The following is excerpted in shortened form from Chapter 9 of Notes on Resistance by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, published by Haymarket Books David Barsamian: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented — a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Noam… Read More Noam Chomsky: Optimism of the Will
Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and… Read More Chris Hedges: The Return of Fascism
Mohsin Hamid In the United States, the Republican governors of Texas, Florida and Arizona are bussing and flying migrants from their states to states governed by Democrats. In the United Kingdom, the government plans to deport migrants to holding facilities in Rwanda, an authoritarian country 4,000 miles to the south, which only a generation ago… Read More The west’s cruelty to migrants will only grow more inhuman. Don’t let the nightmare peddlers win
Mukul Kesavan The symmetry of the responses of the Pakistani and Indian high commissions to the recent communal violence in Leicester neatly illustrates the evolution of the Indian State under the Bharatiya Janata Party. This is the first paragraph of the Pakistani statement: “It is with great concern that the High Commission of Pakistan to… Read More Leicester calling
JUAN COLE A mere category 1 hurricane dumped so much water on Puerto Rico so quickly that one of its rivers has swollen to 25 feet above normal, even more than it rose during Hurricane Maria in 2017, which was a Category 5 hurricane. The island is beset by flash floods, and is getting 16-30 inches… Read More Climate Crisis and the Age of the Super-Typhoon: Storms batter, flood Puerto Rico, Pakistan, Japan and Shanghai
One of the interesting points that you make is how we in the West think of Solzhenitsyn in terms of his The Gulag Archipelago published in 1973. We think of Solzhenitsyn as a human rights actor. But that’s not the role that he plays where Ukraine is concerned. Your argument is that Solzhenitsyn is, as it were,… Read More Decentralizing the Cold War: an interview
NB: The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a popular protest against war. It began spontaneously on International Women’s Day, February 23 (March 8); and was led by women. Soldiers of the Petrograd 66,000 strong garrison refused orders to shoot the protesters, leading to the collapse of the Tsarist regime and the emergence of the Petrograd… Read More Protests in Russia against mobilisation – in pictures
PUBLIC GOODS • September 1, 2021 • Peter Rossman he multilateral trading system anchored by the WTO is not confined to cross-border trade in physical goods. It was also designed to protect corporate knowledge monopolies. Developing countries were told that strict adherence to the rules of ‘free trade’, codified and enforced by the WTO, would enhance their… Read More Multinational Corporations and COVID-19: Intellectual property rights vs. human rights
Oliver Milman Fury as ‘explosive’ files reveal largest oil companies contradicted public statements and wished bedbugs upon critical activists Criticism in the US of the oil industry’s obfuscation over the climate crisis is intensifying after internal documents showed companies attempted to distance themselves from agreed climate goals, admitted “gaslighting” the public over purported efforts to… Read More Big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims
K. VELA VELUPILLAI A review article around Anwar Shaikh’s ‘Capitalism’, now turning into a classic Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises by Anwar Shaikh ‘Capitalist history is played out on a moving stage.’- Shaikh, 2016, p. 50 (see also p. 5; italics added). The Book 1 by Anwar Shaikh 2 which is reviewed here was published a little over six years ago;… Read More Understanding Capitalism
After the truth-shower 