
Abolish the Olympics
The Tokyo “2020” Olympic games are just like every other Olympics: a bonanza for corporate profits, and miserable for everyone else. The Olympics can’t be reformed — it’s time to abolish them.

The Tokyo “2020” Olympic games are just like every other Olympics: a bonanza for corporate profits, and miserable for everyone else. The Olympics can’t be reformed — it’s time to abolish them.

In the twentieth century, the post-revolutionary Mexican government drew up ambitious plans to transform the world economic system for the benefit of the Global South. Their failure helped turn Mexico itself into a laboratory for neoliberalism.

Despite copious evidence of Saudi complicity in the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration and its successors have spent twenty years shielding the country’s elite from accountability while making war on an ever-growing list of other Middle East countries.

The US-backed Indonesian dictator Suharto was responsible for some of the twentieth century’s worst crimes. More than two decades after Suharto’s death, his regime’s brutal legacy is still holding back democracy in Indonesia.

Xiomara Castro won Honduras’s presidency pledging to tax wealth, expand the welfare state, and end the country’s “failed neoliberal model.” Her win was also a defeat for the US, which backed a coup that overthrew her husband Manuel Zelaya 12 years ago.

Gabriel Boric’s presidential victory and a new constitution are the crowning achievements of Chile’s broad socialist movement. Now comes the hard part: fulfilling a vision of working-class prosperity that stretches back to Salvador Allende and beyond.

The Russian aggression in Ukraine has triggered a revival of Cold War liberalism. After decades of self-doubt and introspection, old ideas about “the free world” and the “empire of evil” have been resurrected. But to revive the Cold War would be a serious error.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s uncompromising opposition to the crimes of empire makes him a taboo figure in French culture. The French political mainstream is still in denial about the bloody history of colonialism.

In a new interview, Noam Chomsky discusses the hypocrisies of US empire and why, if we really wanted to build a decent society, we’d immediately slash the massive military budget.

John Bolton bragged this week that he’s “someone who has helped plan coups.” It was a brazen display of antidemocratic imperial arrogance, making clear that antidemocratic meddling is par for the course in US foreign policy.

The media isn’t conveying how serious the Taiwan situation is. China is willing to fight for the island — possibly with tactical nuclear weapons — and if war comes to the Taiwan Strait, the US has a high chance of losing.

Rather than benefiting workers in the US and elsewhere, US foreign policy enriches corporate elites and the national security state. Our task is to rebuild the left institutions that bind workers together across borders and fight for a more just world order.

It’s easy to chalk up the Watergate scandal to Richard Nixon’s singular paranoia. But his criminal actions are better understood as a reaction to the social upheavals of the day and a feverish attempt to destroy the Left.

A new collection of early writings by Christopher Hitchens reveals the writer as a scourge of American imperialism who skewered Cold War hypocrisies in shining prose. But it also foreshadows Hitchens’s post-9/11 transformation into a neoconservative mascot.

Canada’s former finance minister Bill Morneau has recently moved from cabinet to the board of a multinational bank. This business as usual is a reminder that Liberals are totally at home among Canada’s rich and powerful.

For two decades, Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy’s daughter, has made award-winning, godawful films about America’s political class. Pelosi in the House, a dull documentary about her mother and January 6, proves she is the auteur the liberal establishment deserves.

Pelé rose to fame during the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship. He matched his brilliant play on the field with a careful avoidance of crossing the powerful.

The military and its private sector offshoots desperately want to portray themselves as good guys fighting against dark forces. To accomplish that, they’re increasingly leaning into nerd fantasy like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.

In 1948, Australian Labor foreign minister Doc Evatt was instrumental in convincing the United Nations to recognize Israel. Today the ALP continues his legacy by ignoring Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

We spoke to director Santiago Mitre about his Oscar-nominated film Argentina, 1985, which depicts the struggle to bring the leaders of Argentina’s murderous military junta to justice.