Politics

Eurasia News October 9, 2021 Is a new “cultural revolution” starting in China? For many days in the Celestial Empire, they have been discussing the article “Everyone can feel that a deep transformation is taking place” – about the new course of Xi Jinping . Here is the most striking quote from it: If we continue to have to rely on big capitalists as the main force in the fight against imperialism and hegemonism, or we continue to cooperate with the American industry of ‘mass entertainment’, our youth will lose their strong and courageous energy, and we will suffer the same collapse. like the Soviet Union, even before we get a real attack. The publication appeared on WeChat on August 28 on the personal blog of Li Guangman. He is a little-known journalist and former editor-in-chief of a small newspaper. But in the following days, the text was reprinted by various state media, including the People’s Daily...

Bright Line Watch polling results by region. Question: “Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in new union]?” This article was originally published on July 16, 2021 Andrew Tanner October 9, 2021 Since 2016, I have watched America’s slow march over a cliff with a mix of fascination and horror. But the results of recent polls by Bright Line Watch have provided the first hard and frighteningly conclusive evidence that Americans are moving fast down the road I predicted—towards a national divorce. I have unfortunately been right about almost every major development in America since Trump won the Republican Party nomination in 2016. Originally published at gen.medium.com Like many observers, I didn’t take Trump’s campaign seriously at first. His first attempt at a campaign in 2012 collapsed before the first primary. The second defied every rule I had learned...

Brilliant cartoon from 2010… August 23, 2021 Jeffrey Sachs is professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He’s a leading intellectual on global economic affairs in general and sustainable development in particular. Here he chooses the unusual way of communicating: Instead of going into a lot of “academic” issues and dimensions of the US-led war on Afghanistan since 2001, he characterises the underlying mentality, decision quality and level of knowledge by using the word “stupidity” a number of times. And that’s what this US policy has been: stupid. Repeatedly stupid. We find it important that people proven excellent intellectuals do not feel that they have to separate the personal and academia and feel free to express themselves in plain language – indicating also, of course, a sense of frustration and anger over that very ignorance . . . stupidity and its tragic human consequences. Perhaps...

Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson August 23, 2021 Many people have wrongly assumed that political freedom would follow new economic freedoms in China and that its economic growth would have to be built on the same foundations as in the West. The authors suggest that those assumptions are rooted in three essentially false beliefs about modern China: (1) Economics and democracy are two sides of the same coin; (2) authoritarian political systems can’t be legitimate; and (3) the Chinese live, work, and invest like Westerners. But at every point since 1949 the Chinese Communist Party—central to the institutions, society, and daily experiences that shape all Chinese people—has stressed the importance of Chinese history and of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Until Western companies and politicians understand this and revise their views, they will continue to get China wrong. Originally appeared in the May-June 2021 Harvard Business Review here When we first traveled to China, in the early...

, in Washington and New York, everybody talked about who could have done it, how they did it and with what means. The only thing never brought to the fore was: WHY would somebody want to do something like 9/11 to the United States of America? By not asking the Why question, the US could stand as the innocent victim of cataclysmic violence. It would not have to do any soul searching and therefore no change of its global militarist policy. 9/11 was not a response to US foreign policy – but it needed a response. The world felt sympathy for the American suffering – much more so than for the suffering and deaths in other countries around the world. The fact is that the 9/11 attack targeted the US’ global finance-capital (World Trade Center), its global military (Pentagon) and its political (White House, however not hit) centres – not...

“There is virtually zero knowledge or understanding of the Chinese Communist Party in the West. It is seen as a clone of the Soviet Communist Party. In reality, it is entirely different. It has been extraordinarily successful, not just transforming China but is also in the process of changing the world. Everyone needs to know about CPC and understand the reasons that lie behind its extraordinary success.” This is very true – the intro to this video on Martin Jacques’ YouTube channel. Martin Jacques is one of the most important experts around and will give you more food for thought per minute than most others. Voices like his are immensely important in these years when the US/West does nothing significant for the future but developing its utterly destructive China Cold War Agenda, CCWA. Please watch, discuss and share. We desperately need to improve the Western discourse on China as it...

Photo credit: wsimag.com Ellyn Kaschak April 16, 2021 It is definitely nothing that has come before All of us alive on the planet today are part of the most significant transition in centuries, whether we know it or not, whether it has touched us lightly or heavily and whether we choose to be or not. Not since the Industrial Revolution has such a total and radical social upheaval occurred. As with most major cultural shifts, this one follows a technological innovation of which we are all aware and that is the invention of the Internet along with its ready accessibility on a handheld ubiquitous device. Originally published at World Street International This dependence on technology to spur social change has been the case perhaps since the first person to do so created the wheel. Automobiles and air travel, movies and recordings changed the lives of those who lived in those...

Photo credit: ChannelNewsAsia A U.S. State Department transcript April 3, 2021 Editor’s noteThere are several reasons to assume, or predict, that this meeting will be seen in the future as a serious turning point. One can’t blame the Chinese side for thinking that this is not the way to start dialogues about common matters. Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken here reveals a surprisingly impolite and amateurish style of diplomacy – a style not exactly indicative of global leadership. The Chinese may well have felt, even concluded, that it is, at least at the moment, a hopeless idea to seek long-term cooperation with the United States. Therefore, we bring you the full transcript from the opening day. China’s Yang: ‘Is that the way that you had hoped to conduct this dialogue?’ NEW YORK — This is a U.S. State Department transcript of the opening remarks at the U.S.-China meeting in...

Image: Adobe Stock / XY March 23, 2021 Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Amy Kapczynski, David Singh Grewal If we are to emerge from this era of crisis, we need legal thinking that operates on fundamentally different presumptions. We live in an era of intersecting crises—some new, some old but newly visible. At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has already caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States alone, with many more deaths on the horizon in the coming months. Since its arrival in the United States, the virus has intersected with and magnified long-neglected problems—radical disparities in access to healthcare and the fulfillment of basic needs that disproportionately impact communities of color and working-class Americans, alongside a crisis of care for the young, elderly, and sick that stretches families and communities to the breaking point. Originally published at Bostonreview These crises arise from the chronic failure of political institutions to respond...

Photo by Daniel Huizinga | CC BY 2.0 Gabriel Rockhill  March 16, 2021 One of the most steadfast beliefs regarding the United States is that it is a democracy. Whenever this conviction waivers slightly, it is almost always to point out detrimental exceptions to core American values or foundational principles. For instance, aspiring critics frequently bemoan a “loss of democracy” due to the election of clownish autocrats, draconian measures on the part of the state, the revelation of extraordinary malfeasance or corruption, deadly foreign interventions, or other such activities that are considered undemocratic exceptions. The same is true for those whose critical framework consists in always juxtaposing the actions of the U.S. government to its founding principles, highlighting the contradiction between the two and clearly placing hope in its potential resolution. Originally published at Counterpunch The problem, however, is that there is no contradiction or supposed loss of democracy because the United...

TFF Associate and friend over decades, Richard Falk, last year turned 90. Read more about him here – and use the search engine to find lots of his writings. The latest we’ve published is on championing lost causes... Eric Walberg March 10, 2021 Writing this memoir has been as much about discovering my story, that is, myself as it is about telling it. That’s Falk’s version of Socrates’ ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ Or should I say, Forrest Gump’s? Falk’s life reads like a storybook, starting with meeting Supreme Court judges with his father at age 9 in 1939, making friends with Claudette Colbert, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liz Taylor (long story) at age 15, befriending and befoeing many of the dramatis personae of the Cold War throughout his long and productive life, finally landing on the shores of democratic socialism as the US charges towards the (literal) finish line. Falk came...

Albert Einstein February 27, 2021 (Originally published in May 1949) Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is. Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. Originally published by Monthly Review But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition,...