30 April 2021 — Institute of Race Relations
With the public consultation closing on 6 May, it is vital to respond and to call out the illegality, impracticality and immorality of the asylum proposals in the government’s ‘new plan for immigration’.
29 April 2021 — theplanningmotivedotcom
Preamble
Capitalism is the first, but not the last industrial society in history. This remarkable but cruel mode of production has its feet in the era of the horse drawn carriage and its head in satellites orbiting planets and even exiting our solar system. What took months now takes hours, what took the efforts of thousands is now accomplished by a handful and what took days to communicate now takes microseconds. In every way capitalism, this inescapable, inevitable and necessary step in our economic emergence, has laid the foundation for a future and more highly organised mode of production.
29 April 2021 — Mint Press
In its preparation for great power competition, the US military is modernizing its artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques and testing them in West Africa.
By Scott Timcke
NIAMI, NIGER (Africa is a Country) — One striking feature of US military involvement in West Africa is the absence of an observable strategic vision for a desired end state. Nominally, US presence in the region’s multilayered conflicts revolves around building “security cooperation” with state partners to improve counterterrorism capabilities, ostensibly providing protection to communities that states cannot. Concurrently, the US military is typically the prime diplomatic entity for high-level bilateral engagements. The result is that the US military is propping up the public authority of weak states, albeit in an ad hoc fashion that lurches from crisis to crisis.
29 April 2021 — Good Law Project
Good Law Project is today able to reveal the names of four more companies awarded contracts through the VIP lane: Clandeboye Agencies, P14 Medical, Luxe Lifestyle and Meller Designs.
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29 April 2021 — Tricontinental
A mass rally with the Free German Youth that marked the founding of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet Occupation Zone, October 1949.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border. On 3 March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister Miklós Németh asked the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western Europe could be opened. ‘We have a strict regime on our borders’, Gorbachev told Németh, ‘but we are also becoming more open’. Three months later, on 15 June, Gorbachev told the press in Bonn (West Germany) that the Berlin Wall ‘could disappear when the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist’. He did not list the preconditions, but he said, ‘Nothing is permanent under the Moon’. On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall was knocked down. By October 1990, the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR) was absorbed into a unified Germany dominated by West Germany.
29 April 2021 — Indian Punchline
Ex-CIA officer Bruce Riedel at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, whose familiarity with Afghanistan is never in doubt, has held a looking glass to figure out the future course of events even as the US troop withdrawal commences.
29 April 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
The changes needed are fundamental to a country which puts anti-black racism at the center of politics, law and economics.
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29 April 2021 — theplanningmotivedotcom
Something interesting is happening in capitalist governance. The capitalist class is closing ranks, regularising and professionalising its rule by squeezing out the populist fools. Instinctively they recognise the class battles which lie ahead and they can no longer tolerate those who flippantly raise the aspirations of the masses and then misgovern.
31 March 2021 — Socialist Resistance
The successful vaccine roll out by the NHS and Starmer’s right wing gallop has given Johnson a shot in the arm. Polls put the Tories 7% ahead of Labour, and on the 6 March at 13% ahead. But the Brexit fall-out, the Covid “social murder”, the dis-United Kingdom, and the economic crisis all point towards a period of intensifying political turmoil. The reheated deep centre of Blairism, now led by Starmer, will fail to dislodge the English nationalist Tories, and thus maintain the creeping authoritarianism and the far right in politics. The Covid pandemic is not about to disappear as mutations arise. As billionaires increase their wealth in this period, neoliberal governments will make the working class pay for the economic crisis. Measures are not being taken to stop the rise of temperature at 1.5°C by 2030. The multi-faceted crisis will continue and deepen. In this context, there will be greater opportunities to present a radical ecosocialist and revolutionary alternative.
29 April 2021 — Corporate Watch
Vaccine capitalism – Penally military refugee camp closes – profiles of Deliveroo and deportation profiteer Evelop/Barceló Group
28 April 2021 — See you in 2020
The story of the climate’s deterioration is intertwined with the story of class conflict, with the battle between the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries. Much to the chagrin of U.S. national security technocrats, factors show that the instability and destruction from the climate collapse is most likely going to harm the strategic interests of the counterrevolutionaries far more than those of the revolutionaries.
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Andreas Malm
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE
Learning to Fight in a World on Fire
Verso, 2021
reviewed by Simon Butler
Despite the climate movement’s growth, epitomized by Extinction Rebellion and Student Strike for Climate, fossil fuel extraction continues to grow, and a safe climate can seem dismayingly distant. Given a choice between forgoing capital accumulation and tipping the whole world into a furnace, our rulers prefer the furnace.
27 April 2021 — Craig Murray
It is not in dispute that the CIA is in possession of Julian Assange’s legal and medical files seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy, including correspondence and drafting by his lawyers on his defence against extradition to the USA on Espionage charges. The defence submitted evidence of this in court. After Julian was arrested in the Ecuadorean Embassy and removed, all of his personal possessions were illegally seized by the Ecuadorean authorities, including his files and his IT equipment. These were then shipped back to Ecuador by diplomatic bag. There, they were handed over to the CIA.
In “The Present,” as throughout all of Palestine, soldiers, police officers, secret police, or Shabak agents, have the power — indeed they are instructed — to harass, humiliate, and take the lives of Palestinians in the most arbitrary fashion.
28 April 2021 — Consortium News – Declassified UK
28 April 2021 — Internationalist 360°
Convoy of U.S. armored vehicles near Al-Qahtaniyah, Syria
In 1989, before the end of the Cold War, Bush I, Reagan’s successor, invaded Panama, and in August 1990 attacked Iraq, starting the First Gulf War.
28 April 2021 — Mint Press News
Inspection of the MH17 saga teaches us, in the first instance, never simply to presume that an enterprise that appears to have the status of an officially supported and endorsed international legal proceeding must on that account be above reproach.
27 April 2021 — Jonathan Cook
At the height of the attacks on Corbyn, IHRA officials joined UK Jewish groups in falsely claiming its antisemitism definition included examples that protected Israel, when delegates had specifically excluded the examples
Mondoweiss – 27 April 2021
New research charts a five-year campaign by highly partisan, pro-Israel lobby groups to mislead the international community about the nature of what has been widely described as the “gold standard” definition of antisemitism.
28 April 2021 — Mint Press News
It’s a tangled web but the bottom line is that social-impact investing, given a big boost by the pandemic and the “Great Reset” planned in its wake, can be made to sound so good that it’s hard to conceive what a dangerous threat it poses: it only “works” by herding and caging.
28 April 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
The New Dark Age 