Against the Current

Who's in charge here?

THE SADISTIC SAVAGERY of the U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide, and Donald Trump’s executive coup-in-progress in the United States, intersect at Trump’s proclamation of intent to take over, “develop” and ethnically cleanse Gaza of its two million Palestinian residents.

Such pronouncements may have been previously unimaginable, but no longer. As divorced from reality as....

Boris Kagarlitsky is serving a five-year prison term in Russia.

THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED AND (OR) SENT BY FOREIGN AGENT BORIS YULIEVICH KAGARLITSKY, OR CONCERNING THE ACTIVITIES OF FOREIGN AGENT BORIS YULIEVICH KAGARLITSKY.*

A NEW U.S. Administration is always a global-level event. The world anticipated George W. Bush’s arrival at the White House with fears that came to be confirmed, while Barack Obama’s election brought hopes that didn’t pay off. But this is for the first time ever that the new boss of the Oval office is seen with such perplexity and confusion. No one quite knows what to expect of Trump’s presidency. But that’s rather natural, because he doesn’t know it himself.

A NEW U.S. Administration is always a global-level event....

AS ISRAEL’S WAR machine and famine stalk the people of Gaza, resistance to the war in the United States is taking new forms including a growing boycott and divestment campaign against key corporations complicit in the unfolding genocide.

Chevron Corporation, long a villain in the eyes of global climate and environmental activists, has entered the spotlight as a major focus of BDS organizing in support of the Palestinian people.

Chevron earned its billing as a top-tier target of the Palestinian-led...

Donald Trump caricature by Donkey Hotey CC-BY-2.0

DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, with more social and legislative power and experience than his first presidency from 2017 to 2021, is a political milestone that has shaken the world because of what the arrival of such a reactionary, toxic and malignant character to the White House in Washington represents for the world -- and specifically....

KHALIDA JARRAR WAS one of the 90 Palestinians released on January 19, 2025 in the first round of an exchange of prisoners under the Israeli-Hamas truce. She looked significantly older than when she was arrested over a year ago. Since last August she had been in solitary confinement and, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Club, confined to a 1m-1.5m cell at Ayalon (Ramla) prison. --The ATC Editors....

First set of Southern California wildfires in January 2025

SINCE THIS ARTICLE was published, the number of deaths resulting from the series of fires has risen to 28. On January 22nd another fire broke out just north of Los Angeles. Within a couple of hours the Hughes fire consumed more than 5,000 acres and forced residents to evacuate. --The ATC Editors

A CATASTROPHIC FIRE is sweeping through Los Angeles, destroying entire neighborhoods and global warming with its extreme weather, in this case extremely high wind velocity, is the principal cause. Since they began last Wednesday and as I write on January 12, the fire has swept over 37,000 acres, destroyed more than 12,400 homes, businesses, and ....

U.S. Steel Tower, Pittsburgh, PA Photo: Chaile19 CC0

Why? Is it good for steelworkers? Are foreign capitalists worse than American bosses? Should workers care?

Japan’s Nippon Steel is the world’s fourth largest steelmaker. U.S. Steel is ranked twenty-three and only number three in the United States. Most financial observers thought it was a good deal for the industry, given the financial troubles of U.S. Steel.

Japan and its rulers, furthermore, are a major U.S. ally in Asia, including military threats against China. Japan supports Washington and Tel Aviv’s genocidal war in Gaza and U.S. sanctions and threats against Russia....

Toomaj Salehi (Photo by Hosseinronaghi / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

UPDATE: AFter his death sentence was overturned in June 2024, Toomaj Salehi remained in prison but was finally released on December 1, 2024. He had been serving a sentence for propaganda against the state, according to the Iranian state-run press. Index on Censorship, which had been working to free the rapper, welcomed his release and according to the BBC stated that he "should never have been imprisoned to begin with." --The ATC Editors....

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
written & directed by Jane Schoenbrun
produced and distributed by A24

"THE OLD WORLD is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters," observed Antonio Gramsci (according to a 2010 translation by Slavoj Zizek).

Monster movies -- or more broadly, horror films -- are having a moment, and writer-director Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow is a horror film about, among other things, the meanings of horror media. It riffs on 1990s genre TV and the value of fan communities, nostalgia and changes in entertainment media, the perils of entertainment as escape, and the pain and promise of times of transition....

Prisoners After War:
Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration
By Jason Higgins
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024).

Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, The Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multi-generational group of men – white, Black and Latino — lined up proudly between two flags.

In his dispatch to the newspaper, African-American Navy veteran Robert Maury explained why everyone....

WOMEN START QUEUEING at 6AM at the courthouse in Mazan, France so they can support Gisèle Pelicot at the open trial she requested. This rape case has caught international attention because it so perfectly illustrates how many men feel they are entitled to women’s bodies. This continuous outpouring of support demonstrates the determination of women to publicize and end the dehumanization women face the world over.--The Editors....

HOW DOES THE left in France confront the global “right-wing” turn? Can leftist organizations supporting Ukraine develop a common strategy? Researcher and longtime activist Catherine Samary discusses the role of the left in today’s French politics for Posle Media.

Posle: Before we turn to the discussion of the war in Ukraine and prospects for left internationalism, let’s talk about the recent developments in your home country. How do you analyse the current political situation in France and the role that left-wing politics might play in it?...

We Live Here
Detroit Eviction Defense and the Battle for Housing Justice
by Jeffrey Wilson and Bambi Kramer
Seven Stories Press, 2024, 238 pages, $16.95 paperback; ebook $10.

WILSON AND KRAMER’s graphic story highlights the victorious struggles of several homeowners, providing a glimpse into the economic crisis in Detroit and its resistance by the community. The tsunami came to the city earler than the country's 2008 meltdown and stayed longer.

The group of activists that became DED came out of the 2011 Occupy Detroit encampment. Their own eviction from the grounds of the historic public square, Grand Circus Park, came after 60 days of taking back the public space and a lot of political dialogue. ...

Notice the dial on the top right on the TTS. This was critical in justifying each line of type. Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation, https://www.smecc.org/teletypes_in_typesetting.htm.

IN 1962, AS a young and rather aimless woman, I was hired by the Oakland Tribune to learn typesetting on the TTS — TeleTypeSetting machine — which attached a misbegotten contraption to a keyboard that punched holes into a sturdy ribbon. The ribbon was later fed into a similar misbegotten contraption on a Linotype, where it was set into actual type. That poor baby did not live long.

I thought it would be “exciting” to work in a newspaper. And indeed it was. I don’t recall what I earned in former jobs as a typist, but I can tell you I earned a lot more as a printer!...