TuNur in Tunisia: Another case of energy colonialism

by Hamza Hamouchene

Pambazuka News | September 07, 2017

A familiar ‘colonial’ scheme is being rolled out: the unrestricted flow of cheap natural resources from the Global South to the rich North, maintaining a profoundly unjust international division of labour. While fortress Europe builds walls and fences to prevent human beings from reaching its shores for sanctuary, it accepts no barriers to resource grabs.

When we hear news about renewable energy projects, one must be forgiven for thinking that it’s all beautiful and shiny. But scratching a little bit beneath the surface of this language of “cleanliness,” “shininess” and “carbon emission cuts” reveals another picture, a picture of big capital robbing land and resource rights from the Global South in order to safeguard energy security of the Global North.

Food sovereignty in rebellion: The Zapatista Solution

by Levi Gahman

Solutions Journal | Volume 7 | Issue 4 | Page 77-83 | July 2016

The battle for humanity and against neoliberalism was and is ours,

And also that of many others from below.

Against death––We demand life.

Subcomandante Galeano/Marcos

 

One of the biggest threats to food security the world currently faces is neoliberalism. It’s logic, which has become status quo over the past 70 years and valorizes global ‘free market’ capitalism, is made manifest through economic policies that facilitate privatization, deregulation, and cuts to social spending, as well as a discourse that promotes competition, individualism, and self-commodification. Despite rarely being criticized, or even mentioned, by state officials and mainstream media, neoliberal programs and practices continue to give rise to unprecedented levels of poverty, hunger, and suffering. The consequences of neoliberalism are so acutely visceral that the Zapatistas called the 21st century’s most highly lauded free-trade policy, NAFTA, a ‘death certificate’ for Indigenous people.¹ This is because economic liberalization meant that imported commodities (e.g., subsidized corn from the U.S.) would flood Mexican markets, devalue the products of peasant farmers, and lead to widespread food insecurity. As a response, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), primarily Indigenous peasants themselves, led an armed insurrection in Chiapas, Mexico on January 1, 1994—the day NAFTA went into effect.

Red masquerade: Helping the FBI take down the Communist Party

by LOWELL B. DENNY, III

People’s World | August 31, 2017

Poster for the 1949 Cold War propaganda film, The Red Menace. | Wikimedia Commons

In Dorothy Healey’s memoir, California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party, she reflected on the 1949 Foley Square Trial in which the federal government targeted the leadership of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) under the Smith Act for supposedly advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Healey wrote:

“One of the most depressing aspects of the trial was that unlike the great political cases of the 20s and 30s, like that of Sacco and Vanzetti or of the Scottsboro Boys, or even the hearings of the Hollywood Ten in 1947, there was almost no public outcry. Liberals were divided, demoralized, or worse yet, in some instances enlisting on the side of our prosecutors… [A]s the 50s began, it seemed to us we were on our own.”

Review – Che, My Brother

by ANTONI KAPCIA

E-INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | April 08, 2017

Che, My Brother
by Juan Martin Guevara and Armelle Vincent
 Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, & Malden, MA, 2017

This book is a surprisingly valuable addition to a somewhat variable literature on Che Guevara. That surprise comes from the fact that, with one or two prominent exceptions (Jon Lee Anderson’s fine biography, Andrew Sinclair’s excellent political study in the long-lamented Fintana Modern Masters series published in 1970, and, more recently, Helen Yaffe’s study of Che as the prosaic-sounding Minister of the Economy in the early 1960s), much that is written on him tends to be either hagiography or polemic, romanticisation or sensationalism. Given that this account is written by Guevara’s (much) younger brother, we can be forgiven for fearing the worst: will it be either a warts-and-all ‘inside’ story or (worse still) a vicarious exercise in publicity-seeking?