Category: Uncategorized

by B. R. GOWANI

1 June 2019: Nayib Bukele Ortez became El Salvador’s 81st President

later, he declared an emergency and suspended most civil liberties

El Salvador has the world’s highest number of people in prison

including 12 year old minors …

the number of imprisoned is three times that of the United States

that is, per 100,000 people El Salvador has 1,659 people in jail

whereas per 100,000 people, the US has 541 people behind the bar

which itself is quite a high number for a so-called “democracy”

due to his autocratic rule, Bukele is a darling of the right-wing Republicans

he flew into the US after getting reelected in 2024

he was called a “true leader and received standing ovation at the CPAC

(Conservative Political Action Conference)

Bukele alerted the gathering:

“Dark forces are already taking over your country. You may not see it yet, but it’s already happening.”

Bukele, like other foreign leaders, is good at bullshitting

these leaders are good at telling lies Western ears like to hear

strange indeed as …

dark forces were being warned about dark forces by a dark force

if you terrorize your people you become a “beloved” leader

Garbage man’s friend & the Congress reject Matt Gaetz praised Bukele on X:

“Nayib Bukele locks up the gangs, throws out the corrupt judges, unapologetically embraces God, and rebukes globalism with facts and results.

He is beloved by his people, and an inspiration to the Western World.

I’m honored to call him a friend.

Western World doesn’t need Bukelele’s inspiration …

Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492

since then, Western World has been on a pillaging and genocidal rampage

Nayib Bukele told Time magazine’s Vera Bergengruen:

“A leader should be a philosopher before he is a king, rather than the typical politician who is hated by their people.”

well, Bukele is a politician whom people can’t hate openly

Bukele’s philosophy is ruling with mano dura or “iron fist”

his iron fist silences all voices allowing Bukele to declare: no one hates me

he throws people in jail by just by alleging they belong to a “gang”

in two and a half year, 330 people died in El Salvador jails

94% of them were not gang members

the other 6%, even if they did belong to gangs, had a right to fair trial

a just system should assist gang members to be rehabilitated

on September 21, 2021, Bukele gave his first speech at the UN

then he changed his Twitter profile which read:

“the coolest dictator in the world”

this coolest dictator was not Trump’s favorite

but now Trump welcomes Bukele as a “friend of mine”

the reason being that he wanted to use El Salvador as a dumping ground

for removing immigrants from the US by alleging they’re gang members

US is paying $6 million to Bukele regime to house deportees

innocent people are charged with whatever the Dear Leader comes up with

one of the innocents is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, married to a US citizen

US Senator Chris Van Hollen took up the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case

he went to El Salvador and had Garcia moved to a less rough jail

when the CNN asked Bukele about Garcia, Bukele played smart-ass

“How can I smuggle — how can I return him to the United States? It’s like I smuggle him into the United States or what do I do? Of course, I’m going to do it. It’s like, I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle the terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

one has to marvel at the confidence & sarcasm of Bukele’s bullshitting

“How can I smuggle the terrorist into the United States?”

the CNN reporter couldn’t say:

“what harm an innocent person wrongly charged will do to us

no one can match us, we’re the greatest terrorists on earth”

Bukele’s smart-assness was thanks to President/King Donald Trump

what happens if tomorrow for some reason Trump doesn’t like Bukele

well, Trump will bomb the shit out of Bukele and El Salvador

Bukele will be “the coolest,” literally

his lifeless body won’t be left with any hot blood

no exaggeration:

• Panama’s Manuel Noriega worked for the US CIA

Noam Chomsky on how US hates clients’ independence

“It’s all quite predictable, as study after study shows. A brutal tyrant crosses the line from admirable friend to “villain” and “scum” when he commits the crime of independence. One common mistake is to go beyond robbing the poor-which is just fine-and to start interfering with the privileged, eliciting opposition from business leaders.

“By the mid 1980s, Noriega was guilty of these crimes. Among other things, he seems to have been dragging his feet about helping the US in the contra war. His independence also threatened our interests in the Panama Canal. On January 1, 1990, most of the administration of the Canal was due to go over to Panama-in the year 2000, it goes completely to them. We had to make sure that Panama was in the hands of people we could control before that date.”

George H. W. Bush invaded tiny Panama in 1989, destroyed many slums

a country of 2,300,000 was attacked by 27,000 soldiers & 300 planes

the US killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of Panamanians

• Noriega was arrested and died in a US jail in 2017

Iraq and and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein met the same fate

in January 1991, Bush bombed Iraq killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis

March 2003 — Bush’s son George W. Bush, then president, invaded Iraq

• Saddam was captured, a sham trial was held, and Saddam was hanged

Iraq was destroyed again by a second war, a great number of people died

every Iraqi government since then, runs according to the US dictate

there are many more scenarios, like this …

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by BADRI RAINA

Hashmi was a dreamy-eyed modern-day progressive Hamlet, who, like his predecessor, remained committed to “set right” our own rotten times.

You may recall that in the iconic play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, it is revealed to the young prince that his father, the erstwhile king of Denmark, was murdered by his uncle Claudius and his mother Gertrude who, just three months after the funeral, entered into wedlock with the uncle ascending the throne as a usurper.

Shattered to the soul, Hamlet realises that “something is rotten in Denmark/it is an unweeded garden/things rank in nature possess it merely”.

As a reluctant crusader, Hamlet, desiring vengeance, bemoans “the cursed spite” that he should have “been born” to “set right” “the time” which he characterises as “being out of joint”.

A profoundly thinking protagonist, Hamlet rejects the impulse to carry out the correction in the customary way, namely by resorting to violence and killing the usurper uncle-king.

Instead, he thinks up the creative idea of staging a play “in which I shall catch the conscience of the king” by enacting in that play, famously titled Mousetrap, the actual facts of the act of murder committed by Claudius and Gertrude.

This he does, with stunning results; the usurper, recognising what is before him in the play, gets up to go to pray, only to bemoan how “my words go up, my thoughts remain below”.

Thus the play effectuates a transformation more telling and lasting than a mere revenge killing might have achieved.

Safdar Hashmi and our own kings

The late Safdar Hashmi was a dreamy-eyed modern-day progressive Hamlet, who, like the Shakespearean predecessor, remained committed to “set right” our own rotten times, again through the modus operandi of staging plays, not in palaces but in the streets where forgotten masses live out each day in pain and rejection.

Until, on that tragic day of January 1, 1989, lumpen stormtroopers of the powers-that-were assaulted the players in a street in Sahibabad, resulting in the death of an outstanding educationist, artist and friend of “we the people”.

An organisation called SAHMAT, named after him and his work, has since committedly sought to keep alive the memory and legacy of Safdar’s politics and of the means he used so tellingly to project emancipated ideas, namely, the agit-prop street play.

And, what with our own reversion to modern-day elected monarchies, I do not think this has been an easy commitment to carry out.

On April 12, 2025, Safdar Hashmi’s birth anniversary, SAHMAT organised a whole evening of street plays, put up by diverse groups, comprised chiefly of young, college-going students.

The evening drew a fair-sized audience, soon to be riveted to sharing imaginatively rendered enlightened critiques of our present-day social and ideological evils.

The Wire for more

Iran’s mid-20th-century transformation through the lens of Mohammad Mossadegh’s struggle for sovereignty, the rise of leftist movements, and the 1953 CIA-backed coup that reshaped the nation’s political landscape. This video tells about nationalism, socialism, and Islamism’s impact on Iran’s revolutionary history, setting the stage for the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

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by JOSHUA CRAZE

The 15 April marked the two-year anniversary of a civil war in Sudan that has left tens of thousands dead and millions displaced. I published an essay in Sidecar, ‘Gunshots in Khartoum’, two days after the war began, which tried to trace its emergent lineaments. The conflict initially pitted the Sudanese army against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary organization formed during the reign of dictator Omar al Bashir (1989-2019). In the war’s first weeks, the RSF overran much of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, including the Presidential Palace. Initially constructed in 1825, during the Turkish-Egyptian colonisation of Sudan, the palace was the headquarters of an imperial regime intent on enslaving and plundering the rest of the country. The last governor of Turco-Egyptian Sudan (1820-1885), Charles Gordon, was killed by Mahdist insurgents on the steps of the palace in 1885. Successive regimes would retain both the exploitative tendencies of the Turco-Egyptian colonialists, and their obsession with the Presidential Palace. After the Mahdists demolished it, the British rebuilt it during their colonial occupation of Sudan (1898-1955). It became the ‘Republican Palace’ after Sudanese independence in 1956, and then – albeit briefly – the ‘People’s Palace’ during the reign of Jafaar Nimeiri (1969-1985). Bashir, who took power in a coup in 1989, ordered the construction of a new palace, next to the old one, built and funded by the Chinese. He didn’t get to stay long in his new abode. A wave of protests in 2018-19, triggered by cuts to grain and fuel subsidies, ended his regime.

A transitional government was established in 2019, which saw civilian politicians uncomfortably share power with the leaders of Sudan’s security services: Abdul Fattah Al Burhan, the chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), was made the head of a Sovereign Council, while Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (also known as Hemedti), the RSF’s leader, became his deputy. The two men soon conspired to push the civilians out of power. In October 2021, I wandered through a Potemkin protest organized outside the palace, masterminded by the security services, which used the astroturfed unrest as a rhetorical justification for an autogolpe later that month. Bashir had multiplied his security services as a means of coup-proofing his regime, making sure that no single organ was strong enough to seize power. Each had its own economic empire, which included construction, real estate and banks. It was perhaps inevitable that the two most powerful of the Hydra’s heads, the RSF and the Sudanese army, would turn on each other and compete for control of the capital. After almost two years of conflict, on 21 March 2025, the Sudanese army finally retook the Presidential Palace, and pushed the RSF out of almost all of Khartoum. Jubilant soldiers posed in front of the ruined palace, its walls pockmarked by bullet holes. Two weeks ago, one European diplomat asked me expectantly: does this mean the war is over?

The palace, like Sudanese sovereignty, now lies empty. What began as a battle to control the state has morphed into a war that has no clear end in sight. Both the RSF and the Sudanese army were initially weak military actors without broad social bases. They have waged war in the manner of their mentor, Bashir, who played ethnic groups against each other, and outsourced his counterinsurgency campaigns to militia forces. Both the RSF and the army have created unruly coalitions of communitarian self-defence forces and mercenary fighters. The local dynamics set in motion by this strategy have become disarticulated from the fight for control of the Sudanese state. For the young Hamar and Misseriya men fighting in the Kordofan region of southern Sudan, struggles over land and resources have become existential, and left wounds that a national-level ceasefire could not heal, were one ever to be agreed. A struggle for control of the palace has ignited a hundred wars across the country.

Side Car – New Left Review for more

by MICHAEL ALBERT

Imagine you are about to crack open a new book and begin reading. The opening sentence  goes like this: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” 

You might think “worst” refers to the now on-going Trumpian fascistic makeover of government, economy, culture, health, education, and indeed all of U.S. society and beyond. Goodbye empathy. And you might think “best” refers to students, workers, moms, dads, daughters, and sons assembling to instead win a fundamentally better future. Hello solidarity. But Charles Dickens actually wrote the quoted sentence nearly 170 years ago to begin his “A Tale of Two Cities.” Please forgive that I have shamelessly adapted Dickens’ title to become “Trumpism: A Tale of Three Reactions.”

Consider reaction one, passive accommodation. Many millions of people who Trump disturbs, worries, sickens, or even enrages nonetheless remain quiescent. They ignore unravelling social ties. They deny impending social suicide. They accommodate. Why? 

I would wager that two long-nurtured beliefs fuel people’s resignation. One: you can’t fight city hall and win. Two: even if you do fight and win, what you implement will lead right back to the vile conditions you sought to overthrow. Yes, fear undoubtedly also propels people to accommodate. We bow to avoid Trump’s cruel wrath. And yes, exhaustion or even eyes on only self likely play a part. We must go where it is quiet. But despite these latter possibilities, I think accommodation isn’t mostly people being scared, lazy, or uncaring. I think accommodationists mostly feel that to fight Trump is a fool’s errand. They believe we will lose big time, and more, if we did win our victory would just reinstall yesterday’s horrors. Accommodationists feel “doom is our destiny.” 

When the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of lawyers in a big firm including the young ones who still have social ties and progressive feelings are told by their groveling “partner” bosses to obey cuts and restraints and acquiesce to Trumpian dictates, and they say, okay, yes boss, and lawyer on, what is that? It is passive accommodation. It is individuals seeking individual survival without even contemplating another path. We can understand, but why don’t they resist? Does it even occur to accommodationists to try? 

The same holds for universities. When groveling Trustees tell faculty and students they must surrender to Trump and in response most faculty and some students say, okay, yes boss, and return to class, what is that? It is again passive accommodation. It is individuals seeking individual survival. It is individuals not even noticing their potential collective power. This too is understandable, but why don’t they resist? 

What leads to accommodation? Protect myself, my future, my job, and my family? Okay, I can do that. Fight against Trump and my own immediate groveling boss, fight against just my own circumstances, much less fight to achieve a better world? No way. I can’t do that. I surrender.

Z Network for more

by HAO PING

China’s tech drive has avoided the pitfalls and failures of both Soviet-style economic planning and US laissez faire capitalism

This article is the second part of a commentary published by Guancha.cn. Hao Ping, which means “good commentary”, is the Guancha column’s title. Asia Times editorial elucidation notes are in brackets. It is republished with permission.

In early 2025, China saw a wave of technological innovation achievements—from movies and video games to artificial intelligence and futuristic fighter jets—making many realize that a long-term transformation was already underway.

This sudden change results from China’s strategic resolve, market dynamism and societal collaboration. Although this transformation has been ongoing, it is finally visible to the world. Its ultimate result may exceed what people can imagine. It will continue to evolve and become a new paradigm of industrial civilization.

Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, once offered a compelling summary of this rapid transformation.

“I grew up in the 1980s in a remote town in Guangdong. My father was a primary school teacher. In the 1990s, people had many opportunities to make money in Guangdong. Many parents came to our house and said that education was pointless. But now, those attitudes have completely changed. Because making money has become harder—even jobs like taxi drivers are scarce. In just one generation, everything has changed.

“Going forward, hardcore innovation will become increasingly important. This might not be widely understood right now because society wants tangible results. When those who achieve hardcore innovation become successful and recognized, society’s collective attitudes will change. We need more successful cases and some more time.”

In the summer of 1959, the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park welcomed two special visitors: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon.

In front of a model home filled with modern appliances and furniture, the two engaged in the historic “Kitchen Debate.”

Nixon argued that most American blue-collar workers could easily afford such a home and its appliances, with homes typically replaced every 20 years as consumers upgraded to better ones. “The American system is designed to take advantage of new inventions and new techniques,” he said.

However, Khrushchev sidestepped Nixon’s point and focused his critique on distribution issues [economic benefits]. [Several] decades later, the outcome of the Cold War [the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991] offered a phased resolution to this debate.

Asia Times for more

by JONATHAN LAMBERT

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish.

If you follow any path of ancestry back far enough, you’ll reach the same single point. Whether you begin with gorillas or ginkgo trees or bacteria that live deep in the bowels of the Earth — or yourself, for that matter — all roads lead to LUCA, the “last universal common ancestor.” This ancient, single-celled organism (or, possibly, population of single-celled organisms) was the progenitor of every varied form that makes a life for itself on our planet today.

LUCA does not represent the origin of life, the instance whereby some chemical alchemy snapped molecules into a form that allowed self-replication and all the mechanisms of evolution. Rather, it’s the moment when life as we know it took off. LUCA is the furthest point in evolutionary history that we can glimpse by working backward from what’s alive today. It’s the most recent ancestor shared by all modern life‚ our collective lineage traced back to a single ancient cellular population or organism.

“It’s not the first cell, it’s not the first microbe, it’s not the first anything, really,” said Greg Fournier (opens a new tab), an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In a way, it is the end of the story of the origin of life.”

Still, understanding LUCA — whether it was simple or complex, and how quickly it emerged after life’s origin — could help answer some of our deepest questions about where we come from and whether we’re alone in the universe.

“[LUCA] tells our own story,” said Edmund Moody (opens a new tab), an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bristol. “It gives us a point from which we can look even further back.”

For half a century, biologists have focused on different kinds of physiological, genomic and fossil evidence to paint portraits of LUCA that sometimes clash dramatically. In 2024, Moody and a team of interdisciplinary researchers, including geologists, paleontologists, system modelers and phylogeneticists, combined their knowledge to build a probabilistic model that reconstructs modern life’s shared ancestor and estimates when it lived.

The analysis, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution in July, sketched a surprisingly complex picture (opens a new tab) of the cell. LUCA lived off hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, boasted a genome as large as that of some modern bacteria, and already had a rudimentary immune system, according to the study. Its genomic complexity, the authors argue, suggests that LUCA was one of many lineages — the rest now extinct — living about 4.2 billion years ago, a turbulent time relatively early in Earth’s history and long thought too harsh for life to flourish.

Quanta Magazine for more

by BEN NORTON

At a summit held by a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, US Vice President JD Vance gave a speech about globalization that made it clear that the West wants to keep poor, formerly colonized countries in the Global South trapped at the bottom of the global value chain, through monopolistic control of advanced technologies.

Silicon Valley prepares for war with China

The US vice president made these remarks at a summit that was organized by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This annual meeting in Washington, DC is called the American Dynamism Summit, and it brings together corporate executives and US government officials to facilitate contracts.

One of their main priorities is preparing for war with China. Andreessen Horowitz promotes 50 US companies that it says are “shaping the fight of the future”, outlining a scenario of a hypothetical 2027 war with China over Taiwan.

Vance is a China hawk who has scapegoated Beijing for the many economic problems in the US, demonizing it as “the biggest threat to our country”.

After Donald Trump selected Vance to be his running mate in the 2024 campaign, Vance pledged that they would end the war in Ukraine, not because they wanted peace for peace’s sake, but rather to prioritize containing China. The US will “bring this thing to a rapid close so America can focus on the real issue, which is China”, Vance told Fox News, claiming, “That’s the biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it”.

In his March 18 speech at the Andreessen Horowitz summit, the US vice president sought to bridge the gap between right-wing “populists” and what he called “techno-optimists” — a term promoted by billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a personal friend of Vance.

Vance has close ties to Silicon Valley billionaires, and has even worked for some of them.

Although Vance is known for exaggerating his humble upbringing, for which he was accused of poverty “stolen valor”, Vance attended the elite Yale Law School and worked as a corporate lawyer and venture capitalist.

The far-right Silicon Valley billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel previously employed Vance. Thiel then cultivated his political career, spending $15 million to help Vance win the 2022 Senate election in Ohio.

Like Vance, Thiel is extremely anti-China. Thiel also openly supports monopolies. The billionaire venture capitalist declared that “competition is for losers”, writing that “monopoly is the condition of every successful business”.

Thiel identifies as a conservative libertarian, and he has argued that capitalism is more important than democracy. But he also wrote that, “Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites”, and that US corporations must “look to build a monopoly”.

Dependency theory was right: Global North wants Global South stuck at bottom of value chain

In his speech at the American Dynamism Summit, Vance stated (emphasis added):

The idea of globalization was that rich countries would move further up the value chain, while the poor countries made the simpler things. You would open an iPhone box, and it would say “designed in Cupertino, California”.

Now, the implication, of course, is that it would be manufactured in Shenzhen or somewhere else. And, yeah, some people might lose their jobs in manufacturing, but they could learn to design or, to use a very popular phrase, learn to code.

But I think we got it wrong. It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things. There are network effects, as you all well understand.

The firms that design products work with firms that manufacture. They share intellectual property. They share best practices. And they even sometimes share critical employees.

Now, we assumed that other nations would always trail us in the value chain, but it turns out that as they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends.

In these comments, the US vice president inadvertently acknowledged that the fundamental thesis of the dependency theorists in the 1960s was indeed correct.

Geopolitical Economy for more

by MERCY MUTEMI

A landmark case could see the US tech giant forced to take responsibility for workers’ rights violations not just in Kenya but globally.

In 2025, the world’s largest social media company, Meta, has taken a defiant new tone on the question of whether and to what extent it accepts responsibility for the real-world harm that its platforms enable.

This has been widely understood as a gambit to curry favour with President Donald Trump’s administration, and Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg all but said so in a January 7 video announcing the end of third-party fact-checking.

“We are going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world, going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said, giving his product decisions a distinct geopolitical flavour.

To justify the company’s decisions to do away with fact-checking and scale back content moderation on its platforms, Zuckerberg and Meta have appealed to the United States’ constitutional protection of the right to freedom of expression. Fortunately, for those of us living in the countries Meta has vowed to “push back on”, we have constitutions, too.

In Kenya, for example, where I represent a group of former Meta content moderators in a class-action lawsuit against the company, the post-independence constitution differs from those in the US and Western Europe with its explicit prioritisation of fundamental human rights and freedoms. The constitutions of a great many nations with colonial histories share this in common, a response to how these rights were violated when their peoples were first pressed into the global economy.

We are now beginning to see how these constitutions can be brought to bear in the global technology industry. In a landmark decision last September, the Kenyan Court of Appeal ruled that content moderators could bring their human rights violations case against Meta in the country’s labour courts.

Al Jazeera for more