Global News and Analysis

Source: In These Times

RADICAL CHANGE CANNOT AND WILL NOT BE NEGOTIATED BY GOVERNMENTS; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public that can link hands across national borders. A public that disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public that has set itself against the governments and institutions that support and service Empire.

Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There’s no country on God’s earth that isn’t caught in the crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the International Monetary Fund checkbook. For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars—losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. read more

Source: Truthout

On Tuesday, May 9, Haymarket Books hosted a conversation between Michelle Alexander and Naomi Klein, moderated by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in front of a sold-out crowd of 3,000 at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. In this, the final part of the transcript of that conversation (lightly edited for length and clarity), the three women discuss movement-building, the need to write “people’s platforms” and not to rely on candidates, and their hopes and fears for resistance to the Trump regime. Read part one here and part two here. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 soared onto bestseller lists, as did Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which also hit TV screens in a storm of publicity.  Zombies, fascists, and predators of every sort are now stalking the American imagination in ever-greater numbers and no wonder, given that guy in the Oval Office. Certainly, 2017 is already offering up a bumper crop of dystopian possibilities and we’ve only reached July. But let me admit one thing: the grim national mood and the dark clouds crowding our skies have actually nudged me in a remarkably positive direction. Surprise of all surprises, Donald Trump is making the corn grow in Connecticut! read more

Source: Jacobin

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention. But don’t worry, it’s not just you: objective confusion seems to have settled over the American media landscape in 2017.

To say that the Overton window — the range of acceptable political discourse — expanded last year is to vastly understate the situation. It would be better to say that rage, spread across a wide spectrum of political ideologies, smashed the window, frame, and mold. As a result, we now live in a conceptual twilight that confounds journalists and citizens alike. read more

Source: The New York Review of Books

Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn’t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s okay.” read more

Source: The Nation

There is no denying it: The last few months have been disastrous for the French left. As the gospel of neoliberalism goes up in flames across the Channel, French voters have handed over the republic to one of its true believers. Not only did they elect Emmanuel Macron as president. But last Sunday, they delivered his newly formed party, La République en Marche (LREM), a parliamentary supermajority, granting him the tools to comfortably enact his business-friendly agenda.

These will be trying times for the French working class, and really anyone concerned with the country’s collective well-being. Macron wants to radically restructure labor law in favor of employers; he wants to enshrine parts of the nation’s ongoing state of emergency into common law; and he wants to lower corporate taxes. Recently distilling his vision in a frightening and cruel tweet—which he wrote in English so it could be shared worldwide—he claimed France should be a “nation that thinks and moves like a start-up.” read more