SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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Trump and his impossible return to the past
In an act of desperation, Trump is trying to stop the clock to revive the ‘golden age’ of imperialism, writes ATILIO A BORON
Cartoon: Songi
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
THE radical return to protectionism is not only possible but necessary for an empire facing an undeniable decline. It has been denounced by critical analysts but certified by leading intellectuals of the US Establishment, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski in a 2012 text and, subsequently, by several documents of the Rand Corporation.
Decline, or dissolution, if you prefer, came hand in hand with critical domestic factors: the slow growth of the economy, the loss of competitiveness in global markets, and the gigantic indebtedness of the federal government. If in 1980 the US federal government’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 34.54 per cent, today it has reached an astronomical level of 122.55 per cent. To this must be added the intractable balance of the trade deficit, which continues to grow and in 2024 amounted to $131.4 billion, representing roughly 3.5 per cent of the GDP. This is the case because the US consumes more than it produces.
To this constellation of domestic factors of imperial weakening should be added the deterioration of democratic legitimacy. The latter was highlighted by the January 6 2021 assault on the Capitol and by the more recent widespread pardons granted by Trump in favour of some 1,500 attackers who had been convicted by the US judiciary. Instead of bipartisan consensus, today, there is a huge rift undermining the political system, of which Trumpism is but one expression.
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