John Gambrell First posted June 29, 2017 NB: President Biden was cited yesterday as saying ‘We’re gonna free Iran‘. This is calculated to weaken the Iranian people’s democratic protests. We have become used to American arrogance and idiocy raised to stratospheric heights by the talking baboon Donald Trump; but Biden is not far behind. The… Read More US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup
Fiona Harvey The top 1% of earners in the UK are responsible for the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions in a single year as the bottom 10% over more than two decades, new data has shown. The findings highlight the enormous gaps between what have been termed “the polluting elite”, whose high-carbon lifestyles fuel the… Read More Polluting elites
(Translated from Portuguese) “No one is interested in living in a divided country, in a permanent state of war“ “Now, let’s fight for zero deforestation of the Amazon. Brazil and the planet need a living Amazon” “When an Indigenous child is murdered by the greed of the exploiters of the environment, a part of humanity… Read More Victory Speech of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, President-Elect of Brazil
Richard J. B. Bosworth Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič It’s 100 years since Mussolini took political control of Italy. Given a period of violent tensions across large parts of Europe after the First World War, what specifically lay behind the rise of fascist totalitarianism? And how does the Duce’s leadership compare to that of other contemporary authoritarianism?… Read More March on Rome under scrutiny
As was the case with the British Empire, today’s global form of extractive capitalism is a system of human sacrifice hidden in plain sight. A critical look at the palm oil industry reveals both the violence of this trajectory in an exemplary way and the challenges for a transition into a just world, social thinker… Read More The Sacrificial Altar of Extractive Capitalism: Notes on Abolition and Transition
Truss is gone. The ideological hobgoblins she brought in and others of her fraternity turned on her. It’s not been “take back control” but out of control. Even two more years of this Tory disaster is unthinkable. Whether it’s tax cuts splurging on the rich, or the return by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to thumb-screw austerity,… Read More Market fundamentalism bites the dust in Britain. But the lunatics will soldier on..
Andy Beckett Neoliberalism, the belief that free markets, low taxes and a state with little or no interest in equality will produce the best economic and social outcomes, has fallen out of fashion even among the business elite and their chroniclers. In the Financial Times this week, the columnist Rana Foroohar argued that the west… Read More Truss is frantically blowing on the embers of neoliberalism. But it is a funeral pyre
First posted July 22, 2017 Sam Kriss Neoliberalism is not particularly hard to define. It’s not only an ideology or a set of principles; it’s a system of practices, and an era, the one we’re living in now. What it means, over and above everything, is untrammeled ruling-class power, an end to the class-collaborationism of… Read More ‘Neoliberalism’ isn’t a left-wing insult but a monstrous political system of inequality
Andrew Rawnsley ‘Never in the field of British politics has a leader become so staggeringly unpopular in such a spectacularly short time.’ In the wake of the self-devouring carnival of cannibals, the most disastrous Conservative conference anyone can remember, parliament will reconvene this week. Then the dark fun and gory games will really begin. On… Read More Johnson was slow-poisoning arsenic for the Conservatives. Liz Truss is instant cyanide
The jailed Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties have won the 2022 Nobel peace prize, in an award the committee said was to honour champions of “peaceful coexistence” during the most tumultuous period in Europe since the second world war.… Read More Nobel peace prize given to human rights activists in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine
After the truth-shower 