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“On the campaign trail, she [María Corina Machado] was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration. ‘María!’ her followers shouted, before falling into her arms,” the New York Times reverently reported.

Indeed, Machado’s personally chosen surrogate to contend in last July’s Venezuelan presidential election, Edmundo González, did fall into her arms. But that was because her infirm disciple had trouble, both literally and figuratively, standing on his own two feet.

Machado was the main Venezuelan opposition figure backed …

Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…

— Amilcar Cabral (Revolution in Guinea, stage 1, London, 1974, p 70-72)

It was under the Democrats and the first “Black” president that the Department of Defense 1033 program that militarizes local police forces was expanded by 2,400%; the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) expanded by 1,900%; Libya, the most prosperous African  and Pan African nation was attacked and destroyed; the war on Yemen began; the Occupy Wall Street Movement was smashed; the FBI created the “Black …

This is an extract from the author’s new book Power Play: The Future of Food.

In the annals of agrarian history, one particular movement has left a profound impact on the collective imagination of food sovereignty advocates. The Diggers in 17th century England were led by the visionary Gerrard Winstanley. This radical group emerged during a period of intense social and political upheaval, offering a revolutionary perspective on land ownership and food production that continues to resonate with modern struggles for (food) justice.

The Diggers, also known as the True Levellers, arose in …

David Swanson asked me to write about Kiribati after I wrote to him to point out Costa Rica is not the only “full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarised.” Kiribati, and other small countries I suspect, have no military. In Kiribati’s case this was a deliberate decision taken by the first President and Government of Kiribati as it was becoming Independent in 1979. Like Costa Rica it has almost certainly benefitted from that foundational decision. Many other newly independent ex British colonies suffered from coups and …

In August 2021, following the withdrawal of major U.S./NATO military forces from Afghanistan after two decades of occupation, Taliban forces took effective control over the country. In response, the United States seized the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank totaling around $7 billion. Half of that amount was transferred to the misleadingly named “Afghan Fund” in September 2022, a Swiss-based “charitable foundation” whose only role thus far has been to privately conceal and invest the funds without any concrete plans to return them, as confirmed by U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West. …

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.

—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

This is how it begins.

This is how it always begins, justified in the name of national security.

Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

This is what you can expect in the not-so-distant future.

Once you allow the government to overreach the …

Nearly all of these quotes are gathered from the chapter epigraphs in the book, M. Shahid Alam, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Springer: 2008). A few of the quotes are from non-Zionists. The sources for most these quotes can be found in this book.

 Chosenness

“Israel is not another example of the species nation; it is the only example of the species Israel.” Martin Buber

“Only Israel lives in, and constitutes, God’s kingdom…” Jacob Neusner

“For me the supreme morality is that the Jewish people has a right to exist. Without that there is no morality in the world.” Golda Meier, 1967

“We …

COP29 was always going to be memorable, for no other reason than the hosting country, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate indifferent to the issue of emissions and scornful of ecological preachers.  It has seen its natural gas supply grow by 128% between 2000 and 2021.  Between 2006 and 2021, gas exports rose by a monumental 29,290%.  A dizzying 95% of the country’s exports are made up of oil and gas, with much of its wealth failing to trickle down to the rest of the populace.

The broadly described West, as stated by President Ilham Aliyev in his opening address to …

There’s a new trend in the world that’s working against the planet, you know, the one you’re standing on. This new trend, over the past year or so, spells “thumbs down” for planet Earth. It’s a disheartening, and fraught with danger, change in attitude, dismissing commitments, left and right.

A figurative Planet Support Switch has been turned off by several key players. Proof of this agnostic attitude is found in every meeting of nations of the world over the past couple of years. They are turning their noses up on prior commitments. This is a new attitude. And it’s happening as …

Yulia Skripal communicated from her bedside at Salisbury District Hospital on March 8, 2018, four days after she and her father Sergei Skripal collapsed from a poison attack, that the attacker used a spray; and that the attack took place when she and her father were eating at a restaurant just minutes before their collapse on a bench outside.

The implication of the Skripal evidence, revealed for the first time on Thursday, is that the attack on the Skripals was not perpetrated by Russian military agents who were photographed elsewhere in Salisbury town at the time; that the attacker or attackers …

What paradigm encapsulates the bourgeoisie crisis of today?

On 25 July 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman accepted the advices from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, to 100% reverse his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s carefully designed plan to prevent a WW3 by creating a fully armed democratic federal government of the world to create adjudicate and enforce international laws and NO national laws, and to outlaw and end the cause that had produced both World Wars, which was imperialism and the contests between them, and so he created the basis for what he named …

On August 11, 2022, workers in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) penned an open letter about their experiences in the program. “As it currently stands,” they wrote, “the [SAWP] is systematic slavery.” The article was written by Jamaican workers, but they asserted that migrants of other nationalities had faced similarly dehumanizing experiences. “It feels like we’re in prison,” they continued. “[Bosses] physically intimidate us, destroy our personal property, and threaten to send us home.” Workers were “treated like mules” by unaccountable companies that the Canadian government had empowered to repress migrant workers’ labour rights and political voice.

The SAWP …

The Green New Deal has been largely blocked at the national level, but it is thriving in communities, cities, and states. Jeremy Brecher’s new book is both an urgent call to action and proof of concept.

Starting where we’re at

Less than one week after Trump was re-elected to the single most powerful political office in the world, it seems like a horrible time to release a book about the Green New Deal.

Thinking back to 2018, not so long ago in time but perhaps much longer in space, to when the Green New Deal was launched into public attention as a bold …

Imagine an experienced Ukrainian surgeon breaking down in front of a committee of British MPs as he related how Russian forces had been deliberately targeting Ukrainian children.

Imagine the surgeon had had to operate in desperate conditions on young children who had been lying injured after a Russian bombing attack and who were then ‘picked off’ by Russian drones. The atrocity claims would be headline news all across Western media.

Here, in the real world, the horrific testimony of a British surgeon who had operated on children in …