EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS—In this global theater of the absurd and the insane, there appeared, in 2017, president Donald Trump in vehement support of the polluters and Earth destroyers, claiming climate change is a hoax. His “tax reform” enriched the oligarchy and opened the National Wildlife Arctic Refuge to petroleum drilling. The effects of his environmental policies, like those of president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, are detrimental to this and future generations.
WORLD DESK
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KENN ORPHAN—Reagan told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” erroneously signalling the moral dominance of capitalism and American Empire over the besieged USSR. Now Trump is feverishly building it up again because that same Empire has created a refugee crisis in regions it sought to control. But the specters of the Cold War are apparently hiding out in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran, nations that are coincidentally fossil fuel and mineral rich. What is equally telling is that so many American liberals have lined up with the man they have so enjoyed calling a racist, white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer these past few years. It is apparent that their true allegiance is to American imperialism above all else.
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MARC NORTON—The cast of characters here alone tells the tale. The US government is once again proclaiming loudly that they are in command in Latin America, that governments in the empire’s back yard must show their loyalty to the Gringos, or else. No more talk of socialism, not even of the much-ballyhooed 21st-century variety.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The US is clearly the world’s leading fascist nation, and there is no close second (and none of the nations that the US regime is trying to conquer is fascist at all). What Germany was under Hitler, the US is and has been at least since the time of US President Ronald Reagan. The US has been a dictatorship since at least 1981.
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John Bellamy Foster: Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?
132 minutes readJ BELLAMY FOSTER—For many people on the left, the answer to neoliberalism or disaster capitalism is a return to welfare-state liberalism, market regulation, or some form of limited social democracy, and thus to a more rational capitalism. It is not the failure of capitalism itself that is perceived as the problem, but rather the failure of neoliberal capitalism.