Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book Against the Fascist Creep, responds to a review of his book by E.Z. Kay published in Toward Freedom. "Fascism stems from colonial domination and perseveres through the encroachment of capital... To confront fascism, we must also confront intellectual and moral crises in our society," Ross writes.
Source: The Nation
Yassin Mohamed has spent much of the last seven years in prison for the crime of protesting.
Yassin Mohamed will turn 23 in a few days. He will spend his birthday as he has spent much of the last seven years of his life in Egypt: in prison.
If you had seen Yassin as I have seen him, you probably wouldn’t guess that he’s been jailed, beaten, tortured, electroshocked. From the almost four years I lived in Cairo—both before and after the 2013 military coup—my memories of him revolve around the cheap and seedy cafes of downtown: cracked and canting chairs, antediluvian waiters in soiled slippers, the slack hoses of water pipes trailing around tables like very sickly cobras. Here, on any given night, real veterans of the revolution gathered and smoked and talked, along with graffiti artists, would-be actors, musicians, middle-class students slumming from the suburbs, and a few clumsy, walrus-like police informers.
Wild swings are the daily bread and butter of a structural crisis. This means that we shall live in chaotic uncertainty until the structural crisis is resolved in favor of one of the two prongs of the bifurcation. We need to concentrate our analyses and our actions on what makes it more likely that the progressive side of the bifurcation outweighs the reactionary side in the middle-term resolution of the struggle.
After steadily declining for over a decade, global hunger is on the rise again, affecting 815 million people in 2016. Exacerbated by climate-related shocks, increasing conflicts have been a key driver of severe food crisis and recently re-emerged famines.
Source: Common Dreams
Trump’s ability to rely on “his generals” for guidance shouldn’t be seen as comforting
In a democracy, no one should be comforted to hear that generals have imposed discipline on an elected head of state. That was never supposed to happen in the United States. Now it has.
Among the most enduring political images of the 20th century was the military junta. It was a group of grim-faced officers—usually three—who rose to control a state. The junta would tolerate civilian institutions that agreed to remain subservient, but in the end enforced its own will. As recently as a few decades ago, military juntas ruled important countries including Chile, Argentina, Turkey, and Greece.
A new investigation by Oxfam reveals how the world’s top ten food and beverage companies are failing to protect environmental and human rights defenders caught in the companies' supply chains.
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