Although the United States had only a short-lived involvement of the slave trade in Uruguay from 1797-1809, they took advantage of the hideous enterprise and served as a flagship for many clandestine voyages, including the sale of hides to Rhode Island as noted by historian Alex Borucki. Every coastal city, for that matter, in the Atlantic world was touched by slavery and every distinct place had a microhistory that translated into a larger national and global story. While the topics of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, civil war, and questions related to various reconstruction efforts across the Americas predominantly cover the United States and Brazil, the issue of Uruguay offers an interesting case study and history. This essay provides the historiography of slave histories in the Americas and attempts to figure in Uruguay, to reimagine the transatlantic slave trade along coastal cities and regions like the Rio de la Plata and the city of Montevideo, from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.

Leonardo Marques has pointed out “the role of wind ocean currents and the demand of rum that made possible a strong network connecting Rhode Island” to the coasts of the South Atlantic, Africa and the Americas. In what is perhaps another overlooked region of the slave trade concerning Rhode Island’s involvement is 1782-1807 Southeast Africa with “evidence of at least nine voyages organized by U.S. slave traders to Mozambique.” Marques’ revisions are also helpful when analyzing Uruguay, where he states that the U.S. purchased “548 enslaved people from Montevideo, Uruguay” and that overall “about 11% of all transatlantic slaves disembarked in Montevideo” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “This unusual connection” writes Marques, spanning the North and South Atlantic world was the consequence of the hostile participation of the enslavers of Rhode Island. James DeWolf’s vessel disembarked 95 slaves in Montevideo in 1805.

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If you’re the Russian president, Vladimir Putin—with oligarch billions tucked away in off-shore trusts, a few mistresses, ice time at the local rink, and dachas on the Black Sea—what’s left for your Soviet-era trophy room except the mounted head of the corrupt Ukrainian government, that which believes that Ukraine ought to remain independent from Russia?

When Putin says “Atakovat” to his military command, Russian tanks, bombers, cyber warriors, fighter jets, and missiles will wash over Ukraine as if it were Saddam’s Baghdad, and in short order a Russian puppet collaborationist government will be installed in Kyiv (the Soviet name was Kiev) to hoist the white flag and declare “an end to hostilities” with Russia—as if somehow Ukraine were to blame for its own invasion.

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The eruption of the undersea volcano, off the twin islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai within the Tongan system, drew the world’s attention, if only for a few days, to the island kingdom of Tonga. The death toll so far has been low, and so, for the global viewing audience, more spectacle than tragedy. The satellite images of Nuku’alofa, the capital, covered with grey ash, looked somber and spooky. But such volcanic fall-out is part of Polynesia, isn’t it? Won’t it surely wash away in the tropical rain?

One heard the little discussion, at least among the talking heads on cable news, of what volcanic ashfall does to a vulnerable ecosystem involving freshwater wells, fishponds, and crops such as coconuts. Coconut palms like volcanic soil, of lava and lava ash, beneath them; they do not, however, like the ash raining down on top of them, defoliating them, breaking their branches. This is especially important as Tonga’s main exports have long been copra and coconut oil. Ash is not good either for the vanilla plants, either, which produce their (sometimes) lucrative beans for the world marketplace.

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Image by Joseph Chan.

It is common to hear and read “experts” say that US politics is too “polarized” between “the left,” meaning the Democrats, and the right, meaning the Republicans. According to those who worry and complain about “polarization,” US-Americans need to “come together” and “meet in the middle,” in order to “heal the divisions in the country.”

This is nonsense. There’s next-to-nothing “left” about the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party of the two Joes (Biden and Manchin), Nancy “We’re Capitalist and Just the Way it Is” Pelosi and Chuck Schumer but there’s quite a bit far right about the Amerikaner Party of Trump (APoT) and January 6 – the Republifascist Party. Helping drive the whole two-party system far to the right, the lying neoliberal warmonger Democrats are in much the same corporate and imperial space that “moderate Republicans” used to occupy. With nowhere left go since the Demublican Citigroup presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the GOP crossed over into radical white nationalist and neofascist territory. It went there in a big way with Trump.

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Image by Ivan Diaz.

If 2020 was the year that broke America’s brain with QAnon, “Big Lie” election propaganda, and Covid-19 misinformation, 2021 to 2022 have shown little signs of a return to sanity. On Covid-19, anti-vaxxer misinformation permeates political discourse. Twenty-seven percent of Americans had yet to be “fully” vaccinated by receiving at least two shots by January 2022, and the vast majority of these holdouts – more than 80 percent – said they didn’t plan on getting vaccinated. The pandemic continues, despite many Americans talking about it as if it’s in the past. Approximately three-in-ten Americans in mid-2021 falsely believed the pandemic was over. Forty-five percent acted as if the pandemic was over, saying in late 2021 that they felt “safe enough to carry out everyday life largely the way it was before the pandemic.” This was up from 36 percent in late August to early September.

Anti-vaxxer disinformation activists are intensifying their attacks on medical efforts to combat the pandemic, utilizing pseudoscience to manipulate public opinion. One example is the perversion of the VAERS database, which is used to drum up opposition to vaccination against Covid-19. VAERS – the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – is a data tool run by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. It was created in 1990 to provide citizens with one central location to report their experiences with potential side effects of vaccines. This database has become a key piece of “evidence” used by anti-vaxxers to cultivate public distrust of vaccines.

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Image by Bernd Dittrich.

While a pandemic tying global supply chains in knots is a fresh experience for the American political chorus, it hasn’t stopped the chorus from cranking up its familiar refrains. Conservatives have predictively targeted unions and lazy workers, both for their usual alleged goldbricking and for supposedly blocking automation projects that would make American ports more efficient. Since the pandemic, they have added vaccine mandates. For his part, in October, President Biden sought to partner with the country’s largest retailers to fix the crisis as well as calling on the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which handle about 40 percent of the country’s imports, to work around the clock to unload the dozens of ships backed up off the coast. Around this time is was reported that some of the largest retailers were chartering their own, albeit much smaller cargo ships to get around the backlog and dock at smaller ports around the country (the top 5 U.S. importers by volume are Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ashley Furniture).

On December 23^rd, Biden, speaking ahead of a meeting of the task force he put together this past spring to tackle shortages and inflation, announced that Christmas had indeed been saved with store shelves, stocked at 90 percent and the speed of home deliveries increasing, proclaiming ‘Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered, shelves are not empty…The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur.’ Meanwhile, with the emergence of the Omnicron variant, a spokesperson for Maersk, one of the world’s shipping giants, recently said in The Guardian “We do not see major improvement as long as we have a line of sight, which is into 2022…very likely that it continues thereafter and for North America even longer.’ Other experts envision problems lasting well into next year.

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Image by Moises Gonzalez.

Six years is an eternity in politics. Consider what was common opinion at the start of 2016: That changing demographics in the United States favored the Democratic Party; it would soon be impossible for Republicans to win a national election unless they sharply changed from their primary strategy of sending dog whistles to their base of conservative white people, a dwindling percentage of the U.S. population.

Six short years later, there is not only much hand-wringing that Republicans are using bare-knuckle tactics that are poised to give themselves a permanent grip on power despite their minority status but there is open worry of a possible coup by fascistic elements in the Republican Party that would put an end to formal democracy. No longer, it seems, is demographics destiny; the Democratic Party, ever haughtily giving the back of the hand to its base, had believed it merely need show up to win elections.

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Image by Jolanda Kirpensteijn.

Does the United States have a homeland? Is it truly a nation? Or is it still just a colony that exists to exploit the homelands of other peoples? The federal government presently recognizes 537 tribes within its claimed territory. This number is continually growing and doesn’t include state-recognized tribes and Indigenous people lacking any political recognition. Although homelands can be shared, this extreme example of nations within a nation plainly describes an occupation, not a country, and therefore, an ongoing colonial endeavor.

If the United States is still a colony, it could be described as a colony without portfolio—that is, without a homeland. It broke with its homeland, Great Britain, during the Revolutionary War in 1776, and
now occupies sans terra firma the homelands of other countries, our nations—Native nations.

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Painting by William Halsall, 1882.

Throughout its millennia-long history punctuated by invasion, occupation, and war, the Vietnamese people have accomplished an unparalleled feat: they managed to retain their culture and their sovereignty.

This is in diametrically opposed and tragic contrast to the Native American tribes of New England the seeds of whose destruction were sown beginning with intermittent contact with murderous, disease-ridden, and slave-trading European explorers and elevated to a foregone conclusion with the arrival of the Mayflower in November 1620 and the Great Puritan Migration that followed.

This ignominious history is not only academic but also intensely personal, as I am both a permanent resident of Vietnam and a direct and collateral descendant of settler-colonizers, both saints and strangers, who arrived in their New World in 1610 and 1620. If they hadn’t been there at that fleeting moment in history, I wouldn’t be here in this unique genetic form. That said, it is a painful reality that gives me pause.

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Image by Anthony Garand.

In a recent N“P”R interview on “the possible end of democracy as we know it,” a discussion in which he explained how the neofascist (my description, not his) Republican Party is preparing to constitutionally purloin the 2024 presidential election, the journalist Barton Gellman said something that made me stop and listen:

“It goes back to the days of the founders. In the first years after the Constitution was written in the first elections, under Article 2 of the Constitution, electors for the presidency were selected, as the Constitution says, in the manner of their own choosing, referring to the legislators. So state legislatures were in charge of choosing electors. Now, for more than 150 years, every state has decided that it would choose electors by asking its voters to vote. So we are accustomed to choosing electors by the popular vote in each state. But that’s not the way the Constitution required. And so what the legal strategy is is for the state legislators to take back their constitutional authority to directly choose electors. And so they can disregard what their voters choose or they can claim that the voters’ choice has been irrevocably tainted by fraud and therefore the legislators can make the choice…. And the reason for this strategy is that there are a number of important swing states in a presidential election that went for Biden in 2020 but have all-Republican legislatures at home. And so the Republican legislatures could theoretically override the choice of the voters. And that’s exactly what Trump asked them to do last time and will be asking them to do next time.”

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Photo courtesy of Nina Turner.

The national co-chair for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, Nina Turner, delivered an electrifying speech during her October 30 fundraiser at the Santa Monica home of Jan Goodman and Jerry Manpearl, stalwarts of Los Angeles’ progressive scene. Reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War’s antifascist leader La Pasionaria, the impassioned oration by Turner, a former Ohio State Senator, could be described with colorful cliches as a rabblerousing, fire breathing stemwinder.

Turner’s dramatic discourse at Santa Monica set the stage for this Q&A almost two months after CounterPunch requested an interview with the extremely busy campaigner, which finally took place by phone. Reached back at Cleveland, Turner revealed herself to be a skilled tightrope walker, a precariously perched performer with one foot in the people’s camp of mass movements and the other in an electoral arena dominated by the capitalist system. The thoughtful Turner clearly chafes under the straitjacket of the two-party duopoly and strategizes how to pursue progressive policies, despite both Republicans and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

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Image by Big G Media.

During the past couple of years, India has been ravaged simultaneously by two viruses, one epidemiological in the form of Covid-19, and the other ideological in the form of Hindu nationalism and supremacism or Hindutva, with the former taking the lives of millions of citizens, while the latter wreaks havoc on the country’s religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians.

The two viruses are related due to the way in which Hindu nationalist aligned charitable organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom have raised money for Covid relief and then funnelled these funds to Hindu nationalist groups in India, where they are potentially used to spread hatred against religious minorities.

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Evil genius billionaire, Robert Mercer, and his cohorts at the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund reached a $7 billion settlement with the U.S. Government in September after their failed takeover of the presidential election process. This is nearly twice the size of the penalty paid by the Sackler family hedge fund — $4 billion — for deceptively encouraging over-prescription of the painkiller Oxycontin.

That’s $4 billion for the Sacklers, who are rightly pilloried by the press daily, and $7 billion for Renaissance Partners, who no one seems to have heard of. The Mercer guilty plea has not been covered by The Hill, Breaking Points, The Young Turks, or other usually reliable media outlets, much less by the mainstream media. Search Google News for Renaissance Technologies and the $7 billion fine is not included in the top 80 search results. It has been disappeared in favor of stories about the fund’s above-average financial performance.

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Image by Ronal Labrador.

Socialist communes may be new in Venezuela – officially, they began no earlier than 2009 – but, like much that is new, they also rely on old traditions and hence involve a “blast from the past.” On a certain level, it is hardly surprising that overcoming the radical atomization of capitalist society could be fueled by elements of past social formations in as much as these later, especially those dating from prehistory, were overwhelmingly communitarian. However, much of the Marxist left falls into the trap of thinking that a socialist future will be generated, if not ex nihilo, at least without reference to past epochs and their social forms. In defense of this latter approach, one can appeal to Marx himself who wrote in 1852 that bourgeois revolutions appeal to history (“to smother their content”), but proletarian revolutions take their poetry from the future.

As we shall see, Marx later revised this idea, coming to embrace the relevance of the communal past for the socialist future. However, this backward-looking shift in Marx is not well-known, and it has not kept the bulk of the socialist movement from being oblivious to the importance of communitarian pasts. Latin America may be an exception to this general theoretical trend, for the simple reason that that continent’s past weighs heavily on the present and many political movements appeal to it. In Venezuela, anthropologists Iraida Vargas and Mario Sanoja have forcefully argued for the pertinence of the region’s communal past – and the relics of communitarian practices that survive today – to the project of socialist construction. They claim that both Venezuela’s history and its long-standing cultural traditions could be the basis of the Bolivarian Process’s development of communal socialism, having uncovered some surprising links between the future that the revolution aspires to and its roots in a society whose practices of solidarity and deep-seated conceptions of equality are often shaped by Indigenous and African traditions.

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