F. Left News

Today, some organizers are too young to remember the outbreak of the Iraq War, representing an entirely new generation of the anti-war movement. Delaney Leonard, a 19-year-old in her first year of college and a member of the Howard University Dissenters, an anti-war group at a historically Black university, cannot recall a time in her life when the US wasn’t at war. She will be part of the demonstration Saturday because “the effects of billions of dollars being taken away from crucial sectors of our country such as education, healthcare, or housing has been intrinsic to my youth.”

The post 20 Years After Start Of The Iraq War, Peace Movement Protests Another War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Today the Free Alex Saab Movement makes an urgent call to the world to denounce the alarming health condition of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, which endangers his life.

In July 2021, the Working Group against Torture and several UN rapporteurs expressed their concern about the irreparable deterioration of Alex Saab's health condition.

Let us recall that in Cape Verde, on July 7, 2021, after many refusals, Alex Saab was visited by his family doctor, who in his report detected a worrying health condition of the Venezuelan official, especially because Saab is a stomach cancer survivor.

The post Urgent: Imprisoned Diplomat Alex Saab’s Life Is In Danger appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

On Sept. 26, 2022, a series of explosions rocked the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Denmark. Danish and Swedish authorities quickly determined that the damage done to the pipelines was not caused by earthquakes or other seismic activity, but by “blasts.” The pipelines were a crucial part of Europe’s energy infrastructure, delivering billions of cubic meters of gas from Russia. Over 500,000 tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 80x more damaging for the climate than carbon dioxide, were released from the explosions in the largest ever recorded single methane leak in human history.

The post Chris Hedges Report: Did The US Navy Destroy The Nord Stream Pipelines? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

As hundreds of thousands throughout Israel joined anti-government protests, questions began to arise regarding how this movement would affect, or possibly merge, into the broader struggle against the Israeli military occupation and apartheid in Palestine.

Pro-Palestine media outlets shared, with obvious excitement, news about statements made by Hollywood celebrities, like Mark Ruffalo, about the need to “sanction the new hard rightwing government of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu.”

Netanyahu, who sits at the heart of the current controversy and mass protests, struggled to find a single pilot for the flight carrying him to Rome on March 9 for a three-day visit with the Italian government.

The post Israel Protests Should Not Be Confused With Palestinian Struggle For Equality appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

History’s wheel turned last Friday, when Iranian and Saudi Arabian officials agreed in Beijing to re-establish their bilateral diplomatic relations, which Riyadh severed seven years ago. Reflecting on this momentous development over the weekend, I’ll put it up there with the American defeat in Vietnam, April 1975, for its magnitude. The world we live in this week is not the same as the world we lived in last week.

With the stroke of a pen—three pens, actually—China, the Islamic Republic, and the Saudi kingdom have altered the fundamental dynamic of global politics. The two Middle Eastern powers have transcended the historic and often vicious divide between Sunni and Shi'a Islam.

The post China’s Great Leap In The Middle East appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

The government of Honduras has announced that it is breaking formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and recognizing the People’s Republic of China.

Honduras’ leftist President Xiomara Castro had pledged during her 2021 campaign that, if she won the election, she would recognize China. This March, she fulfilled that promise.

This means that just 12 United Nations member states have formal diplomatic relations with the so-called “Republic of China” on the island of Taiwan.

The other 99.51% of the global population live in countries that formally recognize that there is only one China, and that Taiwan is a province of the People’s Republic of China.

The post Taiwan Separatists Lose Key Ally, Honduras Recognizes China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

A coalition of trade unions in Haiti recently published  the “Ouanaminthe Declaration.” This followed a two-day gathering by members of The Confederation of Haitian Workers (La Confédération des travailleurs haïtiens - CTH) and the Confederation of Public and Private Sector Workers (la Confédération des travailleurs et travailleuses des secteurs public et privé - CTSP).

The gathering was held in Ouanaminthe, Haiti. Located near the Dominican-Haitian border, on January 25 and 26, 2023.

The declaration was drafted a few days after the announcement of de facto PM Ariel Henry’s “December 21 Accord” - the National Consensus for an Inclusive Transition and Transparent Elections. It is a tacit rejection of Henry’s coalition.

The post Renewed Calls For International Solidarity From Haiti appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Remember Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer Trump put in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)? When he gutted net neutrality rules and kneecapped the agency’s ability to regulate telecom monopolies, voters from across the political spectrum were outraged. The internet erupted in protest.

Millions of people from across the political spectrum called their elected officials and submitted comments to the FCC, and thousands took to the streets. It was a rare moment of genuinely popular public revolt that defied partisan DC logic. If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that we don’t want our cable or phone company screwing us over more than they already do, selling our browsing habits and real-time location to advertisers, or dictating what websites we can visit or which apps we use.

The post Action Alert: Trump Rules Remain At FCC As Democrats Cave To Big Cable appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

The machine will churn no more. Nearly 80 years of top-down one-party rule in the United Auto Workers are coming to an end. Reformer Shawn Fain is set to be the winner in the runoff for the UAW presidency.

As of Thursday night, Fain had a 505-vote edge, 69,386 to 68,881, over incumbent Ray Curry of the Administration Caucus. Curry was appointed by the union’s executive board in 2021. There are around 600 unresolved challenged ballots. (This story will be updated with the final vote tally when we have it.)

“By now, the writing is on the wall: change is coming to the UAW,” said Fain. “You, the members, have already made history in this election, and we’re just getting started. It’s a new day in the UAW.”

The post It’s A New Day In The United Auto Workers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Los Angeles, California - On Wednesday March 15, tens of thousands of teachers and education workers rallied at the steps of Los Angeles City Hall.  The joint rally of K-12 teachers (UTLA) and education support staff (SEIU 99) was organized to announce plans for both unions to go on strike, with SEIU 99 taking the lead in the fight for better wages, improved staff to student ratios, and an end to harassment by administrators. The mood was lively, with a mariachi band made up of teachers playing for the crowd, teachers and support staff dancing to the music, and pockets of teachers and education workers striking up impromptu chants and banging on homemade drums.

The post Teachers And Education Workers Set To Strike! appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley gave a rip-roaring speech to the party faithful in Edmonton Saturday, but a consensus is emerging among the commentariat and many voters that the Opposition party’s communications strategy is failing and time is short to fix it. 

The same day, veteran political commentator Charles Adler, a conservative who has grown disillusioned with the extremist direction taken by Canada’s conservative parties in recent years, took to social media to note polls predicting a United Conservative Party (UCP) majority in Alberta’s May election are probably right. 

“No surprise,” Adler observed tartly. “Danielle Smith’s comms team ruthless & relentless. Rachel Notley’s comms team Lugubrious & Lethargic.”

It may have been a surprise to some readers that a frustrated Brian Mason, leader of the Alberta NDP from 2004 to 2014, immediately noted his agreement. 

“I couldn’t agree more,” Mason tweeted soon after. “If the NDP doesn’t up its comms game immediately, they will lose the election in May. There’s too much at stake to keep fumbling around. Clearly, they need outside help.” (It was Mason who said that, by the way, although he has been reduced to tweeting from @bmasonNDP2 since encountering problems with his original @bmasonNDP Twitter account a few weeks ago.)

“I don’t think there’s a coherent NDP communications strategy,” Mason told me from his retirement home in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. “I’m getting very nervous. They’re showing no signs of an effective communications strategy in the lead-up to the election.”

“You have to define your opponent clearly,” he added, noting that the UCP’s communications staff has been quite successful at putting most of the truly outrageous statements by Premier Smith behind them. 

READ MORE: Notley vows reinvestment in health and education in nomination speech

By contrast, Mason said, “Rachel is one of the NDP’s best assets. She is seen as competent and is well liked. Contrasting her with Smith, who is seen as more extreme and increasingly dishonest, is an obvious comms tactic.

“I’d like the NDP to hit that one hard,” said Mason.

But “the NDP’s focus is all over the place,” Mason continued. “They need to define three or four issues that will move the vote we need to move, and hammer them home repeatedly.”

An example, perhaps, is the “A Better Future for Alberta” signs hoisted by party supporters at Notley’s nomination meeting in Edmonton Saturday.

Readers will recall that Jason Kenney’s successful slogan – “Jobs, Economy, Pipelines” – was repeated relentlessly. As a political message it was powerful and effective, at once defining the newly created UCP as being for those things, and by false but persuasive implication, the NDP as against them, or at least hopelessly ineffective at making progress on those files. 

So, it’s said here, that “Jobs, Healthcare, Education,” would be a more effective NDP catchphrase than “A Better Future,” better though the future might be under Notley’s leadership. 

Read the comments on yesterday’s post on this blog, and you’ll see the same thoughts are in the minds of AlbertaPolitics.ca readers.

“As an NDP supporter I am underwhelmed by what I have seen so far in the party’s public offerings,” says one comment. “To me, the NDP is in a fight for its life as a party and for the future of the province. I find their communications and their strategies so far uninspiring and low key.”

Says another: “At the moment, the worst issue facing Notley and the NDP is themselves. The messaging seems to be off. … None have hammered home the reality that Smith intends to withdraw every single spending initiative (the UCP) reluctantly presented in their last budget.”

Not only is the NDP’s milquetoast messaging coming under fire for its lack of fire, but despite the party’s $7.2-million war chest from record-breaking donations it’s been slow off the mark with the tough campaign required for a non-conservative party to win against Alberta’s skewed electoral math, where conservative rural ridings hold disproportionate power. 

“The whole idea you can wait till the writ dropped to spend any money makes no sense to me,” Mason told me. “You really have to start early!”

“You need to start well before the official campaign to convince people of what your message is,” he explained, and despite raising more money than it ever has before, the NDP has been keeping its powder dry even though the shooting from the other side has already started, setting the UCP’s narrative in the minds of many voters. 

Former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, a fierce NDP opponent during the 14 years he was MLA for Edmonton-Castle Downs, shares Mason’s fears about the damage Premier Smith will do to Alberta if she is given a four-year mandate. 

Lukaszuk said he believes many Progressive Conservatives like himself can be persuaded to vote for the NDP because the prospect of four years of Danielle Smith as premier is so dire, and because NDP Leader Rachel Notley was “a very pragmatic premier” between 2015 and 2019.

Out of politics since he was defeated by the NDP’s Nicole Goehring in 2015, Lukaszuk says “I think I am not the only PC looking at this election knowing there are only two options. And PCs willing to be objective will have a hard time voting for the UCP.”

But to win over those Progressive Conservative voters, Mason’s former rival told me, “the NDP really needs to lay out its policy and convince voters that they are the rational choice.”

“The NDP needs to have a professionally managed communications campaign that personalizes their policies and shows Albertans what the impact of their policies versus UCP policies would be.”

And that needs to start now, he added. “I don’t think it’s too late, although it’s getting to be extremely late.”

Whether many other Progressive Conservatives are willing to publicly back the pragmatic leadership of Notley, as Lukaszuk hopes, remains to be seen. 

The post Growing calls for Alta. NDP to pursue tougher communications strategy appeared first on rabble.ca.

Home. What does it mean to you?

If you have the opportunity, pick up any child’s book and it will tell you the answer. Or consider the words of this young boy in the film Home Safe Toronto who told Miloon Kothari, the UN Rapporteur on Adequate Housing what home means to him:

“When you have a home, it’s exactly like a protection, sort of like a force field from stuff that are dangerous. So, sometimes, when you are homeless…if you know that you’re getting a decent home and you’re going there soon, you kind of get overwhelmed with happiness and that’s what a lot of people want now.”

There are two indisputable rights related to home.

One is that there is a right to housing. The second is that, should personal, environmental, or economic crisis take away your right to housing, you have the right to safe and adequate emergency shelter.

In the academic and intelligentsia world of people and organizations committed to ‘housing for all’ there is a well-developed strategic push to a rights-based approach to housing.

The Advocacy Centre for Tenants in Ontario (ACTO) is a case in point.

“The right to housing is more than simply the right to shelter. Housing is not a commodity. It is a fundamental human right. Everyone should have a right to safe, adequate, and affordable housing,” reads a statement from ACTO.

ACTO’s advocacy has included global work. In 2016 they travelled to Geneva where lawyer Kenneth Hale and Michael Creek, a prominent advocate with lived experience, made the case to the UN Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights on the urgent need for justice on the crisis of homelessness in Canada and the need for the state to recognize housing as a human right.

On the national front ACTO led a group of applicants and served a legal notice on the provincial and federal governments. Their 10,000 pages of evidence demonstrated that governments’ action and inaction violated not only several international treaties and covenants to which Canada is a party, but also violated two sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: section 7, the right to life, liberty and security, and section 15, the right not to be discriminated against on the basis, among others, of race, gender, family status and physical or mental disability.

The case was crushed when the Ontario Superior Court dismissed their Charter challenge in 2013.

ACTO continues to fight locally for this right utilizing public forums, rallies, submissions to government bodies, a coroners’ inquest, even joining legal action against the City of Toronto during the pandemic.

There are notable steps forward in the campaign for a right to housing thanks to the work of ACTO and people like David Hulchanski, Bruce Porter, Leilani Farha and Emily Paradis among others.

In 2017 the federal government announced a national housing strategy.

In 2019 Bill C-97 passed the National Housing Strategy Act which includes the right to housing in law.

In February 2022 the federal government appointed Marie-Josée Houle as the country’s first Federal Housing Advocate.

You will have noticed there has not exactly been a building boom in social housing.

Five years in the federal Auditor General reported numerous problems with the National Housing Strategy including the construction of non-affordable rental housing and minimal accountability to reduce chronic homelessness 50 per cent by the 2027–28 fiscal year.

The second right, the right for shelter has been a long and brutal struggle bookmarked by the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee’s (TDRC) declaration that homelessness was a national disaster in 1998 and memorial services held across the country. While not named as a rights-based campaign, it inherently has been exactly that.

Along with TDRC, groups like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Le Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU) and city-based networks in Edmonton, Vancouver, Halifax, and Ottawa waged robust and passionate campaigns for shelter. These included inquiries, rallies and marches, testimony to government bodies, occupations, even civil disobedience such as bringing housing into Tent City in Toronto.

In the absence of a national housing program (as opposed to ‘strategy’), homelessness has reached the level of a public health emergency across the country.

Toronto’s Board of Health passed a motion to declare homelessness a public health emergency and open additional 24/7 respite centres. However, the effort was defeated at City Council on what was the last day of John Tory’s reign as mayor.

There is no right to shelter, in law or municipal practice in Canada.

Even a global pandemic did not motivate a response from federal, provincial, or municipal governments to provide funding to fast-track people from shelter or outdoors into safe housing. Instead, there were dribbles of federal money through the Rapid Housing Initiative that resulted in modular housing units, which mostly ghettoize unhoused people.

Furthering concerns about the use of National Housing Strategy dollars, Gaetan Heroux has written in rabble about at least one questionable use of federal COVID housing funds to purchase a building from a developer.

The pandemic laid bare municipal governments’ intransigence by refusing to provide the most basic public health measures for those displaced by eviction or full shelters: public washrooms, fountains turned on in parks, water delivery and garbage pick-up at encampments. Beyond pure neglect was the vile and violent nature of encampment evictions by city officials, unionized civic employees and police in multiple jurisdictions. We all live in Displacement City.

Archaic shelter practices worsened and dehumanized people including seniors, people with disabilities, women, trans individuals, and families with children: bunk beds for 50–60-year-olds (as if they are at camp), families with children forced to sleep in program offices in shelters (and remember for a long period of time in the pandemic schools were closed), no gender separation or privacy in congregate settings. The list goes on.

The ’regular’ shelter system remains inadequately resourced and archaic. A second and lower tier of shelter, or respites that are usually congregate spaces, does not meet UN Standards for Refugee Camps. A third tier, the warming and cooling centres are unambitious efforts that purport to provide shelter. Toronto is poised to bring the volunteer faith based Out of the Cold program (shuttered during the pandemic) back, lowering the bar further – a perfect example of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine metaphor.

The recent campaign in Toronto for more 24/7 respite sites further exposed the malevolence of both politicians, six figure bureaucrats and a super-powered mayor.

The evidence of need is overwhelming: shelters running at 99 per cent capacity, over 100 people per day turned away by the city’s intake line, hundreds living in encampments, warming centres operating at capacity, displaced people seeking refuge in emergency rooms or on public transit.

Everyone can see the problem. It’s a post-apocalyptic scene.

The biggest mobilization of citizens I’ve ever witnessed on this issue took place when emergency room doctors spoke out, thousands of people signed petitions, a faith-based social justice group Stone Soup Network was born and city council chambers were filled for budget day with an organically boisterous crowd.

While Toronto city council voted homelessness was not a public health emergency and there was no need for an additional 24/7 respite, the mobilization forced city council to include funds in the budget for a 24/7 site which is now operating, albeit in an inadequate facility at Metro Hall, the former seat of Metro government. It has no showers, no special comforting amenities. It’s just a room and some cots and it is full.

Over 20 years ago, when I was particularly crushed by the news of yet another homeless person’s death, I spoke to TV reporters at Metro Hall and without thinking said “What do we have to do to get action, bring the body here?”

I was reminded of that when I watched the movie Till, based on the true story of the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi. In the film, Mamie Till-Bradley displays the mutilated body of her murdered son Emmett to the media and public to show the truth and the hate of racism that had killed her son.

20 years later Canada’s policy disgrace of homelessness and housing is visible to all.

Many call that social murder.

I repeat: What do we have to do to get action?

Writer Larry Scanlan answers that question in an op-ed he wrote: “The simple fact is that more of us have to care about the suffering of others for these catastrophic circumstances to change. Where is the groundswell of outrage and anger, the holding of politicians’ feet to the fire?”

The post The federal budget has to fund housing and shelter rights appeared first on rabble.ca.

Jagmeet Singh was tough when he grilled Loblaw CEO Galen Weston III on Wednesday March 8. 

But the New Democratic leader allowed Weston to slip away from one key accusation, to wit, that Loblaw made excess profits of a million dollars per day in 2022.

The key word here is excess. Singh said he got the word and the figure of $1,000,000 from the work of “a professor.” 

Weston pushed back. He “disagreed” with “the professor.” And that was that.

Loblaw’s Weston was appearing before a House of Commons committee to answer questions on food inflation. 

The committee had invited Weston and the heads of two other companies, Empire (which owns the Sobeys chain among other properties) and Metro, to answer questions about food inflation. 

Together with Loblaw, the three corporations dominate the food retail market in Canada.

Members of parliament on the committee suspect those dominant players have driven food costs for Canadian consumers beyond the increases wrought by supply chain disruptions and other factors outside their control. 

Singh sat in for the NDP’s member of the committee, British Columbia MP Alistair McLeod, and chose to focus his attention exclusively on Weston. 

Loblaw is the largest and most profitable of the three companies.

The New Democratic leader kept asking Weston how much profit was “enough,” at a time when many Canadians have trouble paying inflated prices for food.

The Loblaw chief insisted his company’s big profits are not, mostly, a result of food prices. Rather, he argued, Loblaw owes its handsome profits to a spike in prices for pharmaceutical products and other goods and services it offers, such as banking. 

Moreover, Weston added, the profit on what he called a $25-dollar basket of groceries is a mere $1. 

A buck out of $25 doesn’t sound like much, when you put it that way. But it sounds like a lot more when you re-define that one dollar as a four-per-cent profit margin.

Four per cent is not too shabby for a high-volume industry such as grocery retail. 

One economist told this writer he was surprised to learn Loblaw’s profit margin is so high. He had thought it was more in the one-per-cent range.

READ MORE: Economist debunks supermarkets’ claim they’re not profiting from food inflation

Research by respected, non-partisan experts

The unnamed professor to whom Jagmeet Singh referred when questioning Weston is Sylvain Charlebois, an oft-quoted expert who heads the Agri-Food Laboratory at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

And the million-dollar-per-day excess profit number the New Democratic leader cited comes from a study Charlebois co-authored with his colleague Samantha Taylor: “Canadian Grocers – Measuring Greed in the Era of Consumer Distrust.”

The two authors point out that all three grocery chains earned record profits in the first half of 2022, but Loblaw’s were by far the biggest: $436 million. That profit outperformed Loblaw’s best profit of the past five years by a considerable margin, $180 million. 

There are just about 180 days in a half-year period. And so, Charlebois and Taylor were accurate when they concluded the profit-in-excess-of-the-previous-high Loblaw realized in 2022 amounted to, wait for it – $1 million per day.

The Dalhousie researchers note that Loblaw’s quarterly total revenue for 2022 was a whopping $12.9 billion. In that light, a mere million per day in excess profit might not sound like much. 

Weston made allusion to his company’s high volume and total sales in his verbal fencing match with Jagmeet Singh, until he switched gears in frustration and decided to dispute the NDP leader’s figures.

In their study, Charlebois and Taylor also deal with Weston’s claim that his company’s profits are mostly from non-food items and services, by examining Loblaw’s financial statements.

The two authors point out that in Canada publicly listed companies such as Loblaw must report their finances according to a set of rules known as the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). 

IFRS rule 8.2 states that in their reports companies may lump together their various activities as long as those “operating segments” have “similar economic characteristics”. 

The IFRS definition of similar, Charlebois and Taylor explain, isn’t vague and open-ended. It is narrow and strict. 

The IFRS stipulates that the various segments of a company must be similar in all respects, which include “the nature of the products, services and production processes, as well as the methods used to distribute the products or provide the services.”

Loblaw chooses to report financial results for all of the products and services it sells in aggregate or bundled form. The company does not report food profits separately from cosmetic or other non-food profits.

Charlebois and Taylor are dubious about this practice, which, they say, quite likely defies IFRS rules:

“We find it interesting that Loblaws can justify food and non-food (healthy, beauty, apparel, and other general merchandise) as a combined operating segment … It is unclear how food retail and drug retail are similar in nature, sales or production.”

Over to the Competition Bureau

So far, no government agency has required of Loblaw that it more scrupulously respect financial reporting standards. The federal Competition Bureau is now looking into multiple aspects of the retail food industry and it might impose such a requirement in the future.

The Bureau will also be interested in the degree to which the three retail behemoths, which sell 80 per cent of grocery products in Canada, collude to control the market. 

One MP on the House committee noted that all three companies had decided on the very same day to end so-called hero pay for employees who had worked through the darkest days of pandemic restrictions.

That looked like collusion to the MP, but the CEOs all said they had reached that decision independently. The Competition Bureau will no doubt take note.

As for food prices, Charlebois and Taylor conclude that they simply lack adequate data to determine the precise extent to which Canadians are paying more for food as a result of the retail giants’ – especially Loblaw’s – excess profits. 

Here’s how the two experts put it: 

“We based our analysis on publicly available data, aggregated such that we will likely never be able to prove or disprove Greedflation amongst Canadian grocers. This will remain the case until they are willing to open their books for additional analysis … We conclude that based on the performance of their gross profit, Loblaw Companies Limited are outperforming even their best gross profit performance in recent years. At the same time, many Canadians face tremendous financial hardship attempting to satisfy their basic needs of heat, shelter, and food.”

It is a pity NDP leader Singh did not haul out this report when Loblaw’s Weston tried to gaslight him and his fellow MPs by dismissing the accurate numbers the NDPer had cited.

The post Loblaw CEO gaslights House committee on excess profits appeared first on rabble.ca.

US aggression toward China is escalating and China is shedding its usual restraint to more clearly call out this aggression and warn the US not to overstep its red lines. Clearing the FOG speaks with K. J. Noh, an activist, journalist and scholar on the geopolitics of the Asian continent. He discusses the renewed belligerence of South Korea under the President Yoon Suk-yeol, the increasing militarization of Japan, shifting alliances in Western Asia and how China, including Taiwan, is responding. Noh also speaks about efforts in the United States to prepare for a war against China and how that is increasing violence against Asian Americans, as well as what we can do to prevent what would be a catastrophic conflict.

The post How The United States Is Preparing For Imminent War With China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

The breakup of banks that is now occurring in the United States is the inevitable result of the way in which the Obama administration bailed out the banks in 2008.

When real estate prices collapsed, the Federal Reserve flooded the financial system with 15 years of quantitative easing (QE) to re-inflate real estate prices – and with them, stock and bond prices.

What was inflated were asset prices, above all for the packaged mortgages that banks were holding, but also for stocks and bonds across the board. That is what bank credit does.

This made trillions of dollars for holders of financial assets – the One Percent and a bit more.

The post Why The US Banking System Is Breaking Up appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

The US can’t seem to understand that the rest of the world, including Africa, doesn’t like to be pushed around. African nations’ refusal to reinforce US foreign policy in the UN General Assembly is a case in point.  During the Assembly’s February 16 vote on a resolution “deploring” Russia’s action in Ukraine, nearly half the nations who abstained were African, 15 of the 32 , although only 54 of the UN’s 193 member nations are African. Those abstaining  were Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Sudan, Togo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

The post US Shoots Itself In The Foot In Africa appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

With his arrival, Chávez broke 40 years of a corrupt system and established a participatory and protagonistic democracy that went beyond electoral processes. This has allowed for people to take power by organizing for social, economic, political and educational purposes. Today, plenty of popular organizations self-govern over their land, resources and production.

Driven by his desire to build another society where the basic aspects of human life are not commodified, the revolutionary leader launched a myriad of economic and social policies to democratize healthcare, food, housing, and access to technology, sports, and even culture. The renowned social mission were at the heart of this battle.

The post Hugo Chávez And The Last Solar Eclipse Of The 20th Century appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

When Maurice Bishop, the revolutionary Grenadian leader, appeared at Hunter College in Brooklyn, New York in August 1983, the Reagan administration was worried. Four years earlier, in 1979, a socialist revolution had installed Bishop’s New Jewel Movement (NJM) in power in the Caribbean microstate of less than 100,000 people. A state department report from the time summarised the Americans’ concerns. The revolution in Grenada, it said, was in some ways even worse than the Cuban Revolution that had rocked the region a quarter of a century earlier: the vast majority of Grenadians were black, and therefore their struggle could resonate with thirty million black Americans; and the Grenadian revolutionary leaders spoke English, and so could communicate their message with ease to an American audience.

The post Forward Ever, Backward Never: Grenada’s Revolution At 40 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country and its bankruptcy was the second largest in U.S. history, following Washington Mutual in 2008. Despite its size, SVB was not a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI) as defined in the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires insolvent SIFIs to “bail in” the money of their creditors to recapitalize themselves.

Technically, the cutoff for SIFIs is $250 billion  in assets. However, the reason they are called “systemically important” is not their asset size but the fact that their failure could bring down the whole financial system.

The post The Looming Quadrillion Dollar Derivatives Tsunami appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

The demonstration that brought these angry young Georgians before the parliament building did not originate as a call to action regarding the liberation of Sukhumi, but rather to protest a proposed law which would have required media and nongovernmental organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from foreign sources to register as agents of foreign influence. The law was modeled on the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, which requires people to disclose when they lobby in the US on behalf of foreign governments or political entities.

The post Farewell, Sukhumi appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.