At the crux of the world refugee crisis is a demand for new human relations. The will to deny any responsibility for centuries of exploitation of Latin America and Africa is at the root of inhuman attitudes toward refugees, and it becomes an opening for the most reactionary politicians.
Since overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has surpassed former dictator Hosni Mubarak. Despite this, the U.S. has resumed military aid.
Puerto Rico’s debt has become unsustainable. The roots of the financial and human crisis lie within the island’s 117-year history as a U.S. colony.
North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, has eliminated another member of the ruling party elite, vice-premier Choe Yong-gon. It is likely that Choe was eliminated for his connection to the North’s joint business ventures with South Korea.
Governments which could never have come to power without the social movements’ mobilizations are using vague expressions of anti-capitalism, socialism, resource nationalism, anti-imperialism, etc., to impose developmentalism on their populations, often in collaboration with neoliberalism.
The affinity of so many, including Black, Latino and Third World youth, with the struggle of Rojava’s Kurds—like that in Chiapas before—can be of the utmost philosophic importance.
The indignados (outraged) of Latin America and the world have lost a human voice of towering creativity. Eduardo Galeano has died.
In reading Charles Denby’s “Continuing Magnolia Jungle terror exposes reality of ‘Great Society,’” one is struck by how poignant and presciently modern Denby’s thoughts were and how very little has changed today.
Malta protects Intersex infants from “normalizing” surgery; Richard Hedger exhibits National Treasures collection of elderly LGBT people; Russia refused drivers’ licenses to Transgender and Transvestite people; Gay-straight alliance at Andrews University banned from holding a bake sale for homeless LGBT youth.
South Africa removal of monument to imperialist Cecil Rhodes; UC San Diego eviction of Ché Café; Armenian protest in Lebanon; Burmese student protests; U. of Virginia students demand justice for Martese Johnson.
Several hundred people of all races marched from the Union Rescue Mission in Skid Row, where a homeless Black man with mental problems known as Africa, was killed by six Los Angeles police officers.
From the May-June 2015 issue of News & Letters
Duluth, Minn.—Shannon Miller, the only women’s hockey head coach the University of Minnesota, Duluth (UMD) has ever known, has been fired after 16 seasons. “Discrimination rears its ugly head in many forms, and I feel I have been discriminated against because I’m a woman. [=>]
Real possibilities for social transformation in Latin America, and with it an end to U.S. domination with iron fist or velvet glove, lie not in the choreographed dance between the U.S. and the Latin American governments, including “Leftist” or progressive ones, inside or outside the “Summit of the Americas.”
Tulsa: Eric Harris murdered by Sheriff’s “reserve” cop; North Charleston: cop murder of Walter Scott videoed; Chicago: meager reparations for victims of police torture.
At this year’s World Social Forum in Tunis, Tunisia, Leftists from both eastern and western Ukraine came together to reject the further escalation of armed conflict—and the Russian “Left” ideologue who has been promoting it, Boris Kagarlitsky.
In a day-long orgy of murder on April 2, four al-Shabaab terrorists invaded the campus of Garissa University College and killed 143 students.
The world’s attention was once more belatedly drawn to the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, Syria, by the invasion by IS/Daesh terrorists, facilitated by another fundamentalist faction, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Justice for Jane; Syrian refugee children in Turkey; Howard University Middle School walkout; University of California Student Association call for divestment
The March for Climate Leadership demanded justice for people of color, as they are disproportionately harmed by toxic waste and sea level rise.
Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago activists protested nuclear power outside a City Club luncheon. Former EPA administrator Carol Browner was one of the speakers who carried water for the nuclear industry’s foundering finances.
About 500 people, mostly Black and Latino youth, gathered in Los Angeles. Anti-police brutality and anti-ever growing surveillance society has radicalized youth as well as concerned people from all walks of life.
Price presents a clear explanation of what Marx wrote in Capital about the capitalist mode of production…He correctly sees state capitalism as the final stage of the capitalist mode of production, where private capitalist property is replaced by state capitalist ownership of the means of production and distribution.
Jessie Hernandez; China LGBT Awareness Campaign; Tennessee Trans Justice Project; Michael Mason
Police in Brazil kill five times more people than do police in the U.S. So what’s it going to take to create a sustained movement of resistance and international coverage?
Over one million Rohingya, a Muslim people living in Burma (Myanmar), are once again being subjected to threats from the state.
Today’s African tragedies compel one to return to the great promise, and then great tragedy and betrayal, of the African Revolutions that emerged after World War II.
The late Syrian writer Alisar Iram, for one, saw where IS/Daesh were heading, long before they took their hammers into the Mosul Museum.
Where do we go from here? The U.S. has certainly not given up bringing down the Castros; only the method is different. The pulls of neoliberal capitalism, the world market, are now the weapons.
The Tamils have faced a military occupation of their region for almost a decade. The Sinhalese majority (70%) have as well grown restive under Rajapaksa rule. Crime, a drug mafia, nepotism and corruption characterized his rule.
The terrorist cult Boko Haram has made its name through massacre, kidnap and rape. On Jan. 7, news from the town of Baga in northeast Nigeria, near Lake Chad, indicated that the largest killing yet had taken place, the massacre of over 2,000 people.
More than three months after the forced disappearance of their 43 sons—students of the Normal Rural School Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero—their fathers and mothers continue their protests. In mid-November the parents arrived in Chiapas to share their pain and outrage with the Zapatista Indigenous communities.
Unlike vanguard parties, our goal is not the incorporation of a cadre into a certain fixed structure that Lenin advocated for in 1902 and rejected in 1905, but the development of “organic intellectuals,” thinkers and philosophers from the ranks of the Black masses as vanguard, women, youth, and workers.
From the January-February 2015 issue of News & Letters
by Michael Gilbert
Angry youth in Kashmir hit the streets in November, raising anti-India and pro-freedom slogans as they carried the bullet-ridden bodies of two youths in a procession to Nowgam Chowk. Protesters demanded punishment for soldiers who had opened fire without [=>]
From the January-February 2015 issue of News & Letters
by Dee Perkins
The late December suicide of 17-year-old Transgender youth Leelah Alcorn has shaken the public with an intimate glimpse into the torment of gender dysphoria in a too frequently uncomprehending world. In the suicide note she posted to Tumblr, the [=>]
In cities across the world, the names of Transgender people who were murdered or committed suicide were read out at rallies on or around Nov. 20, the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Illinois Governor Rauner has made his living out of exploiting the disabled and elderly in his many nursing homes.
The 20th “Conference of Parties” was held in Lima, Peru, and, rather than action, issued a “Call for Climate Action” without binding commitments or effective monitoring. The U.S. and other nations as good as admitted the bankruptcy of capitalism by arguing that binding commitments had no chance of being adopted.
At the end of the Nov. 20 mass demonstration in Mexico City in support of Ayotzinapa’s missing students, acts of repression from state forces became more open and intense.
In today’s economic crisis, Europe is haunted by the specters that were supposed to be overcome by the European economic union and the single currency Eurozone: the 20th century tendency to degenerate into vile nationalism, genocidal racism and the barbarism of total war.
