storm as a pro-Israel group applies pressure to have a grant from a Dutch foundation withdrawn. This assault is part of a well-coordinated, escalating Israeli government-endorsed effort to vilify individuals and cripple organisations that criticise Israel's human rights record and call for it to respect Palestinian rights and international law.
- The Demise of Andy Stern and the Question of Unions in Contemporary Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A meaningful advance of workers’ struggles means bringing into existence class-wide organizations. Where those with such a perspective find themselves, by hook or by crook, in trade unions, the issue is to broaden struggles to include the unemployed wherever possible.
- Democracy Seized -- and Lost
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Reconstruction was among the messiest, most complex periods in U.S. history, and certainly one of the most emotionally exhausting to revisit. Accounts of the period resonate with hope of almost millenarian proportions and are tainted by tragedy — not the kind of tragedy that brings release, but the kind that leaves one sick with incredulity.
- Der Zor Diary: A Pilgrimage To The Killing Fields of the Armenian Genocide
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Der Zor desert -- the most infamous of the killings fields in the premeditated extermination of the Armenian people carried out by the Turkish government beginning in 1915.
- Dershowitz to the Rescue?
The Israeli Spin-Machine in Overdrive Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 According to Israel's apologists, only Israelis have a right to defend themselves. Palestinians do not have this right, nor does anyone else who is attempting to assist the Palestinians.
- Diemer, Ulli
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Canadian socialist publisher, writer, and archivist.
- Disability and History
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Joan Hume became active in disability organisations in the late 1970s and in the burgeoning disability rights movement, edited and wrote for the magazine Quad Wrangle for several years.
- Disenfranchisement as Political Repression
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the U.S., if you're caught boosting cars, robbing liquor stores, or attempting to escape reality by injecting heroin into your veins, you not only go to jail, but you lose your right to vote. And you don't just lose it for the time you're incarcerated; it's still gone when you get out.
- 'Diversity of tactics' as a justification for violent tactics - a debate, part 1
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Dividing the Races to Benefit the Rich
Prison Populism? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Race baiting broadcast agitators like Beck and Rush Limbaugh have their audiences believing the factually flawed foolishness that the reason they are falling behind economically is because the federal government is fawning over blacks lavishing them with unearned benefits. The reason for the loss of jobs, homes and dreams of comfortable futures driving white working class (and middle class) ire is not benefits to blacks but naked greed on Wall Street and in the suites of mega-corporations that triggered America's economic collapse.
- Do Workers Lose Their Rights?
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Gertrude Ezorsky's Freedom in the Workplace? is a unique and highly useful book. Unique, because it combines sophisticated philosophical analysis with compelling examples from the lives of low-wage workers and an Appendix on 20th century U.S. labor law — all in a text of 77 easy-to-read pages! — and highly useful, because it refutes a central myth about capitalism.
- Don't Mourn, Balkanize
Essays After Yugoslavia Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Don't Mourn, Balkanize! is the first radical account of Yugoslav history after Yugoslavia, surveying this complex history with imagination and insight. Grubacic's book provides essential information and perspective for all those interested in the recent history of this part of the world.
- Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2010-2011
Capital devours lives, labor, land; masses seek paths to freedom Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 A revolutionary organization can no longer allow any separation between theory and practice, philosophy and revolution, workers and intellectuals, "inside" and "outside."
- Earth into Property
Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A broad exploration of the colonial roots of global capitalism and the worldwide quest of Indigenous people for liberation through decolonization.
Part Two of The Bowl with One Spoon.
- Eat Pray Love Strike
The Law of the Bargaining Table Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We admire underdogs, yet we do not rejoice when underdogs go on strike against corporate fat cats. We admire hard-workers, yet we do not embrace those who are, arguably, the hardest-workers among us - the stoop laborers who pick our lettuce and strawberries.
- 8
The Mormon Proposition Resource Type: Film First Published: 2010 A scorching indictment of the Mormon Church's historic involvement in the promotion and passage of California's Proposition 8 and the Mormon religion's secretive, decades-long campaign against LGBT human rights.
- 1810, 1910, 2010 and Mexican Labor
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the midst of a deep depression, an ongoing crisis of legitimacy and a brutal internal war amongst the different fractions of the drug cartel/state complex, Mexico is celebrating its two great revolutions, the Revolution of Independence (1810) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
- Elixer
A History of Water and Humankind Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A cultural history of water.
- The End of Capitalism?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 For all those who wish to see a different world, this moment is dripping with opportunity because the old order is crumbling before our eyes.
- The End of (Military) History?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today's enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.
- The Enigma of Capital And the Crisis of Capitalism
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010
- European Social failure?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The sixth European Social Forum in Istanbul left something to be desired
- Every Woman for Herself
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Factory Girls shows the reader what it’s like to live inside the largest human migration in history. It feels, apparently, pretty lonely. Leslie Chang’s subjects are the young women who’ve left tiny farms throughout China for a chance at making money in the big city. Their lesson and mantra is that each person can depend only on herself. “The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone,” Chang notes.
- Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Noam Chomsky takes a day off.
- Eyes With Legs
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the last decade, 11 journalists have been murdered by Israeli forces, including Cevdet Kiliclar, a Turkish who was shot in the head, last week, as he photographed Israeli commandos attacking peace activists on the Freedom Flotilla. The U.S. never condemns these crimes because it's Israel's biggest supporter, and also because it does the same.
- Fabricating Terror
The Portland "Bomb" Plot Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Why does the FBI orchestrate fake terror plots? Could it be that the US government needs terrorist events in order to completely destroy the US Constitution?
- The FDA and Frankenfoods
Will the Agency Protect Consumers or the Profits of a Few Corporations Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent enforcement letters warning food makers that they cannot label their products as free of genetically modified or genetically engineered ingredients.
- The Fear Factor
Stephen Harper's "Tough on Crime" Agenda Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This study analyses the financial and human costs of the Harper government's tough on crime agenda and concludes it is wrong-headed, expensive, and counter-productive. In fact, it will likely lead to more crime and a bigger deficit.
- Feminism's Global Contradictions
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It is clear that the most significant factor now shaping women’s lives and status worldwide is globalization. What isn’t clear, however, is whether globalization is affecting women positively or negatively.
- Fifth Socialist International -- Time for definitions
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Although in the past every international socialist organisation was founded amidst great debates and ideological confrontations, the motley crew of factions which all over the world today call themselves 'left' shows an unprecedented degree of ideological confusion and political diversity. It will be a difficult job to bring them together, to give them structure and a route map.
- Fighters with Disabilities
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 At least since the mid-20th century, writers in the United States have publicly debated the place of politics in fiction. Plenty of great authors, Flannery O’Connor among them, warned against saddling fiction with political intent. That some renowned writers have produced work that reveals human truths that belie their detestable politics — Jorge Luis Borges and Ezra Pound are two examples — might support O’Connor’s point.
- Fighting Fires & Breaking Barriers
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Having a young daughter and working in the building trades, I am always scanning cultural representations of construction and skilled trades work to see if there are women. Whether Sesame Street or Wendy on “Bob The Builder,” women — in cartoon form at least — are partially visible in the presence of tools and heavy machinery.
- 'Fill the Jails': Identity, Structure and Method in the Committee of 100, 1960-1968
PhD Thesis,University of Sussex, 2010 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- The Fire This Time: Burning Bridges
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Some activists hold back from condemning tactics that are politically stupid and destructive, like the recent Ottawa arson attack by an anarchist group, because of a commitment to the doctrine of a 'diversity of tactics'. However, the original idea behind a diversity of tactics, that is, a variety of approaches to organizing for change, has been appropriated by activists devoted to property destruction as a media spectacle, who feel that they should be exempted from criticism by other activists, no matter how much their tactics serve to undermine the building of a broad-based movement against capitalism.
- First a Hand on Your Crotch, Next a Boot in Your Face
False Choices and Airport Security Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Since 9/11, we have given up many of our rights and our government has condoned practices like torture, legalized assassination, kidnapping, indefinite detention without access to council or trial – all in the name of keeping us 'safe' and 'free'. We have adopted practices and behaviors that we used to abhor in other nations and regimes. These practices, as demonstrated by the TSA, have nothing to do with keeping us safe or free – quite the opposite.
- 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A comprehensive chronicle of the resistance by Indigenous peoples in North and South America, which limited and shaped the forms and extent of colonialism.
- Five Reasons To Plant Trees Now
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 To some people, planting a tree is the epitome of the environmental cliche. Planting a tree seems so simple, so easy, so... low-technology. In the midst of the economic upheaval we are experiencing now, in the face of massive challenges such as peak oil and climate change, why should we plant trees?
- Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Floodlines is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans. The book weaves the stories of gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, and grassroots activists in the years before and after Katrina. From post-Katrina evacuee camps to torture testimony at Angola Prison to organizing with the family members of the Jena Six, Floodlines tells the stories behind the headlines from an unforgettable time and place in history.
- The Flotilla In The Israeli Press
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An analysis of Israeli media propaganda in the wake of Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
- For a movement that unites us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Activists organizing against cuts and tuition hikes at New York City's Hunter College issue an open letter calling for respect and freedom of expression.
- For Israel, A Reckoning
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The farce of the climate change summit in Copenhagen affirmed a world war waged by the rich against most of humanity. It also illuminated a resistance growing perhaps as never before: an internationalism linking justice for the planet earth with universal human rights, and criminal justice for those who invade and dispossess with impunity.
- Forging Change, Breaking Chains
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Remembering and forgetting are not only things that people do; they are things that are done to them. In our time, the Black freedom movement of the mid-20th century is now both well remembered and selectively forgotten.
- Framing the Sixties
Corporate Media Shadows and the 1960s Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 What Really Happened to the 1960s is a look at the role the media played in the presentation and interpretation of the struggles of the 1960s. Simultaneously, it is a consideration of the meaning of democracy in a society where the media is owned by corporations and elites who consider democracy antithetic to their hegemony.
- Frequently Asked Questions about Workers Solidarity Alliance
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- From Apartheid South Africa to Palestine
"To Exist is to Resist" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The growing support for Palestinian liberation via BDS reminds of small but sure steps towards the full-fledged anti-apartheid sports, cultural, academic and economic boycotts catalyzed by Brutus against racist South African Olympics teams more than forty years ago. Today, these are just the first nails we’re hammering into the coffin of Zionist domination – in solidarity with a people who have every reason to fight back with tools that we in South Africa proudly sharpened: non-violently but with formidable force.
- From Ecological Disaster to Constitutional Crisis
The Long Struggle Over the Xingú Dams Comes to a Climax at Belo Monte Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The master plan for damming the Amazon river system, which includes Belo Monte and the Xingú dams, was originally created in the 1970s by the military dictatorship then in power. It essentially treats the Amazon as a reservoir of natural resources to be extracted without regard for the destruction of its riverine and forest environment or the displacement and pauperization of its indigenous and local Brazilian inhabitants.
- From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010
- From Iron Mines to Iron Bars
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Exploring some of the consequences of the long-term decline in union membership and the significant shift in membership towards public sector workers.
- From Klinghoffer to the Gaza Flotilla
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Under the Rome Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation of 1988, it is an international crime for any person to seize or exercise control over a ship by force, and also a crime to injure or kill any person in the process. The treaty necessarily adopts a strict approach. One cannot attack a ship and then claim self-defense if the people on board resist the unlawful use of violence. In other words, according to international law, the actions of the Israeli military were beyond the law and those involved should be treated no differently than, say, the Somali pirates who are also in the habit of boarding ships by force.
- From one apartheid state to another: Israel's secret military alliance with apartheid South Africa
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel regarded the relationship as based on more than just convenience, but on a common position as colonial oppressor, under pressure from national liberation movements. The two countries shared "unshakeable foundations of common hatred of injustice and refusal to submit to it." The 'injustice' each refused to submit to was ending apartheid (South Africa) and reversing the Nakbah (Israel), in both cases the subordination of indigenous people to the interests of settlers from Europe.
- From Reconstruction to Capitalist Crisis
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The outcome of the Civil War registered the defeat of the Army of the Confederate states, the defeat of the army of the slaveholders, and a victory for the army of the owners of the railroads and big industrial enterprises committed to free, or wage labor. The political party of the big property holders, the Republican party, was supported by the mass of small farmers, urban workers, small business owners and the abolitionist movement.
- From Wikileaks to TSA
Anti-Empire Report Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We have to remind the American people of what they once knew but seem to have forgotten: that they don't want BIG government, or SMALL government; they don't want MORE government, or LESS government; they want government ON THEIR SIDE.
- Funding for Non-profit Media or Public Interest Activities
Part 7 of 7 - Canada's Media in Crisis Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A group that launches, or even refocuses, an independent news media project - or raises money for just about any public-interest activity - will probably have success in fundraising if it does the proper research and targets a unique audience. It will need to demonstrate that it offers an important public service, such as providing in-depth coverage of local political, economic, and social issues not covered adequately by other media.
- The futility of activism using violence as catharsis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The anarchist practitioners of violence are fundamentally elitist. They do violence because it makes them feel good, and they don't care about the fact that it undermines the real work for social change that movement activists are doing.
- The Future of Palestine
Righteous Jews vs. New Afrikaners Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Israel lobby is effectively helping Israel commit national suicide. Israel, is turning itself into an apartheid state, which, as Ehud Olmert has pointed out, is not sustainable in the modern era.
- Gasland
Resource Type: Film First Published: 2010 Today, communities in the United States are being more and more affected by natural gas drilling and, specifically, hydraulic fracturing.
- Gates of Delusion: Media Distortions and REAL Climate Scandals
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Climate-related storms in a teacup have been appearing in the corporate media almost on a daily basis. This nonsense is distracting attention from a mountain of evidence that human-induced climate change is accelerating and poses a deadly threat to civilisation.
- Gay Marriage: End of the World?
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Gaza Freedom March Blocked
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Fourteen hundred international activists mobilized in Cairo, Egypt in late December for a Gaza Freedom March (GFM) to break the siege imposed by the U.S., Israeli and Egyptian governments. The marchers were blocked and attacked by Egyptian police and military forces; there can be no doubt that the authorization for these assaults and the orders to block the march from reaching Gaza came directly from the U.S. administration.
- Gaza Occupation And Siege Are Illegal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Collective punishment is specifically barred under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israeli officials have repeatedly stated that the objective of the blockade is to weaken the Gaza economy and undermine support for Hamas. That is a political, not a military, objective, and it is impermissible under international law to target innocent civilians to achieve nonmilitary goals. Actions taken to enforce an illegal siege cannot themselves be legal. Israel's blockade violates the human rights of Gaza Palestinians and must be brought to an end.
- Gazan Youth's Manifesto for Change
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!
- Genealogies of the Uprisings
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An interview with Adolph Gilly. Gilly is a longtime activist and prominent historian of the Mexican Revolution.
- German Auto Workers in the Crisis
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 German auto workers, unlike their U.S. brothers and sisters, were somewhat sheltered from the economic crisis in 2009. Given that it was an election year, the government passed a law last March that supplemented their wages when they worked a “short” week. Between what they were paid by their employer and the government supplement, they earned 65-90% of their usual wage. The government also had a version of “cash for clunkers” so some auto plants were at full production.
- A Ginger Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Grassroots campaigns could break Britain's corrupt political system.
- Global BDS Against Israel Is Working
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel's ruling elite is increasingly concerned about the international movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, but they are unwilling to address the human rights abuses that brought the movement into existence.
- Global Capitalism in Crisis
Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit System Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010
- Global Directory of Palestine Activist and Related Organizations
Resource Type: Database First Published: 2010 A listing of organizations working on Palestinian justice issues.
- The Global War on Tribes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The point is not that all tribal peoples pose an egalitarian alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Some (such as Indigenous peoples) certainly do have strong egalitarian principles, but many other tribal peoples -- such as in the new conflict zones -- certainly do not (particularly toward women). The salient point is not that all tribal cultures are paradise, but that they are not capitalist, and neoliberal capitalism cannot stand anything other than Total Control.
- Globalizing the Culture Wars
Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Uganda, like many countries in Africa and around the world, adheres to long-standing heterosexual and patriarchal traditions as to what is acceptable sexual behavior. In the West, such traditions are shared by a dwindling minority. The bourgeois capitalist marketplace has reconfigured that which is morally acceptable. Sexual practices among adults are areas of personal erotic experience, protected private activities.
- God and His Demons
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Parenti examines the dark side of religion, the many evils committed in the name of godly virtue throughout history. This is not a blanket condemnation of all believers. The focus is on the threat posed by fundamentalists and theocratic reactionaries.
- Goldstone Report Dramatized
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Grassroots media relations
A short introduction to media relations strategies for activist groups Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Published: 2017 A media relations guide for organizers and activists.
- The Great Leap Forward in China (1958): Chairman Mao's Catastrophe
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong made a promise that Chinese steel production would soon surpass that of Great Britain and America. It was known as "The Great Leap Forward," and the massive focus on steel had catastrophic consequences as it diverted labour and millions died of starvation.
- The Greeks Get It
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Here's to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare: the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.
- The Growing Boycott of Israel
A Force for Good Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 To join the boycott is good for the world's future in general. It is certainly good for the Palestinians, and yes, it is good for the Jews too.
- Guatemala Coup Fails
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 While the coup in Honduras was successful, in Guatemala an attempted “cold” coup unraveled. Rodrigo Rosenberg was murdered on May 10, 2009; the following day the media ran a video filmed shortly before his death. In it Rosenberg stated that if he were killed, President Alvaro Colom and his wife were responsible.
- Haiti, Imperialist Disaster
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The pictures and news reports tell the stories of Haiti’s physical destruction, the agony and heartbreak, the heroism of rescue efforts — and the filthy business of “missionary” child-snatchers — reporting the unfathomable scale of the reconstruction that may take decades.
- Haiti - The Broken Wing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that 'their' suffering is no different to 'my' suffering. Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti's population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti's children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished.
- Hamas, Hezbollah, and so-called 'resistance' against Zionist imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Imperialism, as Lenin states, is more progressive than the fanatical religious tendencies that fight to resist it. But to be clear, this does not amount to an endorsement of U.S. or Israeli policies of aggression. All that it means is one should not support tendencies that are even more wretched than foreign, imperialist domination, simply in the name of national self-determination.
- Hands on the Freedom Plow
Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Published: 2012 A collection of personal stories of women working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
- Hard Core Green
How to Kick Corporate Butt Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Two uncompromised green activists and writers completely focused on winning, and utterly void of bullshit.
- Hedy Epstein Speaks at UC Berkeley
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 Hedy Epstein, a survivor of the Holocaust at the age of fifteen, describes her experiences during the Holocaust and how they made her committed to fighting injustice for the rest of her life. She describes how the situation on the ground in Palestine today very much resembles the situation in Nazi Germany in 1939, and compares the egregious violations of human rights that are taking place, as a result of the Israeli occupation, in Palestine today to the Holocaust.
- Helping the occupation bloom: An open letter to Cargoflora
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Flowers from illegally occupied Palestinian land are being shipped to Europe.
- The Heresy Of The Greeks Offers Hope
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely reported as such.
- The Historical Moment That Produced Us
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 As we emerge, hopefully, from this dismal period of rollback, we recall Rosa Luxemburg's remark, shortly before her murder in 1919: "The revolution says: I was, I am, I shall be!" We assert the ongoing reality of communism, "the real movement developing before our eyes," as Marx put it in the Manifesto. Like Hegel's "knights of history," we locate our identities not in any immediacy but in the emerging new universal that must be the cutting edge of the next global offensive.
- History's Mad Hatters
The Strange Career of Tea Party Populism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Tea Party anger reaches far beyond the ranks of the modest Tea Party movement. It resonates with other Americans who understandably feel that political and economic elites, serving themselves at the expense of everyone else, have failed Americans. The big question is just exactly how (or even if) that private and personal rage gets transformed into moral and political outrage.
- Holocaust survivor - why I support Palestinian rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 For me, the Israeli government's actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family's experiences under Hitlerism: the inhuman walls, the check points, the daily humiliations, killings, diseases, the systematic deprivation. There's no escaping the fact that Israel has occupied the entire country of Palestine, and taken most of the land, while the Palestinians have been expelled, walled off, and deprived of human rights and human dignity.
- Homeless
The Motel Kids of Orange County Resource Type: Film First Published: 2010 Follows a group of children as their families struggle to live survive in one of the country's wealthiest areas.
- Homeless and Hungry at College
Falling Through the Safety Net Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 With students and their family members losing jobs as tuition increases escalate and social services are cut, more and more students are falling through the tattered social safety net.
- Honoring Helen Thomas
A Great Journalist, Traduced By Hacks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Helen Thomas was done in because she embarrassed the group of lap dogs who call themselves White House reporters.
- Hospital pays compensation over 'racism' death
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Harinder Veriah's death helped to expose an ugly truth in Hong Kong: that racism is a serious problem. A report "Hong Kong's big dirty little secret" acknowledged that racism was so ingrained that derogatory terms for ethnic minorities such as gwei lo ("ghost people") for whites and hak gwai or ("black ghost") for blacks were barely noticed.
- Hot Wet Holiday Sex
From Wikileaky Condoms to Yucky Zuckerburg Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Whatever your preferences, do go on some kind of holiday sex adventure. Try not to hurt anyone, including yourself, and whatever your pleasure, enjoy it and infuse it with a sense of *sacred* solstice power, a promise to resist the deadly status quo of depression, perma-war and power-grabs, and a passionate commitment to love.
- How Alternative Media Provide The Crucial Critique Of The Mainstream
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The closeness of the mainstream to dominant economic, cultural and ideological forces means that the mainstream largely functions to promote the interests of the military/industrial/political complex. Yet within advanced capitalist economies, the contradictions and complexities of corporate media have provided certain spaces for progressive journalism.
- How Canada's Christian right was built
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 The religous right is organizing hard, and effectively, to get their hands on the levers of power.
- How Race Fuels Rightist Agenda
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Nearly 50 years after the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, the conservative movement is mobilizing its electoral base by using the wedge issues of race and racism. The principal targets are not new — African Americans and “illegal immigrants” from Mexico.
- How the 'black bloc' protected the G20
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The black-clad mob in Toronto has left a lot of people not only in the general public but in the wider nonviolent social/global justice movements in Canada feeling disgusted, demoralized and dispirited. Just the result you want if your goal is to marginalize and stifle dissent. The blocistes, in other words, are the most effective tool on the ground for silencing the valid concerns of the broad social movements.
- How to Become a Real Muslim
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 When I was growing up in the 1980s the concept of a radical in a Muslim context meant someone who was a militant secularist, someone who challenged not just racism but the power of the mosques too. Someone like me. Today, of course, it means almost the opposite, a radical is a religious fundamentalist.
- How to End the Tea Party (and Scare Obama at the Same Time)
A Black / Brown Coalition Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 One of the reasons the left doesn't do better is because it tends to view the right's transgressions as a moral issue rather than as a pragmatic problem as, for example, a baseball coach would do if the Tea Party were the other team. In fact, calling someone a racist is not a particularly useful political move whereas figuring out why they're getting to first base all the time, and you're not, is. The right keeps it simple. It speaks plain talk, not bland abstractions devised by some third rate branding coach. There is hardly anyone in the country who doesn't know the right opposes gay marriage, abortion and illegal immigration. Now try describing three primary goals of liberals or the left and you see the problem.
- How to Light a Prairie Fire
The Spell Can be Broken Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If there's one thing I think many people need to understand, it is this: sustained mass movements rarely happen unless many of the participants believe they might win.
- How to Write about Haiti
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 How to make sure that you stick to the tried and proven cliches.
- Howard Zinn (1922-2010): In Lieu of Flowers, Organize
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Where other leftish icons have spent these decades gnashing their teeth, lecturing and bemoaning how awful everything that happens up above has been (as if most folks born down below didn't already know that by the time we were eight), Howard answered the call, again and again, to help us do something about it. He walked out to the picket lines every time he was called - by neighborhood organizers fighting against his university's real estate grabs, by striking workers that cleaned and fed the students and professors, by almost anyone who organized and fought that asked, and often before they asked, for his support.
- Hypocrisy Reigns
Don't Forsake the Struggle Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 When Israel labels as "terrorists" the ship passengers who offered some resistance to the Israeli invaders, who points out that the passengers who resisted the 9-11 highjackers on the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania are called "heroes"?
- I was wrong on veganism
Traditional livestock production makes ecological sense Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An environmental reporter reviews the environmental impacts of meat production in the developed world. He finds that First World meat production is incredibly wasteful but that this is not a requirement of livestock rearing so much as an entrenched practice, and offers suggestions for greening the industry.
- Iceberg Economies and Shadow Selves
Further Adventures in the Territories of Hope Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system.
- Idiot Bosses and Valiant Women
Labor and Capital in Actual Practice Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 "No matter what the enterprise, most employees know who the hard workers are, even though it's not their job to know. They know who hustles, pitches in and lends a hand, who goofs off and avoids work, and who strives to keep the operation going by performing those thankless little tasks that don't necessarily get noticed by management." This piece looks at a specific case of a boss benifting from the hard work of their employees who gained nothing.
- Ignorance and Courage in the Age of Lady Gaga
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer’s prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question.
- Ill Fares The Land
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010
- In and Out of Crisis
The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Political economists Albo, Gindin and Panitch lay bare the roots of the crisis, which they locate in the dynamic expansion of capital on a global scale over the last quarter century – and in the inner logic of capitalism itself.
- In the Aftermath of the G20: Reflections on Strategy, Tactics and Militancy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The tactics of the Black Bloc make it clear that, for them, it is more important to smash windows than to try and march with thousands of workers and engage them in arguments about how to move struggles forward or that the problem is capitalism. How radical is it to trash a few windows? For us, radical is about workers gaining confidence and consciousness to fight back, not just at work, but in solidarity with others. Radical is about developing a sense of mass power, organising based on moving others into struggle, winning others to challenge the power in their workplace or community collectively, beyond the individualization of our society. Radical is about going to the roots of the system - not trashing its symbols.
- Independent media advocates must develop creative news sites
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We should be able to come up with two or three practical models that can be used to set up sustainable news and information production and delivery systems.
- Information Terrorists?
The Vile Campaign Against Julian Assange and Wikileaks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 WikiLeaks is under concerted attack from the US government. Also under attack by the US government is the whole idea of freedom of thought and of information. It needs to be clearly understood that the attacks on WikiLeaks by the US government could as easily be used against news organizations and political organizations.
- Insisting on Humanity
The Plight of the Palestinians Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It is important that we preserve the distinction between the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian people, who have held on to their rights for so many years, and unleashed two of the greatest expressions of people's power and resolve: the First Uprising of 1987 and al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000. A whole population taking on the self-celebrated "greatest army in the Middle East" is hardly "powerless". The Palestinian people have printed themselves on the practical discourse of this conflict, and they have proved themselves to be powerful players in determining their own fate.
- Insouciant Americans
Blinding Hypocrisy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Hypocrisy in America is now so commonplace it is no longer noticed.
- Inspired by Injustice: Scottsboro in History
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 “In many respects this is an archival project,” writes James A. Miller, Chair of the American Studies Department at George Washington University, at the end of his introduction to Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial.
- Is Israel an Apartheid State?
Rhetoric or Reality? Summary of a Legal Study by the Human Sciences Research council of South Africa Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Do Israel's practices in occupied Palestinian territory, namely the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, amount to the crimes of colonialism and apartheid under international law?
- Is this what a police state looks like?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The corporate security state is not static - it will keep filling more and more space to the extent that they are allowed to by civil society. The police actions in Toronto are one of those key moments, one that we will look back on as a time when the authoritarian governments we now endure tested our resolve. They know exactly what they are doing. There was no spontaneous 'over-reaction.' There were no cops 'out of control' - the obvious fact is they were always in control. The decision to allow the Black Bloc to do its destructive work without any intervention at all was strategic. They were assisted in their work by the Black Bloc, some of them agents provocatuers, all of them enemies of social change.
- Islamophobia Sets the Terms
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Dutch government didn’t fall in February over involvement in Afghanistan, the unstable governing coalition stumbled over it. But the Islamophobic right wing might be the beneficiary.
- Israel and apartheid: A fair comparison?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The comparison between Israel's policies toward the Palestinians and to apartheid is a legitimate part of that debate and this is an analogy frequently used by Israelis and also by South Africans.
- Israel is an apartheid state and that is why they are losing legitimacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel is losing legitimacy in the world because of what their government is doing to the Palestinians, not because of anti-semitism.
- Israel Is Now a Lunatic State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 What happened with the Gaza flotilla was not an accident. You have to remember that the Israeli cabinet met for a full a week. All the cabinet ministers discussed and deliberated how they would handle the flotilla. At the end of the day, they decided on a nighttime armed commando raid on a humanitarian convoy. Israel is now a lunatic state. It's a lunatic state with between two and three hundred nuclear devices. It is threatening war daily against Iran and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. We have to ask ourselves a simple, basic, fundamental question: can a lunatic state like Israel be trusted with two to three hundred nuclear devices when it is now threatening its neighbours Iran and Lebanon with an attack?
- Israel offered Nukes to Racist South Africa for Use on Black Neighbors
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The implication, that Iran must be stopped because it would proliferate to neighbors, may come back to haunt pro-Israeli propagandists, given Tel Aviv's own secret role in attempting to proliferate nukes to South Africa.
- Israel Targets Ha'aretz
"A Shin Bet State" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel uses police state tactics to crush journalists who expose crimes committed by the military.
- Israeli journalist Anat Kam under secret house arrest since December
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An Israeli journalist has been under secret house arrest since December on charges that she leaked highly sensitive, classified military documents which suggest the Israeli military breached a court order on assassinations in the occupied West Bank.
- Israeli Police Impunity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israeli police expect, and usually receive, impunity for using violence against Palestinians.
- Israeli Soldiers Sexually Abuse Palestinian Children
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Israel's Apartheid
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Blacks in South Africa never faced a 20-foot wall dividing their communities. Palestinians' land is still being seized, their orchards bulldozed.
- Israel's Attack on Us All
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If we needed any evidence of the degree to which Western TV journalists are simply stenographers to power, the BBC, CNN and others are amply proving it. Mark Regev, Israel's propagandist-in-chief, has the airwaves largely to himself. The passengers on the ships, meanwhile, have been kidnapped by Israel and are unable to provide an alternative version of events. We can guess they will remain in enforced silence until Israel is sure it has set the news agenda.
- Israel's 'mad dog' diplomacy doesn't make it more secure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel is feeling cornered on every front it considers important; and like Dayan's 'mad dog,' it is likely to strike out in unpredictable ways. These trends are likely only to deepen in the coming months and years. The mad dog is baring his teeth, and it is high time the international community decided how to deal with him.
- Israel's new 'attack on freedom of speech'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Israeli government and its right-wing supporters have been waging a 'McCarthyite' campaign against human-rights groups.
- Israel's New Strategy: "Sabotage" And "Attack" The Global Justice Movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Reut's analysis vindicates the effectiveness of the Boycot Divestment Sanctions strategy. As Israeli elites increasingly fear for the long-term prospects of the Zionist project they are likely to be more ruthless, unscrupulous and desperate than ever.
- Israel's vivid act of piracy may yet turn the tide of global opinion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the summer of 1947 a steamer named the Exodus set out from France to run the British blockade of Palestine. The British authorities boarded and seized the ship, and killed three passengers who tried to fight the British attackers. The British succeeded in preventing the ship from landing, but the event helped to turn world public opinion against the British. Israel's attack on the Gaza aid convoy may prove to have the same result.
- It's Not Piracy!
The International Law Framework Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The crimes that Israel committed during its assault on the vessels and civilian passengers of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla fall firmly within the category of "high crimes." The assault, rather than an act of piracy, must be defined as a "crime against the peace" and a "crime against humanity" as Israel subjected "part of the high seas to its sovereignty" in a murderous attack on unarmed civilian vessels. The severity of these crimes is magnified precisely because the criminal actor is not an individual but a highly militarized state.
- James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Covers James Cannon's early years through to his 1928 expulsion from the Communist Party USA.
- Journalism and 'the words of power'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.
- Journalists assaulted and censored
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Palestinian journalists are under attack from Israeli forces and are also subjected to raids and arrests as a result of political rivalry between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, report the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedom (MADA) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Meanwhile, Israel continues to target and detain scores of Palestinians involved in protests against the separation barrier in the West Bank with freedom of movement and expression violations, reports Human Rights Watch.
- Julian Assange: Wanted by the Empire, Dead or Alive
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The American airwaves quiver with the screams of parlor assassins howling for Julian Assange's head.
- Jurassic Ballot
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. They’ve invaded; they’ve infiltrated; they’ve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding.
- Just because they hunt witches doesn't mean we have
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Big Brother defence of WikiLeaks is that if everyone had a camera upon them, society would be a better place. This is a view that fails to distinguish between the need to control those who possess power, and the need to prevent those who possess power from controlling us.
- Justice for All: the Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt
A Report by the Solidarity Center Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A report on recent workers' struggles in Egypt, against falling wages, oppressive working conditions, and violations of workers' rights, in the face of an authoritarian and repressive government.
- Kashmir: A Brief Background
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Kashmir was divided between India and the newly created Pakistani state in the chaotic division of the Indian subcontinent in 1947-48, with little reference to the wishes of Kashmir’s people. The larger part is occupied by India, with a volatile “Line of Control” separating it from the Pakistan-administered zone. The formal name of Indian-occupied Kashmir is Jammu and Kashmir; the Pakistan-controlled region is known as the Northern Areas (Gilgit-Baltistan) and Azad Kashmir. The territory’s largest city is Srinagar.
- Kashmir: A Time for Freedom
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 “Freedom” represents many things across rural and urban spaces in India-ruled Kashmir. These divergent meanings are steadfastly united on one point: freedom always signifies an end to India’s authoritarian governance.
- Keeping the Record Straight: About Noam Chomsky's Trip to the Middle East in May 2010
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- The Kidnapping Of Haiti
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Not for tourists is the US building its fifth-biggest embassy. Oil was found in Haiti's waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington's "rollback" plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela's abundant petroleum reserves, and sabotage of the growing regional co-operation.
- Know-Nothings of 2010
The New War of the Christian Crusaders Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Over the last four centuries, Quakers, Mormons, Catholics, Jews and many others have been targets of religious persecution, often the victims of imprisonments, hangings, lynchings and other acts of violence.
- The Koch Empire and Americans for Prosperity
More Tentacles Surface at Rightwing Front Group Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Tracking to funding of extremist right-wing groups.
- Edmond Kovacs, 1924-2010
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 I first met Edmond Kovacs in the fall of 1961. I was then 19 and he 37. He was teaching a class for the Los Angeles chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the SWP’s Southern California Chairman, introduced under his party name, Theodore Edwards. Most of us in those days had nommes de guerre, fake names that we rather optimistically hoped the FBI wouldn’t figure out. It was only years later that I got in the habit of calling him Edmond.
- Labor at War or in the Tank?
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Steve Early is one of a small handful of extraordinarily keen-eyed observers who see things from within the shrinking world of U.S. organized labor — and who hold nothing back from readers.
- Land of Impunity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If the police can get away with killing Ian Tomlinson, there's no justice in Britain.
- Berta Langston, 1926-2010
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Berta Langston (1926-2010), a founder and member of Solidarity, died of lung cancer at age 84 in Norwalk, Connecticut on June 23. Born Berta Green on the Lower East Side of New York City, she was one of four sisters. She joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the mid-1940s and throughout nearly four decades of activity she was widely esteemed on the Left as one of the party’s most devoted and capable militants, a person who could work with sundry individuals to develop coalitions and political defense committees of national and international import. From time to time she used the party name “Berta Graham,” and she received a Marxist education at the “Trotsky School” at Mountain Spring Camp in New Jersey. During the mid-1960s she served briefly on the SWP National Committee.
- Left-libertarianism
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A doctrine that has a strong commitment to personal liberty and egalitarianism.
- Legal Lessons From the Green Scare
When the Constitution is No Obstacle to the FBI Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Green Scare prosecutors and their coordinators in Washington are willing to destroy individual lives to score political points, and to trample their own rules in the process.
- Lena Horne & Her Times
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If there were any doubt that the blues could be elegant, Lena Mary Calhoun Horne Hayton (as she signed her name) dispelled it. At age 26, she sang the title song to the film “Stormy Weather” and her sultry, silky voice branded the tune as hers forever.
- Lessons From Arizona
Direct Action Organizing From 1999 to Now Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 What we saw in Arizona over the summer showed a new model of organizing, wherein cooperation between people who are dedicated to different tactics as well as space for accountability within the struggle takes centre stage.
- Lessons from the Tekel strikes: class solidarity and ethnic (in)difference
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A worker puts it: “There are no differences between Kurds, Alevis, Sunnis and Turks. We have no party.”
- Let's Talk About Another Burning Color: Black Flame vs. Red Fire Extinguisher?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Class struggle anarchists are not the only revolutionary forces on the left, and are not the only libertarian left revolutionary forces. In my opinion, anarchists can learn a lot from some marxists.
- Letter to Readers
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We are writing you this letter to invite you to support the effort to preserve and renovate the Leon Trotsky Museum (IDA-MCLTAC) in Mexico City as we mark the 70th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the 35th anniversary of the opening of the Trotsky Museum, and the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Institute on the Right of Asylum.
- Letters to My Torturer
Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 In these letters, Asadi confronts the man who tortured him while he was held prisoner in Iran.
- Liberating Thought: Toward an Independent Mass Media
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Prospects for democracy are dependent upon the growth of an independent media with wide exposure in the general population comparable to that of the corporate press.
- Libertarian Socialism
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A socialist political orientation which promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production. Libertarian socialism is opposed to coercive forms of social organization, and promotes free association in place of the coercive social relations of capitalism
- The Limits of State Intervention
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Nation, as befits the preeminent journal of left-liberal opinion, has run a series of articles by Robert Pollin and by James K. Galbraith that have sparked great attention. These, as well as numerous other arguments in a similar vein, mount a spirited defense of job generation through deficit spending as effective counter-cyclical measures.
- Abbey Lincoln and Freedom Now
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Abbey Lincoln — singer, composer, actor — left us on August 14 at age 80. A prolific and multidimensional artist (born Anna Marie Wooldridge), she took her performing name in the 1950s by combining “Westminister Abbey” and “Abraham Lincoln.” Composer and percussionist Max Roach, her partner in life — they were married from 1962-1970 — and in music and in political action, died on August 16, 2007.
- Live Working or Die Fighting
How the Working Class Went Global Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Mason relates a series of struggles for worker and human rights over the past two hundred years and compares them to current struggles.
- Lock 'Em Up
The Prison State Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Without a doubt, most of those enmeshed in the (in)justice system are not dangers to society and would not have been in it at all in a society that wasn't so racist and so shot through with every kind of social and economic inequality. Unfortunately, whatever the reasons why so many men and women have been denied their freedom, once the numbers began to rise dramatically, constituencies came into being: lawyers, police, probation officers, prison guards and staff, drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselors, sex offender counselors, vendors of all sorts, clerks and other clerical support staff, court officers, judges, community service employers that have a strong stake in milking the new cash cow.
- The Long War at Staley
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Staley recounts the epic struggle of workers in a corn-processing plant in Decatur, Illinois in the 1990s and provides insight into how a pivotal struggle ended in defeat. That ending was not inevitable.
- Looking for Trouble
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Why are we still prospecting for oil when we can't afford to use existing reserves?
- Loren Goldner speaks on the current capitalist crisis
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 Writer and activist Loren Goldner contextualizes the current economic crisis and class struggles in a theory of capitalist development.
- Lost Liberties in the Age of Obama
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 When World War II broke out on September l, l939 the poet W.H. Auden sat in a bar on 42nd Street and penned a poem using that fateful date for its title. He reflected that the past ten years had been “a low dishonest decade.” And so has our last ten.
- Louisianans, Oil & Petro-Addiction
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Deepwater Horizon oil horror has again focused the nation on South Louisiana. For the second time in less than five years, we are on the front pages of America’s newspapers. Again, this region is being misunderstood. Easy explanations miss the reasons why this area is so vulnerable, and why we in Louisiana are paying for the American economy’s dependence upon petroleum.
- Making Sense of This Economic Crisis
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 While it now is generally agreed that the main source of the 2008 financial implosion was the accumulation of too much toxic debt, there is little agreement on the factors that precipitated the buildup of all that unsustainable debt. Whereas neoclassical/neoliberal economists blame the “irrational behavior of the agents” (both lenders and borrowers), Keynesian economists blame financial deregulation and insufficient public policy.
- Martin Kramer, Harvard and the Eugenics of Zion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 At Herzliya the cream of the Zionist security elite gather to raise the alarm about Arab births and hear scholarly analyses of family size and fertility rates among Jews and Arabs as 'existential' threats to the State. Meanwhile, in the Israeli Knesset there are elaborate debates on how to define who is a Jew and who is not - along with legislating what extra privileges should be allocated to the former and denied to the latter. It would be hard to imagine another modern country where such discussions are part of the intellectual mainstream, rather than isolated in the more shadowy fringes of racist right-wing politics. Similar attitudes are expressed in the Zionist Diaspora, where bemoaning Jewish assimilation, promoting Jewish childbearing and financing Aliya to strengthen Israel's Jewish demography are common themes. Early eugenicists (and their successors) once warned against 'miscegenation' and 'mongrelization' as a danger to the White Aryan Race. Today, Jewish charities like the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation announce their prime mission as education against 'intermarriage.'
- Marx at the Margins
On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Published: 2016 Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed. To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America. But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism.
- Marx, Bakunin, and the question of authoritarianism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Marx characterized the International as "a bond of union rather than a controlling force" and considered it "the business of the International Working Men's Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever."
- Marx versus Bakunin
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- A Marxist History of the World Part 1: The Hominid Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the first of a regular series, Neil Faulkner charts the evolutionary development of modern day humans from primitive apes to socially co-operative human beings.
- A Marxist History of the World part 10: Men of Iron
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The constant rise and fall of Bronze age societies was a product of their wasteful, crisis ridden nature. But in the barbarian periphery around 1300 BCE an industrial revolution had begun that was to transform the world.
- A Marxist History of the World Part 11: Western Asia: the Persian Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner looks at the centuries following 1000 BCE when the scale of civilisation and empire exploded as the productivity of iron tools boosted the surpluses available to Iron Age empire-builders.
- A Marxist History of the World part 12: India: the Mauryan Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner looks at the growth of the Mauryan Empire which at its zenith encompassed almost the whole of what is today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
- A Marxist History of the World part 13: China: the Ch'in Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner looks at the origins of the Ch'in Empire - short-lived, created by conquest and terror and characterised by extreme centralisation, military-style exploitation, and murderous repression.
- A Marxist History of the World part 14: The Greek Democratic Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner looks at the radical participatory democracy which began in Athens between 510 and 506 BCE and spread to virtually every city-state in the Aegean.
- A Marxist History of the World part 15: The Macedonian Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner looks at the defeat of the democratic empire centred around Athens in a protracted counter-revolution led by Greek aristocrats, Macedonian kings, and Roman viceroys.
- A Marxist History of the World part 16: Roman Military Imperialism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Rome represented a unique fusion of Greek-style citizenship with Macedonian-style militarism. The result was the most dynamic imperialist state in the ancient world.
- A Marxist History of the World part 17: The Roman Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner looks at the Roman Revolution - a complex, distorted, century-long process of class struggle.
- A Marxist History of the World part 18: The Crisis of Late Antiquity
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner explains how the Roman Empire entered its terminal crisis as its military imperialism came up against geographical, economic, and sociological barriers to expansion.
- A Marxist History of the World part 19: Mother-goddesses and power-deities
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner looks at how the growth of private property altered the position of women - from occupying a central role in society to suffering what Engels called ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’.
- A Marxist History of the World Part 2: The Upper Palaeolithic Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the second of his regular series Neil Faulkner reveals the incredible innovation and adaptability of our ancient ancestors, their unique combination of language and imagination and how cultures formed to fit the different environments in which early societies lived and worked.
- A Marxist History of the World part 20: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner examines how the three great monotheistic religions produced by the contradictions of the ancient world owed their extraordinary power to their origins in the myths and rituals of the oppressed.
- A Marxist History of the World part 21: Huns, Goths, and Romans
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner charts the transformation of the Huns from tribal nomads into continent-straddling militarists.
- A Marxist History of the World part 22: Arabs, Persians, and Byzantines
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This week Neil Faulkner describes the rise and explosive spread of the third great monotheistic religion, where compassion, charity, and protection became moral imperatives - Islam.
- A Marxist History of the World part 23: The Abbasid Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Islam created a single overarching allegiance throughout the Arab-ruled world yet the Middle East came to be a divided region of weak and unpopular states. Neil Faulkner looks at the conflicts that lay behind this process.
- A Marxist History of the World part 24: Hindus, Buddhists, and the Gupta Empire
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 More than half a millennium separated the fall of India’s Mauryan Empire in the late 3rd century BCE (before the common era) from the rise of the Gupta Empire in the early 4th century CE (common era). Economic and social change during the interval altered the foundations of imperialism.
- A Marxist History of the World part 25: Chinese History's Revolving Door
Door Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Neil Faulkner examines China's imperial history, where for two millennia political revolution did not lead to social transformation, but simply to the replacement of one dynasty by another.
- A Marxist History of the World Part 3: The Neolithic Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In part three of Neil Faulkner's Marxist history series he reveals how the advent of farming lead to primitive communistic societies who through land depletion and scarcity of resources would be forced into global war.
- A Marxist History of the World Part 4: The origins of War and Religion
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This week Neil Faulkner looks at the origins of War and Religion in the Early Neolithic world.
- A Marxist History of the World part 5: The Rise of the Specialists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Early Neolithic economy was doomed by insoluble contradictions. Technique was primitive and wasteful. Society lacked reserves against natural disaster and hard times. Virgin land ran out as old fields were exhausted and populations grew.
- A Marxist History of the World part 6: The First Ruling Class
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This week Neil Faulkner looks at the rise of the first ruling classes as the surplus created through the increasing productivity of human labour allowed a section of society to live without producing.
- A Marxist History of the World part 7: The Spread of Civilisation
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This week Neil Faulkner looks at the spread and development of ancient city civilisations around the world, each governed by a new ruling class of priests, city-governors and war-leaders.
- A Marxist History of the World part 8: Crisis in the Bronze Age
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Why did Bronze Age empires rise and fall amid crisis and war? And why did this contradictory social form simply replicate itself over long periods of time? Neil Faulkner looks at the evidence.
- A Marxist History of the World part 9: How History Happens
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The complex societies that emerged from the division of society into classes also created societies that were wasteful, violent, stagnant and crisis prone. Understanding why is the key to how history happens argues Neil Faulkner.
- Mass Murder at Colfax, The Bloody Death of Reconstruction
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On April 13, 1873, white supremacists laid siege to a Black Republican stronghold in rural north Louisiana, brutally slaying freedmen and altering the course of the United States. The Colfax massacre happened at the courthouse of newly created Grant Parish, located in a town named after Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Colfax is situated in cotton country along the Red River.
- The Massacre and the Cover-Up
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Without much stronger international pressure than the international community has applied to date, there is every reason to expect Israeli massacres to steadily become more severe, their PR rationales more outlandish. Mild diplomatic rebukes will not sway them. Unless serious costs are imposed for such crimes, much worse is yet to come.
- May Day & SDS & SNCC Jubilee
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Class consciousness is the knowledge that emancipation is ours. Class struggle is the fight for it, the fight to be a class, and then the fight to abolish the class system. It is not economistic; it is historical. It was concrete not abstract. It was expressed in real voices, voices of the past and voices of the present. The skill is in the listening.
- Meat: A Benign Extravagance
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 An exploration of the difficult environmental and ethical issues that surround the human consumption of animal flesh.
- The Media and the Far Right
Showcasing the Crude, the Violent and the Aberrant Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The right-moving trend of the mainstream media, absurdly deemed liberal by successfully intimidating corporatists and ideological aggressors, continues year after year.
- A Memory of Howard
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A recollection of the late Howard Zinn.
- Merchants of Doubt
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Published: 2012 Investigative reportage on how private interests and lobbies in America use hired gun scientists to spread doubt and misinformation. The media's binary understanding of balanced repoting has given these individuals a soapbox and allowed the public to believe there are divisions in the mainstream scientific opinion on global warming where none exist.
- Mexican Women -- Then and Now
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Araceli's gnarled hands knead the corn dough in a smoke-filled lean-to next to her kitchen, as the 5 a.m. sunlight begins to squint through the slats. She will make about 48 pounds of tortillas, as she does every day. By noon they’ll be on the table in houses all over the 500-inhabitant town she has lived in her whole life, half-way between Mexico City and Toluca, the capital of the State of Mexico.
- Mexico 2010: The Spreading Crisis
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On July 4, in an atmosphere of widespread insecurity, unabated violence, and an uncertain allocation of authority and impunity,* Mexico held local elections in 15 of its 32 states.
- Mexico's Crisis in Context
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In this article I offer an historical context for understanding Mexico’s current economic, political, and human crisis triggered by 28 years of neoliberal economic policies. Neoliberal governments have privatized most sectors of the economy and reduced the Mexican state’s role to one of being a repressive apparatus. NAFTA and related neoliberal policies have left the economy without a dynamic internal market for local products and with a socio-economic inequality that is one of the most extreme in the world.
- Microsoft, piracy, and independent media in Kyrgyzstan
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Selective enforcement of alleged software infringement is being used with some frequency in the former Soviet republics as cover to harass independent media. Local law enforcement officials have been given broad powers, in the name of fighting piracy, to raid premises and seize hardware. For the most part, Western companies and governments have encouraged this broadening of powers.
- Midnight on the Mavi Marmara
The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Eastern Mediterranean, Monday, May 31st, 2010, 4.30am: Israeli commandos, boarding from sea and air, attack the six boats of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as it sails through international waters bringing humanitarian relief to the beleaguered Palestinians of Gaza. Within minutes, nine peace activists are dead, shot by the Israelis. Scores of others are injured. The 700 people on board the ships are arrested and transported to detention centres in Israel, and then deported.
- The Miners' Hymns
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 The ill-fated coal mining communities in North East England are the subject of this inspired documentary by multi-media artist Bill Morrison.
- Miners Protest Brutal Beatings
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Five thousand members of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union and their families and other unions and social movements marched five kilometers May 24 to protest the brutal police beating of more than 20 union leaders and activists. The march ended at the port which serves the local steel mills in Lázaro Cárdenas, a steel mill city in the state of Michoacan, blocking it for two hours or more.
- Mining Peru
Canada's New Territory? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In Peru, 40 percent of conflicts involving local communities are over mining. The majority of the mining sector in Peru is owned by Canadian corporations.
- Mitziton: A community in Chiapas resisting the government road
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Moffatt, Gary
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Canadian anarchist and activist.
- Moffatt, Gary (Italian text)
Connexipedia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Gary Archibald Moffat era un attivista Canadese specializzato nella costruzione di movimenti radicali ai fini di cambiamenti sociali e politici.
- Mohammed Khatib, coordinator of West Bank Coordination Committee arrested
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Khatib's arrest today is the most severe escalation in a recent wave of repression again the Palestinian popular struggle and its leadership. Khatib is the 35th resident of Bilin to be arrested on suspicions related to anti-Wall protest since June 23rd, 2009. The recent wave of arrests is largely an assault on the members of the Popular Committees - the leadership of the popular struggle - who are then charged with incitement when arrested.
- The Money Gusher
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The oil industry's decommissioning costs will dwarf those of nuclear power. The money being made now should be put aside to meet them.
- The Monster
How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America -- and Spawned a Global Crisis Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Hudson explains the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage business by chronicling the rise and fall of two corporate empires: Ameriquest and Lehman Brothers, who did more than any other institutions to create the feeding frenzy that flooded the U.S. with high-risk, high-profit home mortgage loans.
- Morality Policing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The police treat protests and festivals as a threat to their power.
- Mossad Operation Threatened Against Reporter
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An Israeli journalist who went into hiding after writing a series of reports showing lawbreaking approved by Israeli army commanders faces a lengthy jail term for espionage if caught, as Israeli security services warned at the weekend they would "remove the gloves" to track him down.
- Mother Russia and the Soviet Fatherland: Canadian Women and the Communist Party of Canada,1929-1939
PhD. Thesis, Queen's University, 2010 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Mountain Justice
Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal, for the Future of Us All Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 In recent years, local people fighting against Mountaintop Removal's destruction of their homes in West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia have invited volunteers from outside Appalachia's coalfields to help them bring national attention to this shameful practice, and abolish it. This on-the-ground, insider report of a grassroots effort to end mountaintop removal in Appalachia is a fascinating account of why building solidarity across geographic, age, class, and philosophical lines in such struggles is so important but so hard.
- The myth of Israeli morality
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel has consistently reacted with repression or even extreme violence to cultural and political manifestations of Palestinian identity.
- The Myth of Muslim Conquest
Less Threatening Than Imagined Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It's easy to mistake the high visibility of Islam in the West for a massive return to piety in Muslim communities. But for the last 20 years religious observance has stagnated, even slightly waned.
- Myths of the Exile and Return
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 So where did “the Jewish people” come from anyway? Was there an Exodus from Egypt, an Empire of David and Solomon, an Exile ending in a triumphant Return to Zion? Does any of it matter and if so, why?
- National Anarchism: Trojan Horse for White Nationalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- The National Security State Cops a Feel
Taking Off the Gloves (Then Everything Else) Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It's finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your "safety" will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
- Net freedom 'at stake' on WikiLeaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Internet service providers are cutting access to the whistleblower site, raising broader concerns about online freedom.
- A New Age Of People Power: Lessons From The Dongria Kondh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 With greater power to build alliances across boundaries, the Davids of the world are having more success throwing off the Goliaths.
- New Hogtown Press
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 New Hogtown Press was a Canadian left-wing publisher active during the 1970s and 1980s.
- The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Argues that Jim Crow and legal racial segregation have been replaced by mass race-based incarceration as a system of social control.
- The New Jim Crow: A talk
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Nothing short of a broad-based social movement can address this problem. Such a movement has to be multi-racial: Latinos and women, especially women of color, are the fastest growing segment of the prison population. If we don't create care and compassion across racial lines, then, even if this system collapses, we will recreate it in another form.
- The New McCarthyism In Israel
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Israeli government and its right-wing supporters have been waging a 'McCarthyite' campaign against human-rights groups by blaming them for the barrage of international criticism that has followed Israel's attack on Gaza a year ago, critics say.
- The New Sexual Radicalism
Socialist Feminist Questions About Queer Activism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 What are the social origins of queer? Does this current have a vision - whether implicit or explicit - of sexual liberation, and if so, what is it? What is its relationship to such emancipatory projects as feminism, antiracism, global justice and socialism?
- The New Sexual Radicalism
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 From its beginning in the 1990s in the United States, a “queer” activist current has gradually spread to other countries, including in recent years in Western Europe. In decades when the prevailing trend in LGBT movements has been to orient to legal reforms by parliamentary means, queer activism has constituted a third wave of sexual radicalism, emphasizing visibility, difference, direct action, refusal to assimilate to the dominant culture, and the fluidity and diversity of sexual desire.
- A New Type of Political Organization?
The Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- The Next Mexican Revolution
Don't Look Now, But It's Already Started Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If this is to be the year of the next Mexican revolution, the time to move is now.
- The 1960 Sit-ins in Context
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We think of the Sit-In Movement as beginning on February 1, 1960, fifty years ago. In the minds of many this was the initiating event that led to many subsequent developments in the broader civil rights movement, indeed as a turning point in Black, and more generally, U.S. history. But the sit-ins, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had their origins in vast social changes that began long before.
- The 1960 Sit-ins in Context
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Civil Rights Movement that we associate with the 1960s was the culmination of a vast set of social and economic changes. The tradition of Black struggle itself, going back to the very beginnings of slavery in the New World, was also part of the context for the new movement.
- No longer a real newspaper, new Globe betrays Canadians
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The new tarted-up, glossy, colour Globe and Mail is many things, but it is not a real “news paper.”
- No News is Not Good News
Cops Taping Protesters & Journalists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If cops photograph and videotape protesters and journalists, it's news if it happens in China, but when it happens in the U.S., as it routinely does, the media are silent.
- The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Politics
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 In the near future there will be no politics but green politics…
- The No-Nonsense Guide to Religion
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Symon Hill's No-Nonsense Guide to Religion tries to explain what religion means, how we relate to it, how it was created and how it affects us culturally, politically and spiritually today.
- No surrender in Greece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A member of International Workers Left (DEA), reports from Athens on the May 20 general strike and workers' growing radicalization.
- Noam Chomsky: Moral & Social Thinker
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Noam Chomsky is a powerhouse of insightful thought – this book attests to that. So analyzing or even summarizing Anthony Arnove’s The Essential Chomsky is no simple task. A moderately lengthy and notably chronological collection of texts plucked from Chomsky’s enormous output, The Essential Chomsky leaps from linguistics to Palestine to libertarian socialism and back to linguistics again. Given the political nature of Against the Current, we will focus on Chomsky’s views on political philosophy, morality, U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and propaganda, ending with thoughts on the editing. But first, a few introductory remarks on the man himself.
- Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers search the sky and explore the origins of the universe. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones murdered and dumped in the desert by the Pinochet dictatorship. The desert also holds the stories of pre-Columbian indigenous societies, 19th-century miners, and political prisoners. A meditation on astronomy, the past, memory, and persistence.
- Not Another Disaster Movie
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Whose will is it that keeps us going the way we are? The will of capital, albeit a capital that’s been refurbished for our modern times. That will cloaks itself in the garb of progress, science and technology. At the same time, it justifies itself by the invocation, in the developed countries and those (like China) on the fast track to development, of an apparently all but incontrovertible need to maintain “our way of life.” That way of life threatens to fairly quickly become a threat to the possibility of life in any form that we would want to be part of.
- Not Bad Policy, But Class Policy
Holes in the Keynesian Against G20 Austerity Plan Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Liberal critics of the vicious austerity policies passionately argue against such policies as bad, misguided, or unwise as if the governments that make such policies do not know what they are doing. Accordingly, these critics offer all kinds of elegant Keynesian arguments in favor of stimulus deficit spending that could lead to improved economic conditions, increased tax revenues, and decreased debt and deficit. What these critics tend to overlook, however, is the fact that the governments that impose austerity policies are serving as bailiffs or debt-collecting agencies on behalf of their corporate/financial masters.
- Notes on Radicalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Questions frequently asked when introduced as a co-author of Radical Sydney are: "What is radicalism?"; "Is radicalism dead?"; and specifically with regard to Australia, "Where is radicalism today?". Often, it seems, the unstated, implied premise behind some of these questions is that radicalism once was, but is no more, a questioning underpinned by senses of defeat, confusion, with a hint of nostalgia thrown in.
- Nuclear Deceit: The Times and Iran
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Is the Times engaged in reporting or propaganda in its coverage of Iran's nuclear program?
- Oaxaca: Autonomy Under Seige
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On April 27, 2010, the Mexican state of Oaxaca again garnered international attention as a humanitarian aid and solidarity caravan comprised of national and international activists heading to the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala was ambushed by state-backed paramilitaries, resulting in the deaths of two activists, leaving several wounded, and others disappeared for days.
- Obama and the Boy in the Metal Box
The Incarceration of John Walker Lindh Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Clemency for John Walker Lindh would open up to public scrutiny an outrageous injustice that high officials in the Bush administration deliberately perpetrated on an American citizen after the 9/11 attacks. It would expose how they covered up their illegalities by betraying the legal professionalism of the Justice Department and by imprisoning their victim behind prison walls for half his life.
- The Obama Syndrome
Surrender at Home, War Abroad Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A merciless dissection of Obama’s overseas escalation and domestic retreat.
- Obama's Imperial Continuity
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Despite the rhetoric of hope and promises of “change we can believe in” that ushered him into the White House, Barack Obama has offered anything but a marked shift in the fundamental course of U.S. foreign policy. The change Obama has brought — to the relief of U.S. and global elites — is away from the George W. Bush-era fantasy that U.S. military firepower and ideological muscle could unilaterally dominate the globe. But his underlying policy goals are very much in continuity not only with Bush but with a century of his predecessors.
- Obama's Liberty Problem
Why Indefinite Detention By Executive Order Should Scare the Hell Out of People Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The proposal to create a special new legal system by Executive Order will threaten the liberty of every single US citizen who is not in Guantanamo because it will damage the due process guarantees which have built up over the years to protect each one of us.
- Obama's Reform, Recovery Stalled
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Reform agenda of president Obama and the Democrats, such as it was, is exhausted. Two failing wars, a fragile and almost jobless economic recovery teetering on the cusp of a double-dip Great Recession, and an all-out rightwing racial, economic and political offensive have defined the ground for the November midterm election and the period to follow.
- Obama's RTTT vs. Teacher Unions
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The 165 Washington, DC public school teachers terminated for poor evaluations on July 23 may be the first victims of the Obama reform agenda. The teachers were fired because of low scores on the DC school system’s new evaluation procedure — one which ties teacher evaluations to student scores on standardized tests.
- October 7: Defend Education!
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Students, faculty and campus workers across the United States will kick off the 2010-2011 school year with an October 7 national day of action to defend public education. This day of action will attempt to pick up from where last year’s movement to defend public education left off. March 4 represented the broadest point of last year’s organizing, with strikes, major rallies and marches, and smaller local speak-outs taking place throughout California, across the country, and to some extent around the world.
- Ohio Socialist Runs for U.S. Senate
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 I’m running as the Ohio Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate because I believe that the severity of the crisis, and the depth of dissatisfaction and discontent in our society, obligate socialists to put forward our alternative and to organize to achieve it. We on the left need to present the vision of a democratic socialist society, a society which can only be achieved through building a mass social movement and a radically different sort of political organization.
- On the Legacy of Che Guevara
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Peter Drucker's letter (ATC 144) commenting on Kit Wainer's review of Besancenot and Löwy's new biography of Che (ATC 143) rehearses many of Besancenot and Löwy's arguments that Che's Marxism was some sort of alternative to Stalinism. I, for one, am no longer convinced by these claims.
- Once a Jolly Hangman
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 When this book was first published in Asia in July 2010, UK journalist Alan Shadrake was arrested and tried, then sentenced to jail—for daring to put the Singapore justice system in the dock. This revised and updated edition covers Shadrake’s arrest, and his ongoing campaign against the death penalty.
- Open Letter to German Left Party (Die Linke)
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The state of Israel does not deserve prizes for its occupation, racist separation and its war crimes. Only international policy which emphasises to Israel that violations of international law are not tolerated will succeed in promoting a just peace for all residents of this land.
- The Opposites Game
All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands.
- Oranges and Sunshine
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 This Australian drama is based on the true story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker who uncovered the scandal of 'home children', a program which forcibly relocated underprivileged children from the United Kingdom to Australia and Canada.
- Organizing with Love: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible.
- The Origin of America's Intellectual Vacuum
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A profile of Chandler Davis, a blacklisted mathematician who served six months in jail for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
- Orwell in the Maze of Memory
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On 23 June 1937, George Orwell and his wife Eileen boarded a train in the Barcelona station, destination Portbou.
- The Other World Is Here
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 You see what you’re looking for. Most of us are constantly urged to see the world as, at best, a competitive place and, at worst, a constant war of each against each, and you can see just that without even bothering to look too hard. But that’s not all you can see.
- Our Promiscuous Prehistory
A Review of Sex at Dawn Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Most otherwise topnotch evolutionary psychologists, primatologists and anthropologists come up with flip, vague or convoluted ways to explain away unpopular evidence. They seem to be trying to squeeze the square peg of monogamy into the round hole of humanity. Ryan and Jethá have chosen a more well-rounded term to characterize the essence of human sexuality as practiced by our prehistoric progenitors: promiscuity.
- Out Lickspittle Press
Doorkeepers to the House of Lies Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Today no one believes that our country’s success depends on an informed public and a free press. America’s success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people’s god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.
- Out of Sight, Out of Trouble
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The UK could tap into vast renewable resources, without any of the aggro caused by existing wind farms.
- Out of the Frame
The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Links Pappé's personal struggle against Israeli McCarthyism with a broader struggle for human and political rights of which "academic freedom" is merely one aspect.
- Pakistan on the Brink? The Real Threat from Within
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The American antiwar movement must understand that what is unfolding in Pakistan bears no resemblance to the “failed-state” proclamations of establishment hacks the world over. The danger is not at all that the country will fall to the Pakistani Taliban, drowned in a tidal wave of instability said to be cascading eastwards from Afghanistan. While sham elections in Afghanistan have hopefully helped clarify the venal, corrupt character of NATO’s efforts there, at times an unhealthy haziness still afflicts the Left’s thinking on Pakistan.
- Pakistan Women's Voices
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An interview with Bushra Khaliq. Bushra Khaliq is general secretary of the Women Workers Help Line (www.wwhl.org.pk) and a member of Labour Party Pakistan.
- Palestine: Israeli Love Song
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 A video response to Israeli propaganda and PR efforts.
- Palestinian Economic Boycott Hits Israeli Settlers
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israeli settlers are beginning to feel the bite of an economic boycott campaign launched by the Palestinian Authority (PA) against goods produced in the illegal Israeli settlements dotting the occupied West Bank.
- A Paradise Built in Hell
The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 The most startling thing about disasters, according to Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides.
- Parecon & Participatory Society
An Interview with Michael Albert Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Participatory Economics, or parecon for short, is a vision for how to conduct economics in a classless manner. It delivers to workers and consumers self managed say over their economic lives, a condition of solidarity with others, equitable incomes for their labors, diverse opportunities and options, and ecological balance.
- PayPal admits US pressure over WikiLeaks account freeze
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 PayPal today admitted it suspended payments to WikiLeaks after an intervention from the US State Department.
- Peace, Freedom and McCarthyism
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The title of this volume is a bit misleading. It has hardly anything to do with the ideological substance of U.S. anticommunism in its encounter with the African-American freedom movement.
- Pedophiles and Popes: Doing the Vatican Shuffle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Church leaders seem to forget that pedophilia is a felony crime and that, as citizens of a secular state, priests are subject to its laws just like the rest of us. Clerical authorities repeatedly have made themselves accessories to the crime, playing an active role in obstructing justice, arguing that criminal investigations of 'church affairs' violates the free practice of religion - as if raping little children were a holy sacrament.
- The People v. the Bankers
Greece Today, US Tomorrow Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Greek "bailout" is actually a bailout of the international banks.
- Permanent Autonomous Zone
A Conversation With Zine Writers Erick Lyle and Jeff Miller Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 What if our lives were filled with moments of liberation from the everyday? Is it possible to carve out spaces that challenge the dominant logic of the market, where we can pursue meaningful work and actualize our dreams?
- The Persecution of Pfc. Bardley Manning
The Leaker as American Hero Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If Manning did what he is suspected of doing, he should be honoured as an American hero for exposing war crimes.
- PFC Bradley Manning, Patriot
Why Manning was Within His Rights to Give Secrets to Wikileaks Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune
Resource Type: Film/Video First Published: 2010 Published: 2011 A documentary film on the life and times of folk singer-songwriter Phil Ochs.
- A Poetics of Resistance
The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Movement Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Combining narrative history, literary criticism, ethnography, and media analysis, A Poetics of Resistance provides a refreshing take on Mexico's Zapatista movement by examining the means, meanings, and mythos behind the Zapatista image.
- The Poisoned Pill of Obama's War
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Obama administration looked into the abyss of endless war in Afghanistan, considered all its options, pondered the consequences — and jumped. This is a war without honor, or purpose, or hope.
- Police in Canada
The Real Story Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 What's going on with Canada's police? Once an institution that commanded respect and trust, the police are now widely regarded with skepticism and even suspicion.
- The Political Slaughterhouse
Statism's Death Knell for Liberty and Democracy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The issue of government coercion has been taken off the radar screen of politically correct thought. The more government power has grown, the more unfashionable it becomes to discuss or recognize government abuses- as if it were bad form to count the dead brought about by government interventions.
- The Politics of Impatience: An open letter from anarchists to the anarchist movement
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Militancy and dramatic tactics require trust, and trust is built by humbly listening to people who have their own ideas and plans for their liberation. It is now more than ever, exactly because of the urgency of the crisis created by capitalism, that we need to be careful that our actions are as respectful, strategic, and collectively discussed and agreed-on as possible.
- The Polluters
The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Provides an account of the American chemical industry and its effect on the environment.
- The Poor Must Die
Anglo-American Political Philosophy 101 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 For more than 30 years, the world-dominating Anglo-American alliance has been under the sway of factions which, for all their internal squabbling and hair-splitting, are strongly united in their steadfast, unshakeable adherence to the perpetuation -- and expansion -- of elite power and privilege. They have shown themselves willing -- eager -- to degrade their own societies (and destroy many others) in the service of this brutal, barbaric, inhuman faith. The poor have no place in this system.
- Post-Katrina New Orleans: A Third Reconstruction?
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 When Union Army troops under the command of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler entered and occupied New Orleans in April of 1862, so began the first Reconstruction of the city and the state of Louisiana. The rise and then the defeat of the historic democratic struggle known as the first Reconstruction — discussed in the accompanying sidebar [as well as reviews by Robert Caldwell and Jim Toweill elsewhere in this issue] — sets the context in which we find today’s New Orleans, four years after the levee collapse.
- Predicting Torture
The PATRIOT Act, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Bradley Manning is charged with leaking classified documents to Wikileaks and faces a court martial. The conditions of his confinement are extreme, and amount to torture.
- Presenting Insurgent Notes
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We take our Marx and Engels seriously. Recent history, beginning perhaps (in the US) with the UPS strike of 1997 and the 'battle of Seattle' in 1999, now quickened by the abject financial and ideological meltdown (Fall 2008) of the three decades of the stifling 'neo-liberal' era, has favored a certain revival of the radical critique of capitalism, by which we understand first and foremost the work of Karl Marx.
"Theory must seek its practice," Marx wrote long ago, but "practice must also seek its theory", and such theoretical ferment expresses the rising tide, in fits and starts reaching back to the 1990's, of an accelerating global reaction to the ravages of the 'neo-liberal', 'Washington consensus' phase of capitalism, after the rollback of what we might consider he last (l968-1977) offensive of the world working class.
- Presidential Assassinations Of US Citizens
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.
- Press for Conversion #65
December 2010 Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2010 Canada's hidden involvement in the Iraq War.
- The Problem of the Democratic Opposition Organization
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Published: 2014 The basis for this proposal is an attempt to address the classic dilemma of the broad democratic opposition. In summary it is the need for a competent professional cadre to implement the changes needed, combined with the maintenance of a democratic and effective membership control of this 'elite'.
- Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack on the Gaza Peace Flotilla - Part 1
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 We are trained to react to violent acts, not on the basis of their objective legality and human cost, but on the basis of the perceived legitimacy of the people committing the act. Violence committed by authority figures will tend to be viewed as legitimate and well-intentioned. Violence committed by non-state actors or "rogue states" resisting the state will tend to be seen as illegitimate and malevolent.
- Proposal for a Participatory Socialist International
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A statement endorsing the idea of a new International.
- Protesters in Eastern India Battle Against Mining Giant Arcelor Mittal
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the rural, tribal lands of Eastern India, protesters are going head-to-head with world steel giant Arcelor Mittal. "We may give away our lives, but we will not part with an inch of our ancestral land," the villagers cry. "The forest, rivers and land are ours. We don't want factories, steel or iron. Arcelor Mittal Go Back."
- Public Disinterest: Information Commons Dismantled
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Seventy-five years after the Federal Radio Commission declared there was no room on the public airwaves for “propaganda stations” and denied a license renewal to a station that attacked Jews and law enforcement agencies, the airwaves are filled with both propaganda and venom. Today the airwaves, stripped of commons rules, feed hatred.
- Public Education in California--What's After March 4?
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On March fourth, we marched forth. Hundreds of marches, rallies and direct actions in defense of public education took place on March 4 across California. Now what?
- The Punishment of Gaza
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 An account of Israel's criminal treatment of Gaza.
- Put the Palestinians on a Diet
Media Bury Documents Revealing Israel's Deliberate Policy of Near-Starvation for Gaza Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel has been forced to reveal what Palestinians and other observers on the ground have known for a long time: that the blockade of Gaza is state policy intended to inflict collective punishment, not to bolster Israeli “security”.
- Put the Palestinians On A Diet
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel has been forced to reveal what Palestinians and other observers on the ground have known for a long time: that the blockade of Gaza is state policy intended to inflict collective punishment, not to bolster Israeli “security”.
- Queering the Cold War
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A review of the book 'The Canadian War on Queers' and its examination of how homophobia, national security, and queerness unfolded in Canada during the Cold War.
- Questions for a New Movement
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Public universities in California during Fall 2009 saw the eruption of a movement to defend public education — and more broadly, public services and goods — from an onslaught of cuts and fee hikes in the wake of the 2008-09 economic downturn and federal and state budget cuts.
- Race & Class: Obama & the Politics of Protest
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Consider the following contradiction of modern African-American politics: We have the first African-American president (he checked “Black” on the new census form) offering hope to millions of working-class Blacks. Yet we see a drawdown of protest politics by longtime civil rights leaders, even though the “Great Recession” is causing the greatest harm Black communities have seen in decades.
- Race & Class: Obama Forgets Black Community
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 What I found most striking about President Barack Obama’s first “State of the Union” address before Congress on January 27 was what he didn’t say. In his 70-minute speech on the economy as the first president of the United States of African heritage, I expected that Obama would highlight the special impact of the recession on Blacks.
- Race and Class: Blacks Still Taking the Hit
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It took ten months before the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) stood up and challenged President Barack Obama. In a surprise move, 10 CBC leaders refused to participate in a key House financial committee vote in December until some more relief is provided to Black businesses.
- Race and Class: What About the Working Poor?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 One striking feature of political debate in the country today is that — while every commentator, pundit and political observer talks about and focuses on the concerns of the super-rich and the middle class — few ever talk about the plight of the disadvantaged, those on food stamps and welfare and particularly the working poor.
- Race and Class: What About the Working Poor?
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 One striking feature of political debate in the country today is that — while every commentator, pundit and political observer talks about and focuses on the concerns of the super-rich and the middle class — few ever talk about the plight of the disadvantaged, those on food stamps and welfare and particularly the working poor.
- Racism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 An overview of racism
- Racist Universities?
New Rules Favor Former IDF Soldiers Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Measures designed to benefit Jewish school-leavers applying for places in Israeli higher education at the cost of their Arab counterparts have been criticised by lawyers and human rights groups.
- The Railroading of Tonya Craft
A New Wave of Prosecutorial Hysteria Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 As we have seen countless times before, the media always is ready to run over the cliff with the prosecutors, and no matter how many times the prosecution is discredited, there always is another reporter ready to serve as a PR mouthpiece for a dishonest state official. And it always will be that way, for like the Bourbons, the media learn nothing, and they forget nothing.
- Rainbow Pie
A Redneck Memoir Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A fascinating and extremely readable account of a life now vanished, destroyed by the insatiable appetite of capital.
- Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
- The Rawick File: How Do People Revolt?
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 George Rawick (1929-1990) was a powerful socialist scholar in the C.L.R. James tradition, sometimes an equally powerful mentor for young radicals, and also a tortured soul. He is largely forgotten today, because he did not write easily or found a “school” with his methods — or even get along with his friends and allies very well.
- The Real Merchants of Death
The Global Arms Trade Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The global arms trade is a $60 billion yearly business, of which the U.S. controls nearly 40 percent, and a political and economic juggernaut that defends its turf with the ferocity of a junkyard dog.
- The Real Motive Behind the Gaza Flotilla Attack
Sabotaging Peace Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel's leadership is committed to "a dynamic state bent upon expansion". The greatest threat to continued expansion is the threat of peace. Whenever Israel's leadership is faced with the threat of peace, it initiates violence designed to stop it.
- Rebel Rank and File
Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A collection of essays that concentrate on struggles by American workers at the workplace and the political and economic context in which they took place.
- Rebutting Israel's "We don't kill civilians on purpose" argument
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The difference between intentional and accidental killing is only relevant when the aim of the violence is a just one. Accidentally killing civilians in the course of using violence to stop oppression is one thing. Doing it in the course of using violence to oppress people is a very different thing. In the case of Israeli violence, the question is not whether Israel intentionally kills civilians. The question is: What is the purpose of Israel's violence?
- Recollections of Harry Press
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Harry Press, a veteran of the U.S. Trotskyist movement and the American Socialist current, died this year at age 94. In recent years he was a loyal reader and made several very generous donations to this magazine. These recollections of Harry Press were told to Carl Finamore for Against the Current.
- Reflections on October 7th
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Students, workers, teachers, parents and faculty throughout the country participated in the October 7th National Day of Action to Defend Public Education. As part of a growing movement, activists from 25 different states were involved.
- Rejoinder to Criticism of Chomsky: Asset or Liability?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 One can learn much more about Chomsky’s actual views from the real Chomsky than from reading about some imaginary Chomsky which some critics have manufactured.
- Remembering Barbara Zeluck
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Remembering Barbara Zeluck
- Remote-Controlled Killing
The Spot-and-Shoot Game Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Israeli military is increasingly using remote-controlled weapons to kill Palestinians. Israel's remotely controlled weapons systems are in high demand from repressive regimes and the burgeoning homeland security industries around the globe.
- Reply to A Reviewer
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 My old friend Paul Buhle has developed a neat general formula for reviewing the books he is out of sympathy with. Paul begins by making laudatory comments and concludes by expressing overwhelmingly negative judgments. But he has gone too far in his review of my The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class by falsely accusing me of using “a club to beat [E.P.] Thompson.”
- A Report on Recent Struggles in Greece
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In periods of crisis, such as the current period of overaccumulation crisis, capitalists use the politics of 'public debt' in order to devise new ways to intensify exploitation. In contrast with capitalist upturns when the private debt is increased, downturns are characterized by the increase of the 'public debt.'
- Republic of Dunces
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 For its entire 142-year history, the University of California has served the state’s wealthiest businessmen well as a taxpayer-funded R&D facility. Its graduates have gone out into the world to serve as their mining engineers, attorneys, inventors, weapons designers, and business associates.
- Resistance with the Scent of a Woman
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 “They're afraid of us because we’re not afraid. They think, act, and are going backwards as they stay behind their military armor. They see us laughing, struggling, loving, playing as they watch us from behind their military armor.”
- Resisting Agent Orange
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Following an early April round of visits in private residences and care facilities with children suffering from a range of debilitating birth anomalies, classified by the Vietnamese government as “victims of agent orange,” a delegation of six American veterans sponsored by Veterans for Peace (VFP) was received in Hanoi by Nguyen Tan Dung, the Prime Minister of Vietnam.
- Response
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Oldtimers, across geographical space and chronological time, tend to swat at each other, responding to insults both real and imagined, long past and present. I know that in my family, Ma and Pa did it with increasing vigor over the years. Probably not all of the swatting within the greatly diminished U.S., UK or any other Left can be attributed to political disappointment.
- The Return of Debtors' Prisons
Reservations for the Poor Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Nearly a quarter of the people spending time behind bars on Riker’s Island in 2008 - one in four inmates - were there because they didn’t have the money to pay bail on a misdemeanor charge. These unfortunate souls may have been presumed innocent of the criminal charges by the judge, but they were nonetheless jailed for being poor.
- Revered Rabbi Preaches Slaughter Of Gentile Babies
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Rabbis who are among the leading idelogues of the growing fascist movement in Israel say that violence against non-Jews, including the killing of babies, is justied by religious law. According to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, Jewish law permits the killing of non-Jews in a wide variety of circumstances. In a recent boo, they say "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us".
- Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance
The Power of Story Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- The Rise of the Green Left
Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Climate change and other ecological ills are driving the creation of a grassroots global movement for change. From Latin America to Europe, Australia and China a militant movement merging red and green is taking shape.
- Rise of the Left Party: Germany's Election and Beyond
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On September 27, 2009 the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1945. After four years of governing as a junior partner in a “Grand Coalition” with the right-of-center Christian Democrats (CDU), the SPD garnered only 23% of the vote (down from 33% in 2005) and now appears to be a shadow of the party that had taken the reins of government in 1998.
- The Road from Copenhagen
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The handwriting about the long-anticipated Copenhagen climate change conference has been on the wall for months, and its message is not promising for our human civilization or the thousands of species we may take down with us. By the time of that frantic final day of backroom arm-twisting, blackmail and president Obama's lead-balloon speech, it no longer really mattered whether the conference's failure would be openly admitted, or thinly disguised behind a “political framework statement” without serious mechanisms for implementation, measurement or enforcement.
- Lester Rodney: The Long Ball Hitter
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 I am writing this piece after reading the New York Times obituary of Lester Rodney, where both the role of the Daily Worker and Lester’s role as its sports writer were given their due credit in the fight to integrate major league baseball. Irwin Silber’s book Press Box Red has previously told Lester’s story in depth, and Dave Zirin’s recent articles round out his significance to sports in a more contemporary fashion.
- The Root of the Mid-East Conflict and the Reason Our Government Supports Israel's Government
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 How should decent people respond to the Middle-East conflict? We should support equality, not Zionist ethnic cleansing. Equality is the way to make a better world for ordinary people from Watertown to Ramallah to Tel Aviv, and it is the only way to end racist ideologies such as anti-Semitism and Zionism.
- Rosa Luxemburg and the Global Violence of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Rosa Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital
New Perspectives on Capitalist Development and American Hegemony Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 From a Luxemburgian perspective post-war capitalism developed in two phases, each of which was possible because class-struggles and international conflicts had opened non-capitalist environments for capitalist penetration. The first phase gave rise to consumer capitalism and neo-colonialism; the second was characterized by accumulation by dispossession that rolled back welfare states in the North and developmental states in the South, while also integrating formerly state-socialist countries, notably China, into the capitalist world-system.
- Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution in the Twenty-first Century
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform and Revolution, written at a high point of socialist struggle, contains invaluable lessons for today's new generation of activists as they confront the political and organizational challenges of the day.
- The Saga of Stella D'oro, Inspiration and Lessons
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The powerful labor struggle at the Bronx-based Stella D’oro Biscuit Co. recently came to an abrupt end after 14 long, hard months. The 136 workers at the plant, all members of Local 50 of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) International Union, withstood 11 months on the picket line before winning a court order in July that returned them to work under the terms of their previous contract. But the workers and their supporters were unable to prevent the factory’s closure.
- The Save Public Education Fightback
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Coalition of University Employees (CUE) represents workers on ten University of California campuses and one national laboratory. We have been involved in bargaining statewide for the last two years, with no end in sight. For several years our members had not received raises. Additionally there had been hundreds of layoffs on campuses and at the Office of the President.
- Scottish Workers in History
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 So much has happened to the world’s working class in the last 30 years that we oldtimers may, perhaps, be forgiven for losing focus on the deeper histories of industrial life and struggle. Thanks to the publish-or-perish academic reality, ever more studies in social history actually appear, but fewer treat the labor movement as an important part of that history. Working people are more often seen as victims, too often self-victimized in myriad ways.
- The Secret Secret
Of Wikileaks and Literacy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Only those with proper clearances can participate in discussions that affect significant aspects of our lives. Certain technological achievements, our collective ethical decisions (torture, secret prisons, air strikes, etc.), our collective behavior towards other nations and peoples (foreign policy discussions) and more are often obscured by state secrecy. Like the medieval clergy, those holding classified clearances are the sole legitimate interpreters of the 'really important' knowledge. In effect, they are a caste that guides our political and technological cosmologies.
- The Secrets in Israel's Archives
Evidence of Ethnic Cleansing Kept Under Lock and Key Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israel has extended the time limit for releasing documents in its archives to 70 years, to prevent disclosure of evidence of widespread ethnic cleansing. The state's chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public viewing" and raise doubts about Israel's "adherence to international law," while the government warns that greater transparency will "damage foreign relations."
- Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada's First War on Terror
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 In Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror, Daniel Francis provides an overview of the response of the Canadian state and elite to the postwar labour revolt.
- The Semantics of Terrorism
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A mental construct has been created in which the State of Israel is an entity that is under constant attack. By terrorists. Who, irrefutably, must be eradicated. Their actions are somewhat irrelevant. Whether they are school children, passing through checkpoints, or citizens from other countries bringing medicine and food to Gaza, Israel will garner an astonishing degree of unconditional national and international support for harming them if they call them terrorists.
- A serious newspaper should not confuse Jews and Zionists
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On the eve of the 62th anniversary of Israel, it is important to remember that it was the Zionist minority of Palestine's inhabitants that issued the unilateral declaration of independence. Israel is a Zionist state, not a Jewish one, another important distinction to make in future articles on this burning subject.
- Seven Reasons Why Capitalism Can't Recover Anytime Soon
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 There is a larger disease in the international economic system, a disease that cannot be cured by politicians who swear allegiance to this deteriorating system and to the wealthy elite who benefit from it.
- Sex & Iran's Upstoppable Resistance
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Since Iran's presidential “election” in June 2009 and the protests that followed, the world has caught a partial, albeit highly mediated, glimpse inside that country and its politically active citizenry. The state, frequently misrepresented as a monolith and in neoconservative circles tarred as “Islamo-fascist,” is now more accurately understood as a diverse and fractured set of actors. The reform movement that had ushered in President Khatami suffered defeat by the hardliners with Ahmadenijad’s 2005 election, and hailed by many as dead, has come back to life. To many, it appears unstoppable.
- Sex at Dawn
The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Ryan and Jethá contend that humans evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors argue that monogamy is by no means part of human nature.
- The sex work debate - a response to Jess Edwards
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Contribution to the debate on sex work which has been taking place in the International Socialism journal.
- Sharia Law in Britain -- A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 One Law for All says that Sharia Councils and Muslim Arbitration Tribunals are in violation of UK law, public policy and human rights.
- Shock and Au-sterity
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Scared to death that all the lights were about to go out after pulling the plug on Lehman Brothers, the bourgeoisie rolled up its sleeves, girded its loins, crossed its fingers, and reached deeper than deep for that thing of all things, that relation of all relations that is the life of all lives for the bourgeoisie—OPM, other people’s money.
- Shooting Back
Young Palestinians With Cameras Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 For the past three years, Btselem, the Israeli human rights NGO, has provided cameras and training to young Palestinians as part of its camera distribution project, to collect video evidence of abuses and misconduct by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
- Shot in the Back
Did the IDF Execute Mavi Marmara Victims? Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the Israeli commando assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, if victims were shot in the back or in the back of the head, then one is left really with only two possible conclusions: either the shooters, who were the Israeli commandos (according to Israel, no Israeli soldiers were themselves shot, plus all the recovered bullets were 9 mm, the type of shells in the Israeli weapons, making it clear who had the guns), fired at people who were fleeing from them, or alternatively they shot people from the front, and later executed them with shots to the back of the head, which is maybe even worse (certainly a war crime).
- Signs of Change
Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Drawn from an exhibition at Exit Art, a cultural center in New York City, Signs of Change is a visual archive of more than 350 posters, prints, photographs, films, videos, music, and ephemera from more than twenty-five nations.
- Silent Coup
How the CIA is Welcoming Itself Back Onto American University Campuses Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Small country, big struggle
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Swaziland suffers a repressive and corrupt regime.
- SNCC at 50
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is vitally important not just for learning and understanding the past but, more importantly, for imagining and working for a more righteous future.
- SNCC: Same Lesson, 50 Years On
Power Yields Nothing Without Demand Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The SNCC lesson is that power yields nothing without demand and the guts to back it up.
- SNCC's 50-Year Legacy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Celebrating SNCC's legacy.
- So Different Yet So Familiar
Book Review by William Bowles Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A fascinating and extremely readable account of a life now vanished, destroyed by the insatiable appetite of capital and told with acid wit and great style making it enjoyable to relish the language but not too much, it's not a travelog but a rare account of life that most of us are barely aware exists.
- The Socialist Alternative
Real Human Development Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Lebowitz takes the reader through an examination of the workings of capitalism and the problems of not only a transition to socialism, but ultimately to a society that represents freedom from class exploitation.
- Socialist Register 2010
Volume 46: Morbid Symptoms Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical) First Published: 2010
- Solidarity Alliance: A Call to Action
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A historic alliance was born at UC Berkeley on August 28, 2009. Lyn Hejinian, Professor of English and a member of SAVE, a newly formed faculty group, had issued an invitation to student groups and the union coalition to come together and share our plans to fight the cuts.
- Sources Index des Sujets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Sources índice temático (Edición Española)
Expertos y Portavoces Resource Type: Website First Published: 2010
- Sources - Portal para Periodistas y Escritores
Sources Select Resources Encyclopedia Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Sources es un portal de información para periodistas, escritores independientes, editores, autores e investigadores, especialmente si están enfocados en recursos humanos: expertos y portavoces quienes están preparados para responder preguntas de los reporteros, o se disponen a ser entrevistados en los medios de comunicación.
- The State as Protection Racket
Chapters in the History of Daylight Robbery Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 The debate about the current global economic "crisis" is obscenely counterintuitive and illogical to the point of incoherence. Who is willing to 'follow the money"? This dictum appears utterly forgotten, despite recurring astronomic fraud perpetrated by US corporations.
- State Lawlessness on the Rampage
The Menu for 2011 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 As 2011 dawns, public discourse in America has the country primed for a fascist dictatorship.The situation will be worse by 2012. The most uncomfortable truth that emerges from the WikiLeaks saga is that American public discourse consists of cries for revenge against those who tell us truths.
- Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Peter Fryer reveals how Africans, Asians and their descendants, previously hidden from history, have profoundly influenced and shaped events in Britain over the course of the last two thousand years.
- Stones Aimed at Us
An Overview of the Discourse and Strategies of the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This report provides an overview of the discourses around stoning in Iran, and the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign.
- Strong Meat
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The meat-producing system Simon Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one now practised in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience.
- The Suffragettes, Black Friday and two types of window smashing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Article on 'Black Friday' with refections on why the Suffragettes attacked property back in 1910 and whether the tactic helped the movement.
- Summit Protests Are Obsolete
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 I can understand why a lot of folks went to the G20 protests, sincerely wanting to stand up and be counted against savage global capitalism and its consequences. The problem is, almost nobody who didn't participate, especially those who only heard of the protests through the media, has any idea what the protests were about, or why the protesters were there.
- The Sun Behind The Clouds Gives A Voice To Tibetan Dissidents
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam's The Sun Behind the Clouds is the latest offering in a long line of documentaries about Tibet. The distinctiveness of this edition derives from its willingness to portray the internal debates of the Tibetan movement and in the movie's attempts to give voice to Tibetans living in Tibet. These features moved the film from a typical propaganda piece about the oppression faced under the brutal grip of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to a serious examination of resistance strategies in Tibet and in its influential Diaspora.
- SUPA - Student Union for Peace Action
Connexipedia Article Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A Canadian student organization active from 1964 to 1967.
- The Tactical Utility of Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 What place does violence have in the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system? What place does it have in any struggle? Is the current definition of violence as accepted by the ruling regime and the loyal opposition relevant or realistic?
- Tailoring to Needs: Garment Worker Struggles in Bangladesh
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The class struggle in Bangladesh is fought at a consistently high level and concentrated in the ready made garment (RMG) sector, the country’s dominant industry. Mainly unmediated by trade unions, struggles frequently assume an explosive character.
- Take Back The Land, Give Root To Democracy
Book Review by Alex Knight Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In many ways, Take Back the Land is a direct heir of the bottom-up, Black self-empowerment, civil disobedient, movement-building tradition, and is one of the most inspiring examples of a group renewing and developing that tradition today.
- Take Israel To International Criminal Court
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It is imperative that the international community view the Israeli response to the Goldstone report as a blatant attempt to whitewash its crimes in Gaza, and refer the matter to the ICC without further delay. To do otherwise will only continue to encourage Israeli intransigence.
- Taking Back Homes From The Banks: Exercising The Human Right To Housing
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Most people recognize that international human rights guarantee all humans a right
to housing. With the millions of homeless living in our communities and the millions of empty foreclosed houses all across our communities, groups have decided to put them together. Organizations across the US are engaging in 'housing liberation' and 'housing defense' to exercise their human rights to housing.
- Taking on the Religious Right
A review of God and His Demons Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Michael Parenti confronts the dangers of religious fundamentalism.
- A Tale of Two Social Forums
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 From June 22-26, 2010, fifteen thousand social movement activists gathered in Detroit, Michigan for the second United States Social Forum (USSF). Less than two months later, about half that number met at the other end of the continent in Asunción, Paraguay for the 4th Americas Social Forum (ASF).
- Tar Sands
Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 To extract the energy from the Alberta tar sands, the world's ugliest, most expensive hydrocrabon, we are polluting our air, poisoning our water, destroying vast areas of boreal forest, and undermining democracy.
- The Teabagger Anti-Socialist Purity Pledge
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Teachers, Parents, Community Together
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 interview with Joshua Pechthalt. ATC interviewed Joshua Pechthalt, an activist who is Vice President of the United Teachers Los Angeles/American Federation of Teachers and President of AFT Local 1021. He also sits on the Executive Boards of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the California State Federation of Labor.
- Tear Down the Dam; Restore the Commons
Temacapulin Fights for Its Survival Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Over 47,000 large dams around the world have displaced some 40,000,000 people. The World Bank has invested more than $60 billion in 600 dams.
- The Techno-Fantasies of Evo Morales
The Consequences of Modernization Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 There are two different Evo Morales: the one who makes international eco-proclamations and the one, at home, who is pushing dams, uranium excavation, cell towers, and mega-highways.
- Temping Down Labor Rights: The Manpowerization of Mexico
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The continuing erosion of labour rights and labour standards in Mexico.
- Terror As It Was and Is
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Despite the centrality today of “terrorism” as a political phenomenon, justifying a re-ordering of global power relations as well as the suppression of dissent and civil liberties domestically, it is in fact a far older phenomenon, as Nivedita Majumdar’s wonderful anthology of writing on the subject reminds us. The work excerpted in The Other Side of Terror includes fiction, poetry, and essays on the subject of terrorism by South Asians over the course of more than a century.
- Texas Tough
The Rise of America's Prison Empire Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A history of imprisonment, race, and politics from slavery to the present, with an emphasis on Texas, the most locked-down state in the USA.
- These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 As I see in threads on my articles, the online sabotaging of intelligent debate seems organised. We must fight to save this precious gift.
- They're Recharging Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- To end the occupation, cripple Israeli banks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The international banking sanctions campaign in New York against apartheid South Africa during the 1980s is regarded as the most effective strategy in bringing about a nonviolent end to the country's apartheid system. If international civil society is serious about urgently ending Israel's violations of Palestinian rights, including ending the occupation, then suspension of SWIFT transactions to and from Israeli banks offers an instrument to help bring about a peaceful resolution of an intractable conflict.
- Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Toronto Before the G20: A History of Violence
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The notion that Toronto is “a city with little history of violent protests” is laughable. Newspapers across North America have spent more than a century reporting on eruptions of violence and protest in Toronto’s past.
- Torturing the Rule of Law at Obama's Gitmo
Obama Bravely Takes on a Tortured Child Soldier Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Give our government credit for breaking new ground: no nation has tried a child soldier for war crimes since World War II, and the decision to prosecute Khadr has drawn protests from UNICEF, headed by a former U.S. national security adviser, as well as every major human-rights group.
- The Town That Food Saved
How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 An account of how cooperative agricultural enterprises are revitalizing the economy of a town in Vermont.
- Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The shocking rates of infant mortality and cancer in Iraqi city raise new questions about the battle.
- A Tribute To American People's Historian - Howard Zinn
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 With the death of Howard Zinn there is no doubt that the anti-war and peace movement in the USA has lost one of its best activists and an honest historian.
- The Trickledown Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The first step towards re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination - an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.
- Trotsky, Guest of the Revolution
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 “Infamous and impotent handful of vile assassins and traitors!” “raging dogs that must be brought down with no pity!” These were some of the words that Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet Prosecutor General, pronounced on August 24 1936, against four founding members of the Bolshevik Party, among them Zinoviev and Kamenev.
- The Trouble With Billionaires
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 The glittering lives of billionaires may seem to be a harmless source of entertainment, but authors Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks argue that such financial power not only threatens everyone's economic and social well-being but also upsets the very functioning of democracy. Our society tends to regard great wealth as evidence of exceptional talent or accomplishment. Yet spectacular fortunes are often attributable to luck, ruthlessness, cheating, or advantageous positioning that allow some to build on the work and insights of others who have paved the way.
- The Truth Behind The Israeli Propaganda
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The amazing thing in all this is that so many Western journalists - and I'm including the BBC's pusillanimous coverage of the Gaza aid ships - are writing like Israeli journalists, while many Israeli journalists are writing about the killings with the courage that Western journalists should demonstrate.
- Truth in Chains
The Arrest of Julian Assange Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.
- The Truth Will Always Win
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.
- TSA's Gestapo Empire
A Greater Threat Than the Terrorists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is a far greater threat to the lives and freedom of Americans than the 'terrorists' it claims to be protecting them from.
- Turning Estates into Villages
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 How good planning can make us slimmer, fitter, safer and less lonely.
- The Tyranny of False Consciousness
Know-Nothings of 2010, Part Two Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Today's nativists are beset by the crisis of capitalist globalization and its accompanying waves of forced migration. Sadly, nativists refuse to acknowledge the relationship between capitalism and migration. Instead, they seek to resolve the mounting social crisis by returning the country to a fantasy way-of-life that never existed, a white Protestant homeland. Rightwing ideological hacks promote this fictitious solution, setting the stage for a far deeper neo-fascist, racist (and anti-Muslim) upsurge.
- Undisputed Success
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 March 4th was an undisputed success in California. Students, workers, teachers, parents and UC faculty found a way to participate. The major demonstration in San Francisco of 10,000, and other demonstrations in Sacramento and Oakland and in Southern California brought people together from different sectors, K-12, community colleges, state universities and university of California campuses. The California Teachers Association, representing most of the K-12 teachers, initiated rallies and picket lines across the state involving their teachers and students. The California Federation of Teachers reported that events happened at all the state universities except Chico which travelled to join the Sacramento rally.
- The Unfolding Epic Recession
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Department of Labor’s June 4 release of May 2010 U.S. employment numbers sent shock waves through the business community, erasing all doubt that U.S. economic recovery — much touted by business press and government policymakers in recent months — may not actually occur.
- Universal Cure
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Here's a simple means of transforming the UK's universities, schools and society.
- The Unpersuadables
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In fighting for science, we subscribe to a comforting illusion: that people can be swayed by the facts.
- Upper Big Branch Mine and the Race to the Bottom
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Without union representation, workers are afraid to report unsafe conditions because they will be fired. Without union representation to pressure coal companies, politicians, and federal regulators, the American coal industry is in a race to the bottom as it enforces third world labor standards and economic and safety conditions on its workers.
- US Government Systematically Spying on Citizens
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The US government has been systematically violating the privacy rights of U.S. citizens.
- The US Government's Frontal Assault on Freedom
Hillary the Identity Thief Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The leaked Wikileaks documents show that the last thing the US government wants anywhere is a government that is accountable to its own citizens instead of to the US government.
- U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy Wikileaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 This document is a classifed (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. ``The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out''. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses ``trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whisteblowers'', the report recommends ``The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistlblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site''.
- US Navy Veterans Continue to Seek Justice for Israeli Attack
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On June 8, 1967, while sailing in international waters, the US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty was attacked by air and naval forces of the state of Israel. Of the Liberty's crew of 294, more than half were killed or wounded. More than 40 years later, survivors are still seeking justice.
- The U.S. Social Forum in Detroit
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Under the threefold heading “Another World is Possible/ Another U.S. is Necessary/ Another Detroit is Happening,” the 2010 U.S. Social Forum (USSF) convened in Detroit June 22-26 for a celebration of resistance and strategic thinking to advance our struggles for justice globally and at home.
- U.S. Social Forum in Detroit
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 2010 is a year of one, two, many Social Forums around the world, including the second U.S. Social Forum. The first USSF, attended by more than 12,000, was held three years ago in Atlanta. It featured an opening march that wove through the city streets, stopping for rallies at important sites of social struggle, including Grady Hospital, where activists from AFSCME Local 1644, explained their opposition to the privatization of the city’s largest public hospital. The Forum, the result of two years of planning by a National Planning Committee, included plenaries each evening and 800 workshops.
- U.S. Socialists and the Mexican Revolution
Against The Current vol. 149 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Eugene Victor Debs was America’s most impressive Socialist figure: founder of the American Railway Union and of the Industrial Workers of the World, a founder of the Socialist Party and its repeated candidate for president. He was jailed for his role in the Pullman strike in 1894 and for his opposition to World War I in 1918, and he strongly defended the Russian Soviet Revolution. If any person would stand for revolutionary socialism in the United States, surely it would be Debs.
- US tax-exempt donations fund Israeli settlements
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Millions of tax-exempt dollars from the US are being funneled towards Israel's illegal settlement building in the occupied Palestinian West Bank in flagrant violation of international law.
- Vancouverites Stage Picket Against Israeli Shipping Company
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Dozens of activists set up an information picket at Deltaport on August 24, designed to slow the transport of containers belonging to the Israeli shipping company Zim.
- Veiled Values
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 It is important to defend liberal social values, the secular society and the heritage of the Enlightenment. But we cannot do so by promoting illiberal policies.
- Venezuela: Voices on the Struggle
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In mid-June 2010, we caught up with three revolutionary socialist activists, Gonzalo Gómez, Stalin Pérez Borges, and Luis Primo in Caracas, Venezuela to discuss their views on the contradictions and prospects of the Bolivarian process.
- Veolia's dirty business: The Tovlan landfill
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Ever since the first Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel in 2005, French multinational Veolia has been on campaigners' list of boycott targets. Corporate Watch has investigated the impact of Veolia's Tovlan landfill on occupied land.
- The Verso Book of Dissent
From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Bagdad Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 An anthology presenting voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos.
- The Victory for Workers' Rights in Honduras
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Progressive followers of politics in Honduras have had little to celebrate recently. The June 28, 2009 coup that toppled president Mel Zelaya — a democratically elected reformer, though never the radical populist depicted by the mainstream media — was a terrible blow to democracy, echoing the worst chapters of Central America’s dark history.
- A Vision from the Heartland
Socialism for the 21st Century Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 La Botz argues that to solve the problems of our economy and the environment, and to end America‘s wars abroad, we must begin to create a socialist society. A socialist society is one where the working people collectively own and democratically plan and manage the major industries and enterprises. I call for the abolition of the corporations and of capitalism in order to create a society of plenty for all. I believe that such a society can only be created by building a powerful movement for democracy and for working class power.
- Visioning a World Without Capitalism
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 As leftists we have something infinitely more precious to win from our rich history than sentimentality and sectarianism, as we struggle to renovate the revolutionary tradition in the twenty-first century.
- ¡Viva la Revolución!
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Mexican revolution, which began in 1910 and ended in 1940, transformed Mexico. During the course of those 30 years, tens of thousands of men and women fought in battles in many regions of the country to end the Porfirian dictatorship and to determine the course and goals of the revolution that had overthrown it. In a nation of 15 million, a shocking one million were killed while two million migrated to the United States to escape the violence (many of them subsequently returning), a movement which established the paths of future migrations.
- ¡Viva la Revolución! Part 2
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 While the most violent stage of the Mexican Revolution was over by 1920, the country faced a series of new crises in the 1930s. The era opened in 1928 with the assassination of former President Álvaro Obregón, killed by a Catholic militant opposed to the secularizing Revolution in the formerly officially Catholic country.
- Vote as the Class You Are, Not the Race You Aren't
Scott, Frank Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Many upper middle-professional class members of society who truly wish for a more just nation are either helpless to, totally incapable of, or have little desire to confront real power or create social transformation beyond electing one or another member of their class to represent their interests on the board, the council, the congress or at the White House. And that class includes more multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-racial and gender fluid people than ever before. Hooray?
- Waging the War on Slavery
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The settlement of Lawrence in the territory of Kansas, summer of 1856: Pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers are trying to colonize the territory. The former want a slave-soil, the latter a free-soil state. Armed pro-slavery gangs from Missouri are harassing and attacking the free-soil settlers. The U.S. government and U.S. Army are pro-slavery.
- War is a Lie
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A thorough refutation of every major argument used to justify wars, drawing on evidence from numerous past wars, with a focus on those wars that have been most widely defended as just and good. This is a handbook of sorts, a manual to be used in debunking future lies before future wars have a chance to begin.
- A War on Wikileaks?
Unhinged at the US State Department and Pentagon Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If the state fails to make any sense - not surprising - it is because it is has no intention of doing so. The state is appealing to something more visceral with all of this posturing: fear. It wants to strike fear into the minds and bodies of people working with Wikileaks, or anyone else doing such work, and anyone contemplating leaking any classified records. Fear is its greatest weapon of psychological destruction, with proven success at home. The outcome the state hopes for is greater self-censorship and greater self-monitoring.
- The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Wilkerson chronicles the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of the United States.
- Washington's Magical Realism
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A coup becomes a coup — for U.S. magical realists — when Washington defines it as such. On March 10, 1952 Cuban General Fulgencio Batista grabbed power and sought to legitimize his coup by holding fake elections. Magically, the coup makers won; Washington recognized Batista.
- Washington's Post-Cold War Coup
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The pretext for removing Honduran President Manuel Zelaya — that holding a civic consultation to replace the Constitution of 1982 was his power grab, enabling him to run for a second term — doesn’t hold water. Such a document could only have come into effect well after his term of office ended.
- The Watchers
The Rise of America's Surveillance State Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 An exploration of how and why the American government increasingly spies on its own citizens.
- Watching the Pentagon Channel
The New Socialist Realism Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The oddest aspect of the Pentagon Channel is how completely they shield their audience - potential soldiers, current soldiers and former soldiers - from what they are defending, which is to say: capitalism.
- We are the Student Movement?
Remembering the Rise and Fall of the Canadian Union of Students 1965-1969 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- A Welcome Prison Victory at Youngstown
Hunger Strike on Death Row Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Three death-sentenced men were on hunger strike in Ohio State Penitentiary on January 3 to win the same rights as others on death row in the state.
- The Welsh Revolution
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Why are radical politics electable in Wales but not in England?
- The West Bank
A Collection of Graphic Novels Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A collection of graphic stories by twelve students from An-Najah University depicting real descriptions of life in Palestine.
- What Bhopal Started
From Union Carbide to Exxon to BP Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Bhopal marked the horrific beginning of a new era. One that signalled the collapse of restraint on corporate power. The ongoing BP spill in the Mexican Gulf -- with estimates ranging from 30,000 to 80,000 barrels per day -- tops off a quarter of a century where corporations could (and have) done anything in the pursuit of profit, at any human cost.
- What is education for?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 There is a fundamental difference between being a student and being a consumer. Education is not a product but a relationship and a process, a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual. When someone buys a car or a hamburger, he or she is purchasing a pre-packaged, readymade commodity to satisfy a specific need. Education is about creating critical thinkers whose skill is precisely the ability to challenge ideas that are pre-packaged or readymade or designed to satisfy such a need.
- What isn't wrong with Sharia law?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 To safeguard our rights there must be one law for all and no religious courts.
- What Really Happened to the 1960s
How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A historical overview, critical analysis, and appraisal of the 1960s. Drawing upon historical and media studies, theories of capitalism and democracy, and in-depth study of the era's social movements, Morgan provides an extremely comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the events and aftermath of the 1960s.
- What the Media Does Not Say About the Anti-Iran Leaks
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The media is interested in one and only one subject: advancing the anti-Iran narrative that is advocated by the neoconservatives, the War Party, and the Israel lobby.
- What Would it Mean to Win?
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Where is the movement today? Where is it going? Are we winning? The authors of the essays in this volume pose these and other momentous questions.
- What's in a name? In a racist society, everything
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In our society refusal to contemplate a relationship with a person from another ethnic or religious background is described and denounced as racism or bigotry. In Israel it is protected by law.
- When Drones Come Home to Roost
Monsters, Human and Mechanical Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The use of remote-controlled killing machines by the United States guarantees that in the future these same technologies will be used to strike targets in the U.S.
- When Miners March
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Complete with previously unpublished family photos and documents, When Miners March is an extraordinary insiders account of the uprising by coal miners that defined the West Virginia Mine Wars of the 1920's.
- When the State Trembled
How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 Recovers the story of how the business elite-led Citizens' Committee of 1000 crushed the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.
- Where Is Venezuela Going?
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Steve Ellner's latest book, Rethinking Venezuelan Politics, is an important contribution to our understanding of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. It brings a deeply historical perspective to the topic, something almost universally lacking in the growing number of short-sighted texts on the country’s politics. It also offers the opportunity for a discussion of the complexities of the “Bolivarian process” as it unfolds.
- Wherein We Meet Genial Radicals by the Shores of Lake Champlain
The New Secessionists Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Secession is the next radical idea poised to enter mainstream discourse or at least the realm of the conceivable. You can't bloat a modest republic into a crapulent empire without sparking one hell of a centrifugal reaction. The prospect of breaking away from a union degenerating into imperial putrefaction will only grow in appeal as we go marching with our Patriot Acts and National Security Strategies through Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and all the frightful signposts on our road to nowhere.
- While Everyone Else Went to College, I Went to Jail
A Conversation With Saad Nabeel Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Who Can Stop the Drums?
Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 In this ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, Sujatha Fernandes reveals a significant dimension of political life in Venezuela since President Hugo Chávez was elected. Fernandes traces the histories of the barrios, from the guerrilla insurgency, movements against displacement, and cultural resistance of the 1960s and 1970s, through the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the neoliberal reforms that followed, to the Chávez period.
- Who Can Stop the Drums?
Urban Social Movements in Chávez's Venezuela Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A vivid ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, Venezuela.
- Who does that server really serve?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Published: 2013 On the Internet, proprietary software isn't the only way to lose your freedom. Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, is another way to let someone else have power over your computing.
- Who is Afraid of a Real Inquiry?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If a real Commission of Inquiry had been set up into the Free Gaza Flotilla attack (instead of the pathetic excuse for a commission), here are some of the questions it should have addressed.
- Who Profits?
Exposing the Israeli Occupation Industry Resource Type: Database First Published: 2010 In exposing companies and corporations involved in the occupation, we hope to promote a change in public opinion and corporate policies, leading to an end to the occupation.
- Who's Dysfunctional Now?
Against The Current vol. 146 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The good news is that the Republicans and the Tea Party movement not only lost the health insurance reform vote, but made such a obscene spectacle of themselves that everyone now knows who and what they really are. The bad news is that the Democrats now take credit for passing “health care reform” when in fact they’ve gutted it — hiding who and what they really are.
- Why Boycott Aroma?
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Published: 2011 Our boycott call is part of a larger movement by Palestinian civil society to find non-violent means to end the occupation and apartheid.
- Why NGO Monitor is attacking The Electronic Intifada
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 NGO Monitor has launched a campaign targeting a Dutch foundation's financial support to The Electronic Intifada, accusing the publication among other things of "anti-Semitism." NGO Monitor is an extreme right-wing group with close ties to the Israeli government, military, and West Bank settlers,
- Why the French Hate Chomsky
Resource Type: Pamphlet First Published: 2010 Chomsky's criticism is laden with facts, a substance that seems to elicit ennui among contemporary French thinkers. No doubt the importance of the essay in the French educational system has bred a world of 'philosophers' whose skill at manipulating fact-free ideas was the guarantee of a distinguished career. If the social object is to entertain, then the French school reaches its goal -- mystification is often far more entertaining than straightforward descriptions of reality. On the other hand, if the object is to help readers reach their own understanding of reality, especially political reality, then their first need is to be provided with the basic relevant facts, which most people do not have time to ascertain through their own research. Thus Chomsky is useful to citizens by providing them with the raw material to develop their own ideas in a way that the purveyors of ready-made but flimsily supported ideas are not.
- Why the Swedish Left Lost
An Analysis of the Electoral Fiasco and Lessons for the Democrats Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Analysts and political leaders on the left focus on how the right wing's lies go unfiltered by the establishment mass media. The media bias theory has some plausibility but the limit to the media-bias argument is that the extremist Sweden Democrats largely faced a media blackout but still managed to be one of the biggest winners in the electoral system.
- Why There Are No 'Israelis' in the Jewish State
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as 'Israelis,' a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country's self-declared status as a Jewish state.
- Why They Call It King Coal
A Killer Industry Continues to Call the Shots Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Political corruption first puts coal workers at risk of death, trapped by circumstances: either work underground for King Coal and risk your life, go fight our wars in the US military and risk your life, or work for the government defending King Coal and its prerogatives. For working class West Virginians, that's the economy in a nutshell, accompanied by plaintive Civil War violins.
- Why we walked out
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Students across the US are protesting a public relations campaign that brings soldiers from the Israeli army to speak on campuses. These tours are an attempt to justify recent war crimes committed by the army.
- Why Wikileaks is Good for Democracy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The US has been going in the wrong direction for years by classifying millions of documents as secrets. Wikileaks and other media which report these so called secrets will embarrass people yes. Wikileaks and other media will make leaders uncomfortable yes. But embarrassment and discomfort are small prices to pay for a healthier democracy. Wikileaks has the potential to make transparency and accountability more robust.
- Widerspruch gegen linkes Lavieren
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Israelische Linke rufen in offenem Brief an die Linkspartei zu Dialog über Nahostkonflikt auf
In einem Offenen Brief an die LINKE haben über 100 linke Israelis ihre Erwartungen an eine solidarische Politik der deutschen Linkspartei deutlich gemacht und Kritik an Teilen der Partei geäußert, die die israelische Politik im Nahen Osten unterstützen.
- The Wikileaks Afghan War Diary
Reason for Celebration, Cause for Concern Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The release of Wikileaks acquired records from U.S. forces in Afghanistan is an event of major significance which in some ways deserves to be celebrated by those opposed to the war in Afghanistan, but there are also some serious problems with the records and with the way Wikileaks released them.
- Wikileaks and the New Global Order
America's Wake-Up Call Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The impression of a world running out of American control has become a theme touching all our lives over the past decade. The US invented and exported financial deregulation, promising it to be the epitome of the new capitalism that was going to offer the world economic salvation. The result is a banking crisis that now threatens to topple the very governments in Europe who are Washington’s closest allies.
- Wikileaks and the Truth of the Af-Pak War
Against The Current vol. 148 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the aftermath of the much-discussed leak of the Afghan war documents, few aspects of the Af-Pak imbroglio have been as scrutinized as the supposed duplicity of the Pakistani security establishment. The New York Times editorial board, for example, promptly declared that of all of the revelations, the reports detailing the “cynical collusion between Pakistan’s military intelligence service and the Taliban” were the “most alarming.” (This, too, from a paper that had been privy to the leaked material for some time before the database went public).
- WikiLeaks continues exposure of predatory US foreign policy
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In the face of an unprecedented campaign of US harassment and intimidation, the Internet-based WikiLeaks group is continuing its efforts to expose the predatory role of American foreign policy around the world, releasing secret diplomatic documents every day.
- WikiLeaks Copycat Reveals Indonesia's Bloody Secrets
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 On Friday, December 10th IndoLeaks, Indonesia’s very own version of WikiLeaks, went live. Over the following weeks the site has posted some sensitive documents including a conversation between former President Suharto and former US President Gerald Ford as well as four autopsy reports of the victims of the infamous 1965 coup attempt.
- Wikileaks Exposes Complicity of the Press
Documents Show NYT and Washington Post Shilling for US Government on Iran Missile "Threat" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A key Wikileaks document which should have resulted in stories calling into question the thrust of the Obama administration's ballistic missile defense policy in Europe based on an alleged Iranian missile threat has instead produced a spate of stories buttressing anti-Iran hysteria.
- Wikileaks and the Free Press
Exposing the Futility of US Foreign Policy Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Wikileaks published documents from sources US journalists should have cultivated instead of behaving like White House stenographers. Exceptions like Seymour Hersh and Dana Priest only dramatize the point: the fourth estate has become an arm of national security policy.
- Wikileaks is Good for America
Get Over It! Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Julian Assange and Bradley Manning did not create the mess we now find ourselves in. But what they have had the courage to do may just eventually let enough sunshine in for change to happen.
- Wikileaks - The Smear and the Denial
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The Internet has revealed a chasm separating the corporate media from readers and viewers. Previously, the divide was hidden by the simple fact that journalists monopolised the means of mass communication. Dissent was restricted to a few lonely lines on the letter’s page, if that.
- Wild West Journalism
Outlaws, Cowpokes and a Eunuched Press Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Journalism is not dead nor is anthropology. Both are undergoing seismic transformations while under attack from a neoliberal culture that devalues the public and disparages the truth.
- Wildcat Strikes in China
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010
- Wimps Can't Win
The Sissy Left Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 When did we on the left forget how to fight back in dark alleys?
- Women Take On the Orthodox
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Increasing religious domination by the Orthodox is increasing conflict within Israeli and tension between American Jews and Israel.
- The Women Who Gave Us Christmas
Exposing America's Greatest Crime Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In 1834, African American and white men and women members of William Lloyd Garrison’s newly formed Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society saw Christmas as an opportunity to expose a hypocritical republic that proclaimed liberty yet held millions of African men, women and children captive as slaves. Women assumed the lead, boldly defying a society that denied them a public voice or political opinions. To finance the abolition cause, these women organized Christmas bazaars that sold donated gifts, and trumpeted anti-slavery messages.
- Working in Nonprofit Organizations
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 If people want to work in jobs that provide some satisfaction and flexibility, nonprofits jobs can be good for a while. They’re also a way to learn some skills. But don’t have illusions about nonprofit organizations. A job in a nonprofit organization is still a job. A nonprofit job is not a good way to make a contribution to revolutionary change and it’s often not a very good contribution even to smaller scale reformist change.
- The World: A Beginner's Guide
Resource Type: Book First Published: 2010 A comparative/historical sociological review of the world.
- World Cup Woes for South Africa
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The overspending, crony capitalism and increased poverty the majority of South Africans now suffer are taking the fun out of the beautiful game, soccer. According to leading researcher Udesh Pillay of the SA Human Sciences Research Council, in 2005 one in three South Africans hoped to personally benefit from the World Cup, but this fell to one in five in 2009, and 1 in 100 today.
- World War II and Ethnic Conflict in LA
Against The Current vol. 144 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 In The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, Scott Kurashige provides new insights into the struggle for racial equality in Los Angeles by focusing on collaboration, and competition, between African-American and Japanese American residents of the city.
- Worse Than North Korea
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 The reality is that we are dealing with a pariah state, no better at this point in its respect for international law and basic human rights (where non-Israelis are concerned), than North Korea. And maybe worse. At least the North Koreans fired their weapon at a South Korean military vessel. The Israeli Defense Force attacked a vessel filled with civilian peace activists, including elderly Holocaust survivors, members of foreign parliaments, and young children.
- The Year America Dissolved
Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 A vision of collapse.
- A Year of Banking Bailout
Against The Current vol. 145 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Welcome to what to what I call the Second Great Bank Depression. Why that name? Because this period of economic chaos, loss, and global financial destruction was manufactured by the men who shaped the banking sector.
- You Are What You Think
Markos Moulitsas' "American Taliban" Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 America's main international enemy "Islamic radicalism" favors theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, reviles homosexuality, subverts science and education, and reveres force over diplomacy. Markos Moulitsas shows how the American right shares those very same traits. He argues that our domestic jihadists are a greater threat to American democracy than any Islamic terrorist.
- Barbara Zeluck, 1923-2010
Against The Current vol. 147 Resource Type: Article First Published: 2010 Our comrade Barbara Zeluck died at her home June 5, 2010 in New York City.
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