Immigration in Relation to Imperialism: On Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, by W.R. Zammichiéli

Mural: Tribute to Archbishop Oscar Romero

Image by Franco Folini via Flickr

by W.R. Zammichiéli
Writer, Dandelion Salad
September 4, 2020

Throughout the established political structures within the United States, there has been an extensively documented amount of accounts concerning the particular activities of the state apparatus in terms of what transpires on the national borders between the two nations of Mexico and the United States. Within the course of current events, the considerable amount of discourse regarding what would constitute an appropriate reaction to the perpetuation of circumstances on the national border has exponentially increased in the course of years (given various electoral occurrences, socioeconomic degradation, cultural responses to societal denigration, and the political activities which originate because of these cultural responses in question). In terms of acceptable discourse, the political conflict that has emerged directly from the various policies of the United States on the national border, which included but is not limited to intensified national surveillance to familial separation to deportation to mass incarceration to stricter border security apparatuses, has seemingly been confined to whether or not the United States should be focused on inclusion or exclusion to integration or segregation to opportunities or the absence thereof.

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USA’s Militarization of Latin America, by Yanis Iqbal

A U.S. Guide--7 Steps to Kill a Revolution

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
September 3, 2020

Maj. Gen. Andrew Croft, the commander of 12th Air Force, wrote on 22 August: “I have seen an increasingly contested strategic space where Beijing and Moscow are aggressively investing time and resources in Latin America to support their authoritarian models of governance. The Air Force must reinforce the strength of our longstanding commitment to the Western Hemisphere. We lose ground when we are unable to commit to spending the time and resources to fly our aircraft south and train alongside our partners.”

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US Style Fascism Is A Bipartisan Effort, by Phil Rockstroh

Graffiti "4 More Years of Fascism"

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Phil Rockstroh
Writer, Dandelion Salad
September 2, 2020

Glaring sign of intellectual dishonesty of a society that has sunken into a psychical pit of fascist depravity: Terming an armed, racist terrorist, intent on murder, a “vigilante.”

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Chris Hedges: The Signs of the Declining Empire

No Oligarchy

Image by Joe Flood via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

The Democracy At Work on Aug 31, 2020

On this week’s Economic Update, Prof. Wolff discusses the following: Denmark’s new taxes on banks and rich people to help workers doing dangerous jobs; West Virginia AG sues Walmart and CVS for complicity in opioid scandal; and US State Department urges universities to sell shares in Chinese corporations. On the second half of the show, Prof. Wolff interviews author and journalist Chris Hedges on signs of the declining US empire.

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Why the US is Doomed, by Finian Cunningham

Democrats and Republicans

Image by Matt Katzenberger via Flickr

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from Sputnik
August 31, 2020

The fatal trouble with the US is that it has a chronic political disease. But none of the political class, including “populist” President Donald Trump, have a diagnosis to offer. And any remedial action always requires accurate diagnosis.

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Fascism and the Quickening of History + The Empty Theatre, by Kenn Orphan

Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally

Image by Anthony Crider via Flickr

by Kenn Orphan
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Halifax, Nova Scotia
August 30, 2020

Over the last few months I have been revisiting research I did a long time ago on fascism. Pinochet’s Chile, Sukarno’s Indonesia, Montt’s Guatemala, Hitler’s Germany and beyond. I’ve spent time poring over the accounts of the survivors, the details of the crimes, the descriptions of the torture, of the camps, of the dehumanization, the cruelty, the terror, the photos of the train cars headed to concentration camps, the mass graves, the massacres, the piles of corpses. And reading through the accounts of people who knew things were going in this direction, that something ghastly was being done to other people, yet did nothing, not even raised their voice when they had the chance.

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Chris Hedges: Those Statues Are Statements Of White Supremacy, Part II

Albert Pike statue pedestal

Image by BeyondDC via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

RT America on Aug 29, 2020

On the show this week, Chris Hedges, in his second interview with Professor James W. Loewen, discusses public monuments and statues, who put them up and why, and what may replace them.

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Kamala Harris Is Not A “Left Radical” Or A “Marxist”, By Paul Street

DSC_2791

Image by Oisin Prendiville via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
August 28, 2020

Within moments of Joe Biden announcing Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Trump campaign and the American right-wing propaganda machine began portraying the California senator as a “far-left radical” of the “Marxist” variety.

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Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley: Kamala Harris Negates Black Freedom Movement

BLM March, Springfield, Oregon

Image by David Geitgey Sierralupe via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

Black Agenda Report Presents: The Left Lens on Aug 24, 2020

On this episode of The Left Lens, co-hosts, Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley analyze the record of Kamala Harris and why she represents a negation of everything that the Black liberation movement and U.S. political prisoners currently fighting for freedom stand for.

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Indigenous People of Mexico Fight More Than Pandemic, by Yanis Iqbal

Protest banner Oaxaca, Mexico - 2015

Image by Cordelia Persen via Flickr

by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
August 26, 2020

In Mexico, the intensity of the Covid-19 pandemic is increasing. With more than 568,600 cases and 61,450 deaths (third largest number of Covid-19 deaths), the country is staggering under the Coronavirus pandemic. While the entire country is experiencing the impact, indigenous communities represent the hardest hit demographic. Data from Coneval, the national government’s social development agency, has shown that the Covid-19 fatality rate in Mexico’s poorest 427 municipalities is 14.1. On the other hand, the fatality rate in the country’s 54 wealthiest municipalities is 8.1, “meaning that people who live in impoverished parts of the country are almost twice as likely to die if they become sick with Covid-19 than those who live in affluent areas.”

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The Banality of Evil of The Evil of Two Lessers + The Democratic Party’s Raison D’être Is To Co-Opt, Absorb, Marginalize, and Neutralize The Left, by Phil Rockstroh

The Banality of Evil of The Evil of Two Lessers + The Democratic Party's Raison D’être Is To Co-Opt, Absorb, Marginalize, and Neutralize The Left, by Phil Rockstroh

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Phil Rockstroh
Writer, Dandelion Salad
August 25, 2020

“Not voting for Biden reveals your privilege.”

Only privileged people seem to believe the US possesses a viable democracy. The non-privileged live with the boot of the extant dictatorship of money/police state on their throats (of which, Biden has spent his life as an ardent operative). Withal, Biden has spent his political career in service to the profiteers of White privilege because, to quote the man himself, he did not “want his children to grow up in a racial jungle.”

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Late-Stage Capitalism Deprives Us Of Meaning + The Capitalist Class Is Bringing America Towards Fascism, by Rainer Shea

Nazi Donald Trump, Loretto street art

Image by duncan c via Flickr

by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Aug. 17, 2020
August 24, 2020

Consumerism, and the capitalist mentality more broadly, are equivalent to nihilism. They strip the human experience of meaning beyond what serves the market. When a culture revolves around this monetary and commercialist view of the world, it ceases to bring true fulfillment.

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Defund Fascism, Blue and Orange, by Paul Street

Racism Is A Virus-Zabou graffiti, Shoreditch

Image by duncan c via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
August 23, 2020

The American ruling class says it is opposed to “big government.” It isn’t. The wealthy Few are only against what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state” – those parts of government that reflect the victories of past and ongoing social movements by serving the common good, regulating Big Business, and offering support, protection, inclusion and empowerment to the lower and working classes. That is the “big government” the rich and powerful don’t like. That is the big bad State they want to “starve” and “drown.”

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Payroll Taxes Are the Achilles Heel of Social Security, by Jim Kavanagh

to the order of me

Image by frankieleon via Flickr

by Jim Kavanagh
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Polemicist
August 21, 2020

On August 8th, Donald Trump took four executive actions on coronavirus relief. One was a memorandum deferring, to the end of the year, payment of the employee portion of the payroll tax for employees making less than $4000 biweekly. (Employer payments had already been deferred in the CARES act.)

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