By Malik Miah [Editor’s note: The article below is an updated and expanded version of a previous article by the author.} Tyre Nichols, 29, was murdered by police in yet another modern-day lynching in Memphis, Tennessee on January 7. The city is nearly 70 percent African American, including a Black female police chief. What was … Continue reading U.S. Systemic Racism: From Slavery to George Floyd and Tyre Nichols
By JEFF MACKLER After 15 raucous votes spanning almost two weeks, Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy, R-California, was elected House Speaker on January 7. The vote was 216-212, a party-line vote with six Republicans voting present. From the beginning, former President Donald Trump pressured his 20 super-supporters, mostly in the Republicans’ “rightwing” Freedom Caucus, to back McCarthy. They refused until several behind-the-scenes deals, and a new “rules package” governing House operations, were negotiated.
By JEFF MACKLER The political score sheet between Republicans and Democrats now appears even, with both investigating and exposing each other’s illegal confiscation of classified documents, implicitly in both cases, to cover up heinous deeds, the least of which involves exposing the truth about the U.S. role in orchestrating the bi-partisan war in Ukraine. No doubt, the lead up to the 2024 elections will see capitalism’s twin parties once again exposing each other’s duplicities to garner votes in the nation’s periodic contests between the billionaire elite. But on critical questions like the “right” and obligation of U.S. imperialism to impose its will on the world’s people, there is no dispute.
By JEFF MACKLER Led by the dominant capitalist-imperialist nations, especially the U.S. and China, the system involves the capture and transfer of surplus value from workers in poorer countries to leading corporations in the advanced countries. Today, global value chain corporations that represent only 15 percent of all trading firms worldwide, capture some 80 percent of total trade.
