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Contemporary art is often criticised as pointless or overvalued by art market elites. Even the word ‘artist’ has lost much of its meaning. The many ongoing global socio-political crises seem to make even the idea of art fade into insignificance. Most art either reflects local reality (landscapes, cityscapes, portraits) or internal ‘reality’ (surrealism, conceptual art). But there are artists (in this case, I will focus on painters) who do not shy away from depicting the difficulties facing ordinary people or the elites who create those difficulties in the first place. Here we will look at particular ways in which painters …

Somewhere, maybe on the other side of the world from you right now, countless people are sitting locked in small rooms because of things they wrote. It’s a strange idea. How could the written word be so dangerous that the person responsible for it should be placed in a box, locked away from society along with arsonists and murderers? So many of these journalists and artists are unknown. They do not have hashtags. But one of them, Ashraf Fayadh, has become a rallying call around the world. More than 60 international arts and human rights groups have campaigned for his …

(Author’s Note:  Based on interviews with Palestinian refugees from Syria.)

The refugee camp of Yarmouk was ever present in his being, pulling him in and out of an abyss of persistent fears that urged him to never return. But what was this refugee without Yarmouk, his first haven, his last earth?

How could any other spot in this unwelcoming universe ever be a ‘home’ when he had learned that only Palestine, which he had never visited, can ever be a home? When questioned, he always answered without hesitation: “I am from the village of so and so in Palestine.” Yet the Yarmouk …

In the summer of 2014, the people of Ferguson were brutally subjected to a military-style crackdown by local law enforcement following the murder of teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Police officers who appeared more like combat soldiers pointed military-grade assault rifles at peaceful protesters. Paramilitary units dressed in camouflage fired tear gas into residents’ front yards, and armored personnel carriers (APCs) rampaged through the streets of residential neighborhoods.

In the summer of 2015, at a weekend pool party in McKinney, Texas, police officer David Eric Casebolt brutally took down a fifteen year-old girl.  Arriving …

Fifteen years after embarking on its largely ineffective quantitative easing program, Japan appears poised to try the form recommended by Ben Bernanke in his notorious “helicopter money” speech in 2002. The Japanese test case could finally resolve a longstanding dispute between monetarists and money reformers over the economic effects of government-issued money.

When then-Fed Governor Ben Bernanke gave his famous helicopter money speech to the Japanese in 2002, he was talking about something quite different from the quantitative easing they actually got and other central banks later mimicked. Quoting Milton Friedman, he said the government could reverse a deflation …

In all countries socialists renounced the class struggle and proceeded instead to go to war for their fatherland and their people.

Jacques R. Pauwels, The Great Class War 1914-1918, p. 69

War is anathema. I hate war and I am sure the majority of humanity does. So why does war still happen? Earlier wars continue to evoke a mythology that pervades the public discourse. Since much of humanity remains mired in war, it is crucial to cut through the crap of disinformation that beguiles people and involves them in wars that they don’t want. If indeed a knowledge of history prepares humans …

The pattern is unmistakable in both the UK and US – and I apologise for sounding like a stuck record. Liberal mainstream media prove over and over again their aversion to telling us the news straight. They conspire – I can think of no fairer word – with the political elites in Washington and London to spin and subvert stories damaging to their mutual interests, even when the facts are driving real events in an entirely different direction.

A perfect illustration is the story of the Democratic party’s leaked emails, which reveal that the national leadership was actively seeking to swing the primaries battle …

China is fuming. It has obviously had enough.  It is reaching the limit. For decades it tried to appease the West, to play by international laws, to be a good and responsible member of the international community. And for decades it never interfered in the internal affairs of other countries. It sponsored no coups and attacked no foreign lands.

Even its counter-propaganda has been measured, polite and mild.

All this has gained China no admiration, not even respect!

It is being constantly antagonized, provoked and encircled both militarily and ideologically. Not far from its territory are deadly US military bases (Futenma and Kadena) …

We are living in troubled times. Of late, every day we see murder, mayhem and bloodshed, from a few bodies to even thousands. We see it in media headlines and hear it on cable news. It seems that different forms of madness have gripped various countries and cultures, but the US is displaying a special kind: racism.

There are phone videos showing unarmed black men killed by police officers, apparently moved to shoot first, with threatening racist stereotypes ingrained in their minds. How else can you explain a Miami police officer shooting an unarmed black man lying on the ground …

There can be little doubt that we are living through an extraordinary, and in many ways unprecedented, era. Times of uncertainty and tremendous upheaval for sure, but also positive times, in which large numbers of people are becoming energised and politically engaged. Political parties in many countries are fracturing, as internal differences surface and the old dualities of left and right fail to respond to the needs and demands of the people.

Political/social activism has been with us for centuries, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ‘People Power’ – the ‘new superpower’ – has been growing exponentially. …