Henry Kissinger was fond of telling Congress that he was in the business of real estate, not social work. Real estate, much like empire, is suited only to thugs and tyrants — as Kissinger’s decades of meddling in the Persian Gulf make clear.
With US policy in war-torn southern Africa perpetually on the verge of capsizing, Henry Kissinger’s desire for stability put him in conflict with the ascendant New Right, which was firmly committed to white minority rule.
Western Sahara, the largest non-self-governing territory in the world, is today bisected by a 1,700-mile-long sand wall and millions of land mines. Henry Kissinger and the Ford administration were undoubtedly proud of their hard work in the region.
With Central America in flames, Henry Kissinger’s challenge was to portray local revolutionary movements as foreign conspiracies more alien than the United States’ own violent interventions. Where democracy failed, capitalism flourished.
In the mid-1970s, fanatical dictatorships viewed South America as the forefront of a third world war in the fight against communism. Henry Kissinger endorsed this crusading spirit — and unlike in Vietnam, he accomplished his objectives there.
By the time Chile’s workers rose up to rally around Salvador Allende, Latin America had become a key arena in US planners’ “mortal struggle to determine the shape of the future world.” Henry Kissinger was obsessed with toppling the socialist president.
“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” Henry Kissinger advised the Argentine regime. In the first three years of the dictatorship, thousands of labor, student, and community activists were killed or disappeared.
Zionism emerged in response to 19th-century European antisemitism — but its aims in Palestine drew upon Western colonial ideologies. To present the current conflict as a timeless feud denies both European responsibility and Palestine’s multiethnic history.
In bringing together sellers and buyers, markets and investors, autocrats and capitalists, Kissinger Associates played an outsize role in the rapid advancement of neoliberalism around the world.
Already mired in scandal, New York City mayor Eric Adams is now pitting workers against each other by stoking resentment toward migrants and pushing new budget cuts. The city’s corporate class is laughing all the way to the bank.
After a 118-day strike, 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members are voting on whether to ratify a new agreement. AI has emerged as the key source of division, with some members unsatisfied that a ban wasn’t on the table.
British Columbia is touting a bill that will protect gig workers from the worst depredations of the sector. However, in a familiar trend of industries outsmarting employment standards in the country, the bill is poised to fall short of its lofty promises.
The number of medications eliminated from many insurance plans has skyrocketed over the last decade, jumping by some 1,600%. Part of the problem lies with pharmacy benefit managers — powerful companies that determine drug benefits for health insurers.
Across the European Union, conservatives and far-right forces are uniting around an anti-immigrant and climate-skeptic agenda. Ahead of June’s EU elections, the continent’s divided left urgently needs to put forward an alternative.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, critics accused Sweden’s Social Democrats of abandoning ordinary people. For Jacobin, a political adviser to the Swedish minister of health defends his country’s record, arguing that it prioritized the poor and vulnerable.
A wave of mass protests in Panama, organized by environmentalists, indigenous activists, and trade unions, has forced the government to hold a referendum on the contract of Canadian-owned First Quantum Minerals, the country’s largest mining company.
A new biography of Ray Dalio, billionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, reveals him as an autocratic, cultish leader who conflates moneymaking with genius — a rather convenient definition for an ultrarich finance guy.
Ahead of last week’s Dutch elections, the center-left called on voters to stop far-right leader Geert Wilders — but he won easily anyway. The Left needs to give working-class people a hopeful project to rally behind, not just rhetoric about defending democracy.
Actor Susan Sarandon is the latest target of the increasingly McCarthyite attacks on pro-Palestine figures. Supporters of Israel’s brutal war, meanwhile, can apparently say anything they want, including defending the slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
David Fincher’s new movie The Killer is supposedly a metacommentary on hit-man films — and possibly on the director himself. Or that could just be an excuse for how boring it is.