The invasion of Iraq 20 years ago casts a long shadow over today’s neocon attempts to stir up World War III, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.
“The US record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine.
Yet the US never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere.”
"Fernández possesses considerable literary gifts, but this book probably won’t get much mainstream attention. Even as discussion of domestic racism and economic inequality has gone mainstream, even after decades of US war crimes all across the globe, anti-imperialist analysis remains muted, even stigmatized. But if an engaging narrator and lively prose could help change that, Fernández would be that narrator and Inside Siglo XXI would be that book."
"FOR MANY AMERICANS, it is easier to acquire a new car than to find a rental apartment they can afford. But there is a high price, in sheer debt, to pay for getting that ride on the road. The average monthly loan payment for a new vehicle recently passed the $700 mark, a figure that does not include insurance and the steep costs of maintenance. Currently, Americans owe 1.52 trillion dollars in auto debt—a staggering sum that has doubled over the last decade, due in large part to the migration of subprime loans from the housing to the auto market.”
"The background to the war has recently been well-summarized in Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies’ book, “War in Ukraine; Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict” and in Benjamin Abelow’s “How the West Brought War to Ukraine”."
"In CARS AND JAILS, New York-based professors of Social and Cultural Analysis Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross build on this theme, devastatingly undermining the mythology of automobiles as “freedom machines” and foregrounding the irony of tropes like the Buick “Free Spirit”. The book exposes the grim contrast between images of freedom and the reality of a society in which decaying or non-existent public transport creates auto-necessity that drags working people deeper into debt and, especially for people of colour, exposes them to the hazards of pretextual police traffic stops for “driving while Black”."
On the anniversary of Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine, the media coverage of this war reaffirms the old adage that the first casualty of war is the truth. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies argue that renewed peace talks, not escalatory arms shipments, are crucial to end the bloodshed.
"The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones. But also in the losing column are working and poor people everywhere, especially in the countries in the Global South that are most dependent on imported food and energy. Last but not least is the Earth, its atmosphere and its climate—all sacrificed to the God of War."
"Between 2017 and November 2022, 730 people were killed by police during these incidents. More than once a week during that time, someone not being pursued or investigated for a violent crime met their death after a traffic stop. An alarming number were stopped on the pretext of any one of a hundred or more petty traffic code violations.
How did police achieve the power, and impunity, to stop motorists seemingly at will?"
"Brief, judicious and well-written, this is an excellent primer for western peace activists or anyone else concerned about ending the carnage in Ukraine."
“This book is very courageous… It’s very rare that you have the voices of actual working people directly put out into the press and shared with the world.” —Krystal Ball, Breaking PointsWatch the full interview here.
“We need a public alternative which can be democratically controlled… so that we can be guaranteed that it’s a just transition which saves not just frontline communities but also the working class, more broadly.”Watch the full interview here.
"Mike Davis is the most consequential writer and thinker on Los Angeles since… perhaps ever. But his work roams far beyond Los Angeles, including popular and scholarly work on environmentalism, Marxist theory, urbanism and public health. He is also conversant in 'hard' sciences like geology, and can read specialized literature in fire science and climatology. Over the years he’s blurred the lines between these disparate fields. He braids them together with an indefatigable faith in a revolutionary project: nothing less than the liberation of humanity from human exploitation, which today also requires the end of humanity’s malevolent exploitation of the natural world.His faith in revolution is historically situated, pointing toward a string of moments in which 'utopian' visions have flourished in the here and now, before crumbling under the weight of counterrevolutionary forces and internal contradictions, only to be taken up again. There have been large-scale experiments such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Republic, and countless small-scale ones, like Christian Base Communities in 1980s rural Central America. Mike tells us that the future must be 'excavated in the past,' rescued from under the ruins of reaction...At the core of Mike’s work is how he values the dignity of life itself — lived as equitable, healthy, sustainable. And not just human life. He identifies class struggle as the primary engine of modern human history, and he is also an environmentalist because capitalist exploitation violates not only the bodies of workers but the Earth itself."
“The US advertises itself as being at the vanguard of global ‘development’, but the nation’s healthcare, poverty and other indicators suggest a policy of willful counterdevelopment instead… Such is the ironic nature of imperial power, it seems, that the global hegemon responsible for oppressing much of the third world must also keep a significant portion of its own populace in third-world conditions.”
“Right now, the major railroad companies and 13 different unions representing over 115,000 railroad workers have reached an impasse in contract negotiations that have been going on for years, and we are now closer to a national rail shutdown than we’ve been in a generation. President Biden has even appointed an Emergency Presidential Board to try to mediate between the rail unions and the rail carriers, but if that mediation fails we’ll be on the verge of a historic shutdown.So, how did we get here? If you talk to any railroader in private, you’ll get an earful about how decades of corporate greed, consolidation, cost cutting, automation, layoffs, and other profit-maximizing, shareholder-serving decisions have upended the railroads and turned what used to be good lifelong jobs into exhausting, impossible jobs that veteran workers are leaving in droves. But if any workers speak up publicly about what’s going on on the railroads, they will likely face severe consequences.Luckily, we were able to connect with Jay, a qualified conductor who was licensed to operate locomotives at 19 years old, and who became a qualified train dispatcher before he was 23. We talk about Jay’s life, how he came to work at the railroads, and what the job of a train dispatcher entails, but we also talk about how the industry has changed in recent decades, the havoc those changes have wreaked on workers and the supply chain, and why we should all be concerned about the crisis the railroads are in right now."
Listen to the full episode here, and pick up a copy of THE WORK OF LIVING here.
“The publisher has previously responded unconventionally to writers leaving, like when [Hamish] McKenzie wrote a 4,500-word acknowledgement in June of writer Luke O’Neil’s departure—what [Spencer] Ackerman called a ‘Drake album’ due to its deeply reflective, even intrusive, feel.”