IV521 - June 2018

IVP521 PDF magazine

In a sinister development, the FBI is targeting Black Lives Matters and what Justice Department head Jeff Sessions calls “Black identity” extremists. It has the looks of a new COINTELPRO (“Counter Intelligence Program”), the infamous secret program directed by J. Edgar Hoover to infiltrate and destroy the Black Liberation Movement in the 1960s and ’70s and murder many of its leaders.

In June 2018, Argentina signed a loan agreement with the IMF. We therefore republish a useful excerpt of an interview given by Eric Toussaint to Maud Bailly in 2014, which focuses on the process of the Argentine debt restructuring in the wake of the country’s suspension of debt payments between the end of 2001 and 2005.

Mexico’s July 1 elections will take place amid a profound crisis unfolding across Mexico. With voters deeply alienated by the alliance of Mexico’s two main pro-business parties, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN), the question of what the country’s anti-capitalist left should do is critical.

On the occasion of the publication of the report Transnational Corporations and Land speculation in Brazil by Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights), Mary Taylor of LeftEast spoke with Fábio Pitta, Devlin Kuyek and Attila Sz?cs about the broader implications of their findings.

Does the fall of Rajoy open up a new political cycle in the Spanish state? Can Sánchez stabilize the political situation? What will be the attitude of Ciudadanos, which has become the first option of the ruling classes? What role could Podemos play in this new situation?

Eric Toussaint interviewed by Marie Brette for TV5 Monde

Below we publish two pieces on the Singapore summit from comrades in Solidarity in the United States. The first is the editorial in the next issue of their magazine Against the Current, which went to press before the summit itself. The second from David Finkel, was written afterwards.

Even Trump had to back down. The heartbreaking images and audio recordings of migrant Mexican and Central American children being separated from their parents after having been arrested crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, and the chorus of bipartisan complaints, made continuing the policy of family separations a political liability. However, ending the policy, which will not apparently affect those families that have already separated, leaves the bulk of the U.S.’s anti-immigrant policies intact.

Relations between Washington et Pyongyang were radically modified during the Singapore summit of 12 June 2018, and it is good news. The dominant tone of the “serious” US and British press and the English language regional press was completely different. For the first, the Singapore summit was a disaster, indeed “treason” on Trump’s part. For the second, it was an unanticipated turn of events: the threat of war was lifted, leaving the possibility of a lasting peace in the peninsula.