Implosion: U.S. Politics since the J6 Riot

On December 2, 2021, the federally-appointed UAW Monitor completed the count of ballots in the 2021 Referendum vote and unofficial results were posted pending only formalities.

UAW members had voted by 63.7 percent to switch from International Convention selection of the International Executive Board (IEB) to direct election by the membership. Direct election or “One Member, One Vote” (1m1v) is a demand of the reform movement within the UAW, Unite All Workers for Democracy ( UAWD ).

The campaign...

On January 1, 2022, the government of Kazakhstan lifted price ceiling on liquified gas, which led to an immediate doubling of its price. The next day protests broke out in the oil-producing city of Zhanaozen and spread quickly to other cities, including Almaty, Kazakstan's largest city. The protests targeted inequality, corruption and democracy, as well as the price increases.

The government dispatched police and military units to quell the protests. It also requested help from the Collective Security...

Sixty-eight percent of Hondurans turned out to vote in the November 28, 2021 elections, with 53.4 percent supporting Xiomara Castro for president. She will become the country’s first woman president, but more importantly her election is a break from the last 12 years of authoritarian regimes.

This impressive victory after the 2009 U.S.-backed military coup — followed by three stolen elections — is a tribute to the tenacity of the country’s social movements. Calling sitting president...

The Oakland A’s want to build a 34,000-seat stadium, accompanied by new market-rate housing and new shops and restaurants. The A’s are offering to finance the stadium and shops, but they are asking the Oakland City Council for many millions of dollars in infrastructure and transportation upgrades. The current number is $855 million. They’re also asking for money from the Alameda County government.

The result of this is an ongoing three-way struggle. We should start with the A’s. The major...

The cause of socialist democracy lost a giant last week with the death of Michael Hirsch, a comrade with family roots in the Jewish working class of New York City as well as in the global youth radicalization of the 1960s.

Calling him as a giant is partly tongue-in-cheek: Mike stood over six feet tall, and it comes as little surprise to learn he played basketball in his younger days. But more to the point, he had a big heart and an outsized personality — one unapologetically rough around the edges,...

The following notes were initially intended as part of a followup to the article Biden’s Foreign Policy by Dianne Feeley.

I’d like to develop an overview of layers of imperialist actions with their differing relations to “interests of state,” whether merely tactical or fundamental. At one end of the spectrum are the cynical and vicious U.S. sanctions imposed on Cuba, Venezuela and now Nicaragua, which produce enormous suffering but serve practically no substantive interest beyond pandering...

The Glasgow Conference (COP26) should have given priority to 1) making good on the promise of the “developed” countries to contribute to the Green Climate Fund, from 2020 onwards, at least one hundred billion dollars a year to help the global South meet the climate challenge ¹; 2) forcing these same countries to intervene financially to cover the enormous “loss and damage” caused by warming, especially in the “least developed countries” and small island states;...