"More than a Wall" delves into the nitty-gritty of the US border control regime, making accessible statistics and information that will serve campaigners as well as activists and journalists, and interest anybody with an interest in social justice.
Dear friends, if you read one thing today, might as well be this. Follow the link below to access the full statement.
Revolutionary Socialism is the Primary Political Ideology of The Red Nation
Adopted September 6, 2019
“I firmly believe that the philosophy of my ancestors lines up quite tidily with the philosophy of communism. I make no apology for my principles.”
— Lee Maracle
“Socialism is for the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.”
— Fred Hampton
Introduction
A recent opinion piece in Bloomberg makes a concerted effort to paint Mexico as “a moderately prosperous nation,” that “the World Bank calls upper-middle-income.” The thrust of the article is that Trump’s rhetoric on Mexico is wrong, and the country is, in fact, doing pretty alright. While I’m obviously not out to prove Trump right, I do want to correct the record on a few things…
Let’s start with the contention that Mexico is “upper middle income.” In 2019 World Bank ranked 60 countries as upper middle income. These are countries where GNI (Gross National Income, formerly known as GDP or Gross Domestic Product) is between $3,996 and $12,375 per capita (all figures in USD unless otherwise noted). According to the World Bank, Mexican workers earned an average of $9,180 a year, which is the equivalent of approximately $15,000 pesos per month.
Source: The Guardian
This summer, a coalition of award-winning authors came together with a plea to Congress: they called for an end to the inhumane conditions in detention centers, where women are forced to drink out of toilets and children go without food, water or medical care.
The writers, immigrants and refugees themselves, know just what is at stake: “Many of us came to the US as children and shudder to think how this country would treat us now,” they write. They urge Congress to mitigate the worst abuses of our immigration system, from unsafe conditions – in detention or third countries – to endless backlogs and convoluted legal processes.
Source: Maclean’s
In the early 920s AD Ahmad ibn-Fadlan, a chronicler and theologian in the employ of the Abassid Caliphate, was dispatched to Vulga Bulgaria to explain the contours of Islam to a newly converted people. In his manuscripts, ibn-Fadlan described an encounter near the Volga river with a tribe he named the “Rūs” (thought to be a Scandinavian tribe travelling along the trade route), as they conducted a funeral for a departed noble. To complete the ritual, a young enslaved woman was taken by the noble’s family and sacrificed in brutal fashion. Once the sacrifice was completed, the bodies of the slave woman and the dead noble were placed in the boat together, piled with flaming wood, and before long, “wood, girl, and master were no more than ashes and dust.”
Source: Dissent Magazine
The last few years have been a bit of a rollercoaster for the European left. Riding up front has been Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic economist and former Greek finance minister who went to war with the troika—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—in 2015 as it sought to inflict brutal austerity as a penalty for his country’s debts and its decision to elect an openly left-wing government headed by Syriza. They lost that fight, but Varoufakis escaped mostly unscathed. Amid Brexit and a wave of Euroskepticism, he went on to found the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), pushing for a more democratic and inclusive continent, free of austerity. The group mounted several candidates under the mantle of a European Spring this May, including Varoufakis himself. They failed to gain a single seat, though his vote total came in a hundredth of a percentage point below the 3 percent threshold needed to gain representation. While the center-right faltered in May, so, too, did the left.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019