Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth Stan Cox
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
Killing Democracy: Western Imperialism's Legacy of Regime Change and Media Manipulation Finian Cunningham, Daniel Kovalik, Jeremy Kuzmarov, KJ Noh, & Ron Ridenour
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
Surviving the 21st Century Noam Chomsky and José Mujica
Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK James W. Douglass
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine Jeff Schuhrke
From the Avenues of Paris to the Streets of Minneapolis, the Power of Broad-Based Movement Building Is Becoming Evident
Born in South Africa just a few years after the end of World War II and reared by activists in the anti-apartheid movement, I witnessed my parents’ struggle against fascism and its accompanying racism in both my country of birth and Europe. This created in me a sense of the fragility of democracy and fear of losing civil rights and collective values. The wave of brutal ICE raids and the Trump administration’s assault on political and legal norms prove this fear well-founded.
At the age of five, my father told me, “We fought fascism in Europe and then came home to …
There is nothing more dangerous to ruling class interests than people getting in touch with their inborn sense of empathy and acting as their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.
Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person. — Heinz Kohut
…
“Zionist Imperial Mafia” — Antisemitic? Nah.
Nah, it is NOT so-called, “antisemitic” (antispetic?) to point things out, man oh man.
Sam Altman, who has been awarded a one-year military contract worth $200 million from the Trump administration, has invested in technology to allow parents to gene edit their children before conception to produce “designer babies.”
Epstein, anyone?
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s teen accusers alleged she was used as a “human incubator” to have the late pedophile’s baby — and the newborn was apparently snatched from her just minutes after giving birth.
The claim, which was included in the latest Epstein …
They launched a live-streamed genocide in full view of the entire world.
They’re openly targeting civilian populations with siege warfare in Iran and Cuba in full view of the entire world.
They openly kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation in full view of the entire world.
They deliberately provoked a horrific and dangerous proxy war in Ukraine in full view of the entire world.
They spent years actively backing Saudi Arabia’s monstrous genocidal atrocities in Yemen in full view of the entire world.
They’re plundering and exploiting the resources and labor of the global south in full view of the entire world.
They’re killing …
We are at a crossroads of civilization, facing contradictions that cannot be solved by the same logic that created them. We are attempting to answer the future of humanity with a mindset inherited from the past.
“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” — John Lennon
We live in the most materialistic epoch in history. Everything revolves around production—the making of objects. Factories, warehouses, housing developments, cars, films, videos, data centers. Even churches are increasingly objectified: they manufacture faith. Schools become factories for tomorrow’s workers and their bosses.
Political parties have become the marketing arm of these materialist structures. …
Nominal realities bedevil politics. They usually find form in polling statistics, airings in the land of pundits and those self-appointed wise people who think they have a measure of the electorate and its various wishes. Folly often follows, garlanded with errors of judgment and failed predictions: Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in 2016; Trump’s re-election in 2024. The list is wearisomely long, the electorate often inscrutable. Yet the pollsters always live another day, at large and unpunished.
In Australia, the cathedral of commentators and psephologists is expressing interest in the emergence of a new horse from the political stable. Not a thoroughbred, mind you. …
Imagine telling someone who has experienced the most apocalyptic conditions known to man to give their perpetrators a “chance.” That’s exactly what it felt like when I opened my phone the other day and saw headlines from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal talking about Trump’s sham “Board of Peace,” which is supposed to govern Gaza.
Not only is it tone deaf, but it’s also downright racist. Palestinians have spent decades being strung along like puppets, being told what’s going to happen to our land instead of letting us have it. We have been raped, maimed, starved, displaced, imprisoned, tortured, …
The title of the article at Foreign Affairs (FA) — “Xi the Destroyer” — speaks loudly of another Sinophobic piece by the US foreign policy magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
FA opens the article by noting the “purge” of People’s Liberation Army general Zhang Youxia in what it termed a “Shakespearean moment in Chinese politics” — seemingly indicating a lighthearted mistake by chairman Xi Jinping.
Yet Xi’s decision is framed as “suggest[ing] a new level of intrigue.” This is based on the long time familiarity between Xi and Zhang and that their fathers were “comrades-in-arms during China’s …
Recognizing that some parents investigate charter schools before approaching them, while many others do not, charter school advocates have long sought to attract parents and students by aggressively promoting themselves as innovative and creative in curriculum, instruction, methods, and pedagogy.
Indeed, many deregulated charter schools claim to operate according to a distinctive pedagogy intended to appeal to those interested in it. Thus, there exist privately operated charter schools that focus primarily on music and art, science and technology, military training, agriculture and farming, college preparation, and more.
Charter school proponents claim that this educational innovation and experimentation are possible due to the …
During the COVID pandemic, I published a book titled The White-West: A Look in the Mirror. At the time, I did not imagine that only a few years later the dynamics I described would become so stark, so violent, and so openly visible.
Today, many struggle to understand what is happening in the United States—and what radicalized power looks like when it feels threatened. This moment is not fundamentally about immigration, security, or geopolitics. It is about the collapse of the White-West’s moral authority and its turn toward racialized domination as a means of survival.
The actions of ICE and the growing …
Normally, when one develops all the symptoms of a disease, the response ought not to be exacerbating the disease, but seeking to cure it. Approaches to healthcare in the United States have gone off the rails, of course, but think about the disease of military spending.
What are some of the symptoms we’ve suffered recently? Wars, bombings, threats of wars, kidnappings of foreign presidents, arming of distant genocides, attempts to take over or control various countries, hatred, resentment, terrorism, wounded veterans, militarized police, militarized culture, militarized borders, militarized occupations …
Orientation
Unfortunately, in the United States the terms “liberal, “democracy” and “capitalism” are all mushed together according to the following logic:
All democratic societies are liberal;
All liberal societies are capitalist and
All democratic societies are capitalist
In Part I of my article, I challenged this logic because many capitalist societies have dictatorships and some socialist societies are democratic. Part I was divided into two parts. The first half is about the shortcomings of representational democracy in its ontological ground in Newtonian and epistemological foundations in Descartes. I also discussed how representational …
Writing an article that references the murders of innocent people is difficult. Concerns of invading privacy, of not being sufficiently empathetic to the tragedy, and of clumsily using the deceased for undeserved purposes hampers the narrative. By treading softly and expounding sincerely, the screams of anguish heard at the Bondi Beach massacre diminish, the reverberations to its aftermath increase, and the aftermath emerges as a turning point in history.
Bondi Beach is not new to the American public. Bondi Rescue, an Australian television program, which follows the daily lives and routines of the professional lifeguards who patrol Bondi Beach, has been …
Editor’s Note: This is the second of two Dispatches on AI data centers; read the previous article, by Alefiya Presswala, here.
The residents of Saline Township, Michigan, are upset. Soon, construction will begin on a 2.2 million-square-foot data center located just outside the small rural town, which will ultimately serve two Big Tech companies: Oracle and OpenAI. Area residents oppose the facility because they fear it will strain the region’s power grid and increase their electricity bills, disrupt the area’s farmland, and consume much of the area’s water (as the plant will ultimately use …
Why are we experiencing a period of such crisis in international relations in Britain, Europe, the Americas and across the world?
So many responses to this question fail to locate it in what the international communist movement has long called the “general crisis of capitalism.”
At its base, capitalism cannot resolve the cyclical and structural crises that produce instability, shocks, slowdowns, recessions and slumps. As a system of class exploitation reinforced by oppression, it generates inequality and social crisis which, likewise, cannot be fully and permanently abolished without abolishing capitalism itself.
The march of the monopoly corporations to dominate economic and political life …
Our readers are not used to seeing this type of article. However, it offers a peek into the troubles one can encounter, also when working for peace and art – processes that are never revealed in the final text, video or image. The experience involved starting up my Mac and finding only empty folders on its desktop, i.e. the sudden loss of nearly 100,000 documents and files accumulated over decades. I then had to manually retrieve and reorganise it all, and exchange with a formally polite but incompetent pCloud …
As did many fellow Americans, I chuckled when President Trump announced the creation of the U.S. Space Force on December 20, 2019. I even remember laughing heartily while taking in the late-night circuit’s many Star Trek jokes that day. Yet, I had mostly forgotten that the Space Force still exists until last week when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth started a policy speech alongside Elon Musk at SpaceX’s headquarters by flashing the Vulcan salute and affirming Musk’s desire to “make Star Trek real.”
The absurdity of Musk’s introduction–in which he spoke of “going beyond our star system to other star systems, …
Jeffrey Epstein certainly got around. He moved virally, galloping through the cells of the establishment. What was more, he was permitted to. Dead and buried, the financier, convicted paedophile, sex trafficker, eugenics follower, and the man all in power would want to know, continues to ruin reputations, casting doubt on many relationships, and stirring investigations into his correspondents.
Much of this damage is emanating from that noxious font of revelation, despair and disgrace hosted by the US Department of Justice, entitled the Epstein Library. As a result of these 3.5 million files or so, Noam Chomsky, saint of …
We used to have legions. Now we have the military-industrial complex.
We don’t really see war anymore; not up close. It happens thousands of miles away, outsourced, managed. An all-volunteer army made up of farm kids, inner-city kids, a lot of Hispanics. Plenty of them did the math on tuition and decided this was the fastest way.
Disease doesn’t move through towns the way it used to, at least not here. My aunt goes home from the hospital always exhausted, talks about infections that don’t respond the way they’re supposed to.
Food is strange now. There’s always plenty of it, but …
But Not Quite
Recently, there has been a growing sense of déjà vu when it comes to international sports and, in particular, the Olympic Committee. This brings to mind a quote from Ximénès Doudan: “You may not care about politics, but politics still cares about you.” Only in the case of the IOC, it needs to be rephrased: if you say you don’t engage in politics, you’re lying… because the facts say otherwise.
There is probably no one in the world who is unaware that, starting in 2022 and even earlier, Russian and …
While the sheer pomposity, Trumpian megalomania, and painfully paradoxical context surrounding the so-called “Board of Peace” (BoP) might tempt some to dismiss it as mere spectacle or farce, its criminal, inhumane, and hegemonic nature makes it far too dangerous to ignore.
Last week, Trump and his new, thuggish boys’ club of heads of state publicly celebrated the launch of the Board at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Its hypocrisy was inadvertently underscored by Elon Musk—Trump’s on-again, off-again ally—when he quipped onstage that one might call it the Board of “p-i-e-c-e,” a venture devoted to claiming “a …
Sadly, the tragic journey of Buffalo’s first charter school, the King Center Charter School (KCCS), is not an isolated one. Nationwide, far too many charter schools—old and new—experience death by a thousand cuts, usually at the hands of their private operators, charter school authorizers, and the institutions that are supposed to protect them.
Buffalo’s King Center Charter School first opened in 2000, but like many deregulated charter schools it has been plagued by numerous problems which have steadily worsened over time.
Spectrum News reported on January 29, 2026 that the privately-operated charter …
While corruption is endemic to the decades-old charter school sector, it is extra rampant in Florida’s charter schools. To add insult to injury, Florida also has the nation’s second highest charter school failure and closure rate. No amount of “school choice” rhetoric in Florida has improved this record. School privatization is notorious for lowering the level of education.
According to Florida Politics (Jan. 14, 2026), “Florida [high school] graduation rates are rising, but district [public] schools are driving gains far more than charters.”
When data from the Florida Department …
When I first came to Japan in 1989, a few Japanese actually told me that there was no child abuse in Japan. That shows that there was little consciousness of this social problem in those days. But I would guess that most people in the U.S. and Japan, of my generation at least, have been abused by a man or an older boy at some time in their life, either as children or as adults. That might sound like an unsupportable claim, but consider the wide range of types of abuse, what is considered abuse today, including violence, sexual abuse, …
Redactions, Revelations, and the Unfinished Dossier
This essay reviews the documents released over the past month. All previous reporting on this topic can be found in my Decoding Epstein.
“I didn’t see it myself, but I was told by some very important people that not only does it absolve me, it’s the opposite of what people were hoping, you know, the radical left,” claimed President Donald Trump on January 31, 2026.
He was responding to the release of the latest batch of “Epstein Files” from the Department of Justice (DOJ). A day earlier, the DOJ released over …
The International Monetary Fund’s new assessment of Nicaragua’s economy labels it as “strong” no fewer than 56 times. But it also shows how key factors in the country’s growing prosperity – export earnings, trade relations and remittances (money sent by Nicaraguans living abroad) are vulnerable to US attacks. The IMF points out that US sanctions – more appropriately known as unilateral coercive measures – have severely restricted the help the country gets from multilateral bodies like the World Bank.
Nicaragua’s relationship with the IMF is an odd one. On the one hand, the institution’s annual “Article IV” reports …
Things are getting rather ropey on the invitation of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Australia on February 8. It came amidst the anguish following the Bondi Beach attacks of December 14, 2025 on attendees of a Hanukkah event by two gunmen, leaving 15 dead. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese obviously thought it a sensible measure at the time. For months, his government has been snarled at by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for providing succour to antisemitism. The wretched thesis: that Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian State at September’s UN General Assembly meeting somehow stirred it.
Albanese had thought …
Author’s note: This piece is dedicated to the memory of Angie Tibbs, who was a dear friend and also my editor at DV for many years. Her light still shines in the souls of the justice seekers and the peace makers to light our way through these dark times.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. – Matthew 19:24
I recently had the misfortune of seeing a video clip of Stephen Miller, one of the chief architects operating within the lawless Trump …
From an early age, most boys absorb the message—whether stated directly or modeled by the men and women in their lives—that to be a man is to be tough.
I learned that early. In my household, crying got me grounded or spanked, or both. And, of course, I was expected not to cry about the punishment. The older I got, the less that punishment mattered. I became numb to the pain, cut off from the hurt and sadness I felt. Eventually, I learned to express myself through anger.
In the community I grew up in, showing weakness in any form was frowned …
Black History Month: “The Dirty Business of Slavery.”
“The Dirty Business of MAGA”
“The Dirty Business of Tech Fascism”
The Dirty Business of Billionaires”
“The Dirty Business of Axis of Evil: Israel/USA”
“The Dirty Business of ICE’s Slave Patrol Roots”
“The Dirty Business of Israelization of the World”
The phrase “our American Israel” comes from a Puritan expression of colonial American exceptionalism. In 1799, Abiel Abbot, a Massachusetts minister, preached a Thanksgiving sermon titled “Traits of Resemblance …
