Page 404 – Toward Freedom

Why Brazil’s World Cup Protesters Are So Furious

Dave Zirin June 17, 2014 Dave Zirin

Excerpted from Dave Zirin’s Brazil’s Dance With the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics and the Fight for Democracy (May 2014, Haymarket Books).

When Brazil won its bid to host the 2016 Olympics, the country was heralded as a capitalist success story, with the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other organs of the 1% engorged over a nation whose stock market, Bovespa, had grown at a rate of 523 percent over the previous decade. For so many in Brazil, this was long overdue. Hosting these sporting events was about international recognition that Brazil’s day had come. read more

The Geopolitics of Jihadistan: Regional Chaos May Bring Iran and Saudi Arabia Together

Immanuel Wallerstein June 17, 2014 Immanuel Wallerstein

The regimes in both Saudi Arabia and Iran are worried about their survival amidst the growing disintegration of the Middle East. Continuing on their present course is not likely to help them survive.

Raising Hope Across Borders: Transnational Social Movements and Power

Gerardo Cerdas and Beverly Bell June 17, 2014 Gerardo Cerdas and Beverly Bell

It’s important to overcome borders and make a transnational movement because the root causes of injustices, of exclusion, of the violence and discrimination we face are the same. They are systemic issues. They are global issues.

Haiti’s Chief Foreign Import: Meddling

Nathalie Baptiste June 16, 2014 Nathalie Baptiste

In late April,thousands took to the streetsin Haiti’s capital city demanding the resignation of President Michel Martelly, who had come to office in 2011 through fiercely disputed elections.They also called for the departure of the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), a decade-old peacekeeping force that stations 9,000foreign troops in the country.

Iraq crisis: Sunni caliphate has been bankrolled by Saudi Arabia

Robert Fisk June 16, 2014 Robert Fisk

Source: The Independent

Bush and Blair said Iraq was a war on Islamic fascism. They lost

So after the grotesquerie of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 suicide killers of 9/11, meet Saudi Arabia’s latest monstrous contribution to world history: the Islamist Sunni caliphate of Iraq and the Levant, conquerors of Mosul and Tikrit – and Raqqa in Syria – and possibly Baghdad, and the ultimate humiliators of Bush and Obama.

From Aleppo in northern Syria almost to the Iraqi-Iranian border, the jihadists of Isis and sundry other groupuscules paid by the Saudi Wahhabis – and by Kuwaiti oligarchs – now rule thousands of square miles. read more

Capitalism’s Bullets in Latin America: Invisible Empires, State Power and 21st Century Colonialism

Benjamin Dangl June 13, 2014 Benjamin Dangl

The US is infamous for its imperial history in the region. But Washington isn’t the only empire in its backyard. Global and local forces of capitalism, imperialism and modern-day colonialism are at work across Latin America, from soccer stadiums to copper mines.