Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world
You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV
You could say I’d lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me
— Sting, “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” from the 1993 album ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales”
Like many cities in the mountainous central region of Costa Rica, Palmares sits in a valley. A valley of many valleys extending like an unbroken emerald necklace in ever increasing altitudes from the temperate southeast to the higher northwest elevations.
Those who’ve read George Orwell’s 1984 remember the frequent—or rather incessant—rocket fire that occurred throughout Oceania. Destruction was always imminent and so commonplace that citizens took it in stride. Permanent war—by design. Though foreign terrorist attacks rarely happen in the “homeland,” America has been on permanent war footing since the Second World War. You’ve heard the catchphrases that summarize the idea. We’re a garrison state. We’ve traded perpetual peace for perpetual war. Beware the military industrial complex. Between 2002 and 2012 the U.S.
My fellow revolutionaries, internationalists, and travelers on the road to social justice,
I’m writing this letter to praise the legacy of a great man, and to remind you of how much we owe to his selfless efforts. A phrase is etched into his monument and mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba beneath his towering, south facing sculpture. He signed all personal correspondence with those same immortal words: “Hasta la Victoria Siempre”. Until Victory, Always.
Why should I care whether Iran has nukes? It most likely doesn’t, but even if it does… it never attacked anyone, never overthrew any government, and never performed experiments on human beings. It had not committed a single genocide, and never dreamed about conquering the world.
So why should I even bother to think much about Iran’s nuclear program, big or small, “peaceful” or defensive?
Last week a new leader of the British Labour Party was chosen. Already the chimes can be heard from the belfries of thousands of Labour parishes, with coronation eulogies published in the journals of political dissent. The abdication of the Miliband dynasty would seem to herald the end of New Labour’s reign of terror begun when Thatcher acolyte, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair kissed hands in 1997.
A lot of people are taking comfort in Jeremy Corbyn’s amazing victory in England for leader of the Labour Party as part of a leftist surge in Europe, coming to the USA. They’re right about Europe. We see it with Labour in Great Britain, Podemos in Spain, Syriza (before they folded) in Greece, and the Communists in Portugal, who stand to make enormous electoral gains on October 4. People in the US are making the connection to the Bernie Sanders campaign. If only it were true.
Right-wing politics now dominate the globe. Broadly speaking, the Right can be divided into a US-centered right-wing bloc and a variety of anti-US right-wing regimes and social forces.
Because Democrats and Republicans and all those who hold fast to the divine status of the market theory do not want a national discussion on free markets and for whom these free markets are really designed to serve. And this is why the 1% and international elites need to pull the plug on a socialist who has some serious political momentum.
Three brilliant political theories on how to optimally organize and maintain society’s economic and power structures were described by Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and anarchists such as Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, which are, respectively:
