Top Menu

Beyond enthusiasm for an imagined anti-capitalism (Los Angeles Review of Books reviews “Can the Working Class Change the World?”)

It is with this attentiveness to the historic shortcomings and duplicity of left organizations that Yates rejects so-called democratic socialism, which even in its heyday failed to fundamentally challenge capitalism. Setting our sights on the mere (and, as history shows, inevitably temporary) reform of a fundamentally exploitative system instead reflects a colossal failure of imagination akin to the prisoner who spends all his energy advocating for a larger window in his cell… | more…

Listen: Why the right attacks Critical Race Theory, without even knowing what it is (“The Analysis” brings Gerald Horne back for an interview)

It’s a set of loose propositions that fundamentally come down to this. If you look at the overrepresentation of black Americans in prisons or the overrepresentation in terms of being suspended from schools K through 12, you can come to one or two conclusions. You can come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with black people, or you can come to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with society…. | more…

Repeated attempts at a coup in Venezuela have failed, an an extraordinary cost (EXCERPT: Extraordinary Threat)

“…In 2018, Venezuela was only able to import $11.7 billion in goods, according to Torino Capital. The impact on medicine imports was especially destructive. According to U.S. economist Mark Weisbrot, while its economy was still growing in 2013, Venezuela was importing about $2 billion per year in medicine. By 2018, that amount had fallen to an astonishing low of $140 million—an especially horrifying development because medicines are much more difficult to substitute with local production than food. It is impossible to deny that a collapse in medicine imports has killed thousands of people between 2017 and 2018, as Mark Weisbrot and U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs argued in a paper published in April 2019. Weisbrot and Sachs cite a 31 percent increase in general mortality in the 2017–2018 period, according to a survey by anti-Maduro Venezuelan academics. That increase works out to an extra forty thousand deaths….” | more…

The Venezuelan microcosm: A U.S. propaganda apparatus at work (Black Agenda Report interviews coauthors of forthcoming book, “Extraordinary Threat”)

Never “underestimate the need to be extremely careful in assessing governments that the US government vilifies; and to never underestimate how convincing, formidable and dishonest the propaganda apparatus is that supports US imperialism….Moreover, we hope they realize that the allegations, even if true, can rarely justify war or the kinds of economic sanctions the US has imposed on Venezuela, which are essentially criminal acts of war….” | more…

Watch: One of the things Chavez and Maduro did right (The Orinoco Tribune interviews coauthors of “Extraordinary Threat”)

“That to me is the lesson: The other side is not looking to sit in a room and come up with a powersharing arrangement, the other side is looking to kill you, massacre you, get as many of you in jail as possible, and destroy everything that you’ve accomplished… what I’m saying here is that if you look at what they did right, it has to do with not underestimating the depravity of the opposition….” | more…