Our Trash and Our Lives, Here and Abroad By Andrea Mazzarino I learned one of my most valuable lessons about U.S. power in my first year as a Brown University doctoral student. It was in anthropology professor Catherine Lutz’s seminar on empire and social movements. I’d sum up what I remember something like this: Americans consume one… Read More The United States of Consumption
NB: Adam Tooze is a brilliant historian, capable of weaving together different elements of global events. including anti-colonial rebellions, ideological impulses of rulers and ruled alike, and the behaviour of financial markets as a means of understanding complex geopolitical phenomena like the rise to preeminence of the American polity during and after the Great War… Read More The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age
Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy—as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. It would be easy to dismiss (Trump) as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, and… Read More Fascist Aesthetics Has Come Back Matching Fascist Politics
NB: Not for decades has there been an honest and statesmanlike speech by a political leader. This one is one such, and is an exposure of the gruesome hypocrisy of those who claim to lead the world, not least our very own self-proclaimed vishwagurus and performance artists. The English poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936) remarked… Read More Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada / कनाडा के PM ने खोल दी सबकी पोल, पश्चिम के देशों को ही लताड़ा, दुनिया भर में है चर्चा
GAZA casualties, live statistics One strategically placed, massive lump of ice in the Arctic has exposed the leaders of the countries of Western Europe, or the European Union, for the cynical hypocrites, racists, spineless transactionalists and colonists that they really are. Avay Shukla Folks who know me are aware that I am no diplomat; the… Read More EUROPE SHOULD REMEMBER THAT BEFORE GREENLAND THERE WAS – AND IS – A GAZA
Economic inequality is at the heart of all humanity’s major problems, but the wealthiest refuse to confront a system that benefits them Ingrid Robeyns This week, hundreds of government leaders, heads of state, and business executives are gathering at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. They will be discussing solutions to… Read More In Davos, the rich talk about ‘global threats’. But they’re silent about the biggest of them all
Lessons from the first year of Donald Trump’s second term The West’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal razing of Gaza and the impunity with which an allegedly isolationist Trump abducted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, expropriated its oil, bombed Iran, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada has, it’s fair to say, made international law a disreputable… Read More Moment of reckoning
From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is trying to create a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity… The good news is that the US is a large, diverse, energetic country, filled with people who do not like to be bullied and coerced, who still possess significant degrees… Read More Homeland Empire
NB: (The counter revolution) ‘…tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Pustch of 1923 had proved this.. In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative… Read More Chris Hedges: The Machinery of Terror
Julian Borger The attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president was a shocking enough start to 2026, but it was only the next day, when the smoke had dispersed and Donald Trump was flying from Florida to Washington DC in triumph, that it became clear the world had entered a new era. The US president… Read More Trump’s territorial ambition: new imperialism or a case of the emperor’s new clothes?
After the truth-shower 