IV573 - October 2022

“According to the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 49 percent of voters plan to vote Republican and 45 percent Democrat, with Republicans gaining among women and Latinos. The Democrat’s principal problem is the economy.”

“We need to end all the destructive wars that we have seen in the Twenty-First century in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, sub-Saharan Africa; and more to come perhaps in central Asia. Not only does this mean the loss of lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions, but it is also a massive waste of resources and a huge hit to the environment.”

“We who know the history of the Iranian uprisings, the political history […] feel responsible and committed to defending our values so that there is no going back after a revolution.”

The 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party represents a very symbolic tipping point: the predicted break with the political order established at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping has now been consummated. Xi Jinping has granted himself personal power unprecedented in the history of contemporary China.The 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party represents a very symbolic tipping point: the predicted break with the political order established at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping has now been consummated. Xi Jinping has granted himself personal power unprecedented in the history of contemporary China.

“Take the lockdown policy as an example. Xi’s success in 2021 has long turned sour. Lockdown should only be the first step in dealing with a pandemic. It is meant to buy time for the invention and mass production of an effective vaccine, and to earn the trust of the public. In these two endeavours Xi failed miserably.”

“It is a context of turbulence, where the right and the far right are on the offensive, often allied with the conservative current of the Evangelical Churches, with the big landowners and big business, with the support of a media field totally under the orders of capital.”

“The fight over wages and social incomes is therefore directly linked to an anti-capitalist struggle against the high cost of living.”

“We have to advocate and push movements and discussions to consider the importance of offering free abortions on demand and advocate for a reproductive healthcare system that includes the struggles of all humans, regardless of one’s socioeconomic status or identity.”

“They want a world free from militarized violence, from state and national politics that organize and divide people along lines of inequality and oppression, from gender violence and discrimination, from incarceration, from the many forms of socio-economic immiseration, precarity and isolation.”

“France refused to condemn Mahamat Déby’s putsch, unlike Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea, which experienced similar situations, on the grounds that Chad was a special case. The particularity conferred on Chad is explained by its role in the fight against jihadists.”