Against the Current

Central American asylum seekers deported from El Paso to Mexico, March 2021.

THE CONVERGING CATASTROPHES of global capitalism have landed on multiple communities, peoples and nations — but nowhere harder than on displaced populations, refugees and asylum seekers. There are by now an estimated 100 million people globally who have fled their homelands or become internally displaced by war, political repression or ethnic violence; by environmental destruction or economic collapse; or in many cases, by lethal combinations of these modern plagues....

BY THE HEIGHT of summer 2022, as fires burned a record number of residential hotels in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, sidewalks along the three core blocks of Hastings Street were jammed with tents....

Police Lies Facilitate Racist Violence(1)

Photo: Oregon Public Broadcasting

BENJAMIN SMITH IS going to die in prison. On April 18, Benjamin Smith was given a life sentence after pleading guilty to murder, attempted murder, and assault following his shooting of a group of unarmed women in Portland's Normandale Park. Every indication is that the February 2022 attack — ...

HOLLYWOOD FILM AND TV writers went on strike on May 1 demanding a living wage and job security. Writers Guild of America (WGA) picket signs went up outside major studios and shut down late-night TV shows, forcing the industry to run previously taped programs..../p>

i love libraries

AT A MOMENT of rightwing attacks and even defunding of libraries for refusing to remove books on Queer and anti-racist topics, this article is a timely contribution. The author has supplied an extensive list of references and sources, which can be obtained from him by writing to graff.40@osu.edu.

ACROSS THE MEDIA and elsewhere, we hear of organized efforts to ban books, especially for school-aged young people, and to censor school curricula, primarily history and civics....

France, Paris, April 6, 2023. The demonstrator's sign reads "Let s kick the king of the jerks off his throne." 11th inter-union demonstration against pension reform. Photograph by Martin Noda / Hans Lucas

ON MAY DAY 2023, France will explode in demonstrations against the authoritarianism of the Macron government and its undemocratic passage of a bill that raises the work life of the majority of French people by two years. Here is a edited version of an April 5, 2023 interview from Jacobin Radio that provides an overview and analysis of the current political crisis, with Suzi Weissman interviewing Sebastian Budgen. In France, President Macron has imposed a deeply unpopular pension reform by resorting to Article 49.3....

Parents in Zanjan guard the local school from attack.

AT THE HEIGHT of the street presence the Iranian Teachers Coordinating Council held rallies and marches in more than 30 cities. The statement's full title is Urgency of organizing popular safety committees to defend students against chemical attacks, through human chain protection around the schools....

Tortuguita, forest protector shot dead by Atlanta police. Tennessee IWW

WHAT IS ATLANTA’S “Cop City”? Why are people protesting?

Protests began in 2021 when the city announced plans to open Cop City – officially called the Public Safety Training Center (PSTC).

The large police training center, to be constructed on forest land owned by the city, has garnered national attention from Democratic and Republican supporters of “fighting crime” by giving police more weapons and powers. The Biden Administration is behind hiring tens of thousands of cops with little community oversight....

Yoav Peled

THIS INTERVIEW WITH Yoav Peled was conducted April 5, 2023 by Suzi Weissman for Jacobin Radio, broadcast on KPFK radio in Los Angeles. It has been edited for publication here. As protests and polarization continue, updates on the evolving Israeli political crisis and events in Israel-Palestine are available at the valuable online publication +972.

Suzi Weissman: Half of Israel took to the streets, shutting down their workplaces on Monday, March 27....

ON DAY NINE of the conflict that has erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Gilbert Achcar, a close observer of the political and military challenges that have come the way of the Arab world for over a decade, reflects on a battle that he believes was inevitable due to the dual nature of military power in Sudan.

A professor of International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies....

IN HIS CLASSIC "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Karl Marx amends Hegel's quip on history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce (1986 97). With the former Philippine dictator Marcos's son in office, will farcical acts be the spectacle for the next six years? Imagine the sons of Somoza, Trujillo or Batista returning to their banana republics -- that would indeed be "the tradition of all the dead generations" acting as toxic "nightmare on the brain of the living."

The oldest U.S. neocolony, the Philippines, was then plundered....

IN IN STUNNING rebuke to the political establishment in Chicago and around the country, Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner, former teacher, and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union defeated conservative, alleged “lifelong Democrat” Paul Vallas. Johnson was endorsed by the United Working Families Party of Chicago.

While the final results won’t be known until all the mail in ballots are counted, it is likely that Johnson’s margin of 51% to 49% for Vallas will likely...

Woman, Life, Freedom

Twenty independent organizations and unions of Iranian teachers, workers, women, students and retirees have issued the following statement of minimum demands

To the Honorable and Open-Minded People of Iran:

On the forty fourth anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the economic, political and social foundation of the country is shaken by a vortex of crises and disintegration. Thus, it is not possible to imagine a clear and achievable perspective for ending this situation within the framework of the current political superstructure. Thus, the oppressed people of Iran, freedom and equality-seeking women and youth have been giving their lives with unprecedented courage to turn the streets....

IN THE SMALL town of East Palestine, Ohio, the catastrophic February 3 rail derailment highlights failures of safety regulations, indifference to residents, and anti-labor bias against those who do the work.

Initially the media reported it as an accidental derailment, which happens on average every other day, and was not a health risk. But townspeople....

A DECADE AFTER the U.S. Supreme Court banned mandatory life without parole (LWOP) sentences for justice-involved children under age 18 ("juvenile lifers"), Michigan appellate courts are course-correcting years of arbitrary sentencing outcomes which have been an affront to the rule of law.

LWOP sentences are often referred to as a "death in prison" or "death by incarceration" sentences because a person who receives the extreme punishment is condemned to die in prison unless her/his sentence is commuted by the Governor, which is unlikely to occur in most cases.

AS THE LATE Samir Amin wrote in 2006, “the challenges with which the construction of a real multipolar world is confronted are more serious than many ‘alterglobalists’ think.” Sixteen years later, Amin’s call for nations to “delink” from the Western-led economic order appears more ignored by state elites in the global South now than ever before....

Women's strike at Al-Zahra University.

THE THREE DAYS of protests announced by Iranian university students early in December to mark Student Day was a clever choice. They knew it was not going to be supported by royalists. Student Day commemorates three leftwing students, Ahmad Ghandchi, Shariat-Razavi and Bozorg-Nia,...