Labor organizations are taking up the fight for racial justice in many ways. They’re developing in-depth member education on racial capitalism. They’re using bargaining to address structural racism and developing new leadership.
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On the day that Israel was carrying out its remorseless pummelling of the Gaza Strip, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was using his Queen’s Speech to announce a series of laws for the next year.
Included in Johnson’s list were measures to disrupt the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the state of Israel by banning public bodies from launching their own boycott campaigns.
The planned reform would seek to ‘ensure a coherent approach to foreign relations’ by stopping public bodies from ‘imposing their own approach or views via boycott, divestment or sanctions campaigns.’
In announcing the proposal, the government displayed its deep-rooted disdain for the Palestinian cause. In fact, Johnson himself once dismissed those who express solidarity with Palestinian people as ‘corduroy-jacketed, snaggle-toothed, lefty academics’.
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Canada – Spring has always been a time of renewal and hope. I’m filled with a sense of wonder and possibility as I watch new life sprout from the soil and cherry blossoms bloom along streets.
But this spring, I feel a prevailing heaviness. For many of us, this season marks a year since COVID-19 restrictions were put in place. March 13 marked one year since Breonna Taylor was shot in her sleep by police in Louisville, Ky. As the season progresses, and as we pass through solemn anniversaries, I continue to be reminded of where we were a year ago.
Last spring, the COVID-19 pandemic started to unmask the inequalities in society, with the virus disproportionately affecting racialized communities. Headlines were filled with stories of police violence as mass protests erupted around the world.
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Atrocities targeting people and bodies we identify as our own tend to incite powerful feelings of exception. A shared sense of singular vulnerability and violation circulates virally, and the epidemiology of toxic intimacy with violence is simultaneously social and personal. The sheer quantity of casualties matters less than the bare fact of unexpected cruelty. Singularity and exception yield to righteous outrage, communal mobilization, and militant demand on surrounding authorities. Something must be done now. A famous few may issue bounties for individual culprits, with no regard for the collateral consequences of such grandstanding. A larger narrative quickly forms, condensing in precious keywords: hate, hate crime, justice, ignorance, safety, policing, prosecution, inclusion, education, criminal.
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Earlier this year, political scientist and Black feminist Julia Jordan-Zachery asked the question, “What do Black women think about the rain?” She was sharing emergent questions from her research pertaining to Black women, not specifically related to environment studies. Her question echoed some of my own inquiries into the conversation between water, skies, fire, and the currents of Black life. Her question also posited that Black women, complex and disparate, observe and connect to the phenomena called nature. Jordan-Zachery presented a path into the brambled and verdant terrain of Black people’s wonder and delight in the natural world.
Environmental scholar Carolyn Finney notes that “One of the biggest challenges for individuals whose work is considered ‘environmental’ is how quickly anything related to African Americans and the environment get designated as an ‘environmental justice’ concern.”
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Kerala, a state in the Indian union with a population of 35 million, has re-elected the Left Democratic Front (LDF) to lead the government for another five years. Since 1980, the people of Kerala have voted out the incumbent, seeking to alternate between the Left and the Right. This year, the people decided to stay with the Left and give the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader, Pinarayi Vijayan, a second term in office as the Chief Minister. Health Minister K. K. Shailaja, popularly known as Shailaja Teacher, won her re-election with a record-breaking tally of over 60,000 votes, far exceeding her closest contender.
It is clear that the people voted the Left government back in for three reasons…
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Sometimes what is obvious hides what is important. Gabriel García Márquez is best known as the craftsman par excellence of the genre ‘magical realism’, rather than his profound passion for the profession of journalism that led him to traverse—with the eagerness of a chronicler and a vallenato rhythm in his step—countless cafes, newsrooms, and continents.
Gabo, or Gabito, as he was known to his friends in Aracataca, a town camouflaged among the banana plantations of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, produced a journalism that few recognize, journalism militantly committed to a national and global context. International affairs, and in particular the people that rose up against US imperialism, were the ink for his pen.
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The depth of public connection with George Floyd was clear on the day the verdict of his police killer was announced. The moment was awaited with trepidation and the guilty verdict was met with enthusiasm and in some cases outright joy. But at the same time that the world learned the perpetrator’s fate, a 16-year old named Ma’Khia Bryant was also killed by the police.
Police in the United States kill more than 1,000 people every year, an average of three every day. Had young Ms. Bryant been killed on any other date, it is probable that no one outside of her immediate circle would know her name either.
But demands for justice must be expanded beyond the latest police lynching that the media may choose to expose.
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This article offers an overview of less-lethal projectiles—both chemical weapons and impact munitions. The police themselves don’t bother distinguishing the two. We’ll cover chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray. We’ll cover impact weapons like baton rounds, rubber bullets, and pepper-balls. We’ll cover the systems police use to apply these weapons, including air guns, sprays, grenades, grenade launchers, and shotguns. We’ll cover the ways that police mark people for arrest—and the ways they probably don’t. Other articles in this series discuss batons and other police weaponry. One of the most useful articles to read in conjunction to this one is our “Protocols for Common Injuries from Police Weapons.”
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United Kingdom – Over the last few weeks, the brutal policing of protests in Bristol has been profoundly disturbing. The right to peaceful assembly and protest are fundamental principles of any democracy, and the rich history of dissent in this country show us that they literally can change the course of history. Nobody knows this better than the people of Bristol, a city whose radicalism has seen it on the frontlines of change.
The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 drew national attention to racism in public life, playing a key role in securing the enactment of subsequent race relations legislation that outlawed racial discrimination in public places, housing and employment. This radicalism has been with us in recent years, with last summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests seeing the removal of Bristol’s statue honouring the slave owner Edward Colston.
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On February 26th, I interviewed Ajamu Baraka for my podcast. Baraka is a veteran grassroots organizer whose roots are in the Black Liberation Movement and anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles. He is an internationally recognized leader of the emerging human rights movement in the U.S. and has been at the forefront of efforts to apply the international human rights framework to social justice advocacy in the U.S. for more than 25 years. He is a National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace, whose activities we discussed.
Baraka has taught political science at various universities and has been a guest lecturer at academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad.
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Last fall, two powerful hurricanes, Eta and Iota, slammed into Central America within two weeks of each other, causing massive flooding and landslides and affecting millions of people, primarily in Honduras and Nicaragua. Thousands were uprooted from their homes, and women, many with children in tow, suffered the greatest. The events followed a disturbing but familiar trend: The United Nations estimates that 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women. And it’s not just storms that affect them; researchers in India have found that droughts, too, hit women the hardest, rendering them more vulnerable than men to income loss, food insecurity, water scarcity, and related health complications.
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In the history of post-World War Two US imperialism, there have been various cases of aggression against countries and regimes that many anti-imperialist, socialist leftists around the world have considered reactionary, or at least not worthy of their support.
In some cases, there was a consensus that while the regime in question was not to be defended, the imperialist aggression against it was not intended to save people from its dictatorial predations, but rather to secure imperialist hegemony and economic profits that would continue to oppress people. Even in cases when anti-imperialists thought the targeted regime deserved defence, their efforts mostly focused on opposing intervention.
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Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin is probably best known for Anarchism and the Black Revolution, a fifty-six page manifesto that was arguably the first work to systematically apply the principles and theories of anarchism to the history of Black struggle and the question of Black liberation. First published in 1979, Anarchism and the Black Revolution was written while the Chattanooga-born Irvin was incarcerated in the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois serving a life sentence for hijacking . Ervin was first introduced to anarchism during an interim stint in the Federal Detention Center in…
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“The word ‘give up’ does not exist in my dictionary. I learned from my mother: ‘always struggle,’” affirmed former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Wednesday March 10, in the main office of the ABC Metalworkers’ Union in São Bernardo do Campo in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. His address occurred after the annulment of the sentences against him emitted during the Operation Car Wash case, by the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, in the state of Paraná. The decision, made on Monday March 8, was published by Minister Edson Fachin of the Supreme Federal Court (STF).
People voiced their support for the ex-president on social media and by shouting greetings to Lula from their windows in cities like São Paulo.
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Vaccines have had a place in diplomacy since the Cold War era. The country that can manufacture and distribute lifesaving injections to others less fortunate sees a return on its investment in the form of soft power: prestige, goodwill, perhaps a degree of indebtedness, even awe. Today the country moving fastest toward consolidating these gains may be China, under President Xi Jinping, who proclaimed last May that Chinese-made vaccines against COVID-19 would become a “global public good.” Since that time, top officials have promised many developing countries priority access to Chinese vaccines, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry has announced that the country is providing free vaccines to 69 countries and commercially exporting them to 28 more.
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Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was a watershed moment in the national and international arena, one that marked a new step in the accelerated decline and crisis of the U.S. empire after 2008. Trump’s popularity and the support he found in sectors of capital signaled, from the right, a growing rejection of the traditional neoliberal leaders of U.S. capitalism who had led the United States into a multipronged crisis from which it could not fully recover. Internationally, the U.S. faced the decline of its imperialist hegemony and challenges from growing powers like China; nationally, it faced growing inequality and discontent from sectors of the working class and “middle class” whose living conditions had been severely degraded while President Obama bailed out banks and corporations. Trump, with his unabashed individualism and promises to “Make America Great Again,” gave a right-wing populist voice to a certain sector of the disaffected petit bourgeoisie — mostly white, mostly located outside the biggest cities, and more than ready to find scapegoats among the Right’s traditional boogeymen: migrants, marginalized communities, and leftists.
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Donald Trump put the kibosh on the idea of a new right-wing party at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Trump’s followers will remain in the Republican Party, where they’ve established themselves as the biggest and most influential faction. Even so, the mere fact that the possibility of a new “MAGA” or “Patriot Party” was discussed reflects the ongoing desire for more clearly defined political parties in the United States.
Americans across a range of political persuasions yearn for three or more parties. Recent polls showed 63 percent of Republicans think a third party is necessary, which is up 10 percent since 2018, and 68 percent want Trump to lead it. A poll of Republicans taken in mid-February registered a double-digit majority — 46 to 27 percent — ready to abandon the GOP and join a Trump party.
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If a company hides information that suggests its top money-making product is unsafe, keeps adverse findings from regulators, employs ghostwriters to gin up favorable scientific studies and media coverage, funds front groups in an attempt to discredit critics, fails to provide warnings to consumers, and, according to jurors who reviewed a mountain of evidence, is responsible for serious illnesses and death, how would you hold the people responsible to account?
If the company were Monsanto, you couldn’t.
Monsanto — once one of the marquee corporate names in St. Louis — is now gone, gobbled up in 2018 for a whopping $63 billion.
Bayer AG paid a premium and Monsanto shareholders made a bundle, just as lawsuits alleging a link between Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were beginning to heat up.
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As the fight amongst the oligarchs heats up over Trump’s 2nd impeachment, one must wonder what ever happened to the days when the poor and the working class were clear-eyed enough to see their real struggle was against the rich? Wall Street banksters, the weapons warlords, Hollywood moguls, oil barons, real estate developers and the like.
Instead we see the Lumpenproletariat on their knees scratching and clawing each other – defending one side of the elite mobsters who are armed against the other in Washington’s usual sideshow that distracts the nation from the ever present reality of capital accumulation.
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When President Biden rescinded a crucial permit for the Keystone XL pipeline last week, it marked the culmination of one of the longest, highest-profile campaigns in the North American climate movement. The opposition to Keystone XL included large environmental organizations, grassroots climate activist networks, Nebraska farmers, Texas landowners, Indigenous rights groups and tribal governments. Few environmental campaigns have touched so many people over such large swaths of the continent.
The Keystone XL resistance was part of the ongoing opposition to the Canadian tar sands, one of the most carbon-intensive industrial projects on the planet.
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Fifty years ago, my young daughter and I were on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the first Earth Day. A group of us were then launching the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Since then, the NRDC and other U.S. environmental groups have racked up more victories and accomplishments than one can count.
But here’s the deeply troubling rub: As our environmental organizations have grown stronger, more sophisticated and more global in reach, the environment has continued to slide downhill. And not just slightly downhill.
Climate change is coming at us very hard. Worldwide, we are losing biodiversity, forests, fisheries and agricultural soils at frightening rates.
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Since the beginning of the right-wing turn by Moreno’s government and the political persecution of the key leaders of the Citizen Revolution—most notably Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas—countless attempts have been made to prevent the participation in the elections of either Correa himself or any other political leader affiliated to his movement.
This has included preventing the registration of the Citizen Revolution Movement as a political party, a ban on the Fuerza Compromiso Social (FCS) electoral movement used by them to run in the 2019 local elections, a ban on Correa running as a vice-presidential candidate, and several attempts to prevent the registration of the Andrés Arauz-Carlos Rabascall presidential ticket.
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In October of 2020, the Movement Towards Socialism (acronymed MAS in Spanish) returned to power 11 months after the U.S.-backed far-right coup regime of Jeanine Áñez ousted Evo Morales and his government during Bolivia’s November 2019 elections. The MAS party restored majority control over Bolivia’s legislature, and MAS candidate Luis Arce won the presidential election by a landslide victory, earning about 55% of the vote against the two main anti-MAS candidates, center-right ex-president Carlos Mesa (who received almost 29%) and far-right Luis Camacho (who received only 14%).
The right-wing opposition had expected the vote to be close enough to force a run-off election, in which the hope was that the anti-MAS vote would consolidate to elect Mesa over Arce.
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