CounterVortex

The Andes

Peru: local dissent to China’s ‘megaport’ scheme

China and Peru are set to sign an updated free-trade agreement at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which opens this week in Lima. President Xi Jinping also inaugurated a Chinese-financed “megaport” in Chancay, a fishing town some 60 kilometers up the coast from Lima. The $1.3 billion project is to be overseen and majority-owned by the Chinese shipping giant COSCO, with an overland link to Brazil foreseen, providing an exit port for resources from throughout the continent. But the official boosterism is being met with a skeptical response by impoverished local villagers, who say the project is cutting them off from fishing waters and bringing them no economic benefit. Dredging for the port has already destroyed fish breeding grounds, locals say. (Photo: CADAL)

Planet Watch

Global carbon emissions hit record high in 2024

Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have hit a record high in 2024, with still no sign that they’ve peaked, according to a “carbon budget” assessment by the UK-based Global Carbon Project. Researchers found that burning of oil, gas and coal emitted 41.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2024, a 0.8% increase over 2023. When added to emissions generated by land-use changes such as deforestation, a total of 45.8 billion tons of CO2 was emitted in 2024. At this rate, the researchers see a 50% chance that global warming will exceed the 1.5 Celsius warming target set by the Paris Agreement within six years. The findings come as the UN climate talks open in Azerbaijan, where the parties are ostensibly negotiating ways to meet the Paris targets. But the leaders of the biggest carbon emitters—those nations responsible for 70% of 2023 emissions—did not bother to attend the gathering. (Photo of Azerbaijan oilfields: Indigoprime via Wikimedia Commons)

North America

Mandate for fascism, strategy for resistance

Donald Trump has for the first time won the popular vote, and now around an openly fascist program, starting with plans for mass detention of millions of undocumented immigrants. While there are signs of an emergent resistance, there are also undeniable signs of a left-MAGA convergence around a mutual embrace of authoritarian populism, exploiting disaffection from Biden-Harris’ criminal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In Episode 251of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg stakes stock of this grim juncture for the United States and the world. We also revive our call from 2016 for electoral nullification—the electors refusing to seat Trump. The New York judge in Trump’s “hush money” case must immediately impose the maximum sentence of four years in prison, bringing on the needed constitutional crisis, and the Electoral College must do what it was designed to do under the Constitution: bar a dangerous demagogue from the presidency. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr)

North America

Vote for ‘Killer Kamala.’ It’s important.

With UN aid agencies and humanitarian organizations warning of an “apocalyptic” scenario in North Gaza, the Biden administration faces a lawsuit charging complicity with genocide. The “pause” that the White House has imposed on some arms shipments to Israel by no means absolves the administration of moral (or legal) culpability. However, it may have had the effect of restraining Benjamin Netanyahu’s maximalist plans to cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians altogether. President Trump meanwhile recognized Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and launched the “Abraham Accords“—predicated on betrayal of the Palestinians by the Arab leadership. His 2019 executive order officially embraced the propagandistic conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and he now calls for complete repression (including by the military) of Palestine solidarity protests. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who was his Middle East pointman, is now openly backing the cleansing of Gaza of all Palestinians, while his ultra-Zionist former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is an open advocate of Israeli annexation of the West Bank and destruction of al-Aqsa Mosque. As Trump accuses Biden of “holding back” Israel, it is clear that Netanyahu and his most hardline cabinet members like Itamar Ben-Gvirare openly rooting for him—as is the Israel Lobby in DC. In Episode 250 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg urges that the Abandon Harris campaign, however laudable its professed aims, can at this point only abet a Trump victory and is therefore inimical to Palestinian survival. (Photo: Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder via Oklahoma Voice)

Palestine

UN human rights chief: Gaza faces ‘darkest moment’

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that “the darkest moment of the Gaza conflict is unfolding in the north of the Strip.” Calling for urgent action by the international community, Türk stated: “Unimaginably, the situation is getting worse by the day. The Israeli Government’s…practices in northern Gaza risk emptying the area of all Palestinians. We are facing what could amount to…crimes against humanity.” Türk asserted that under the Geneva Convention, member states have “an obligation to act when a serious violation of international humanitarian law has been committed.” (Photo: badwanart0/Pixabay via Jurist)

Greater Middle East

Podcast: neither Jewish State nor Islamic Republic

Israel’s long-awaited strikes on Iran targeted military and industrial installations in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam, with air-strikes also reported in the Syrian cities of Damascus and Homs. It is now Iran’s turn to retaliate in the escalatory tit-for-tat game, as the brink of regional and even world war looms ever closer. In Episode 249 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advocates a neither/nor position that rejects the militaristic and reactionary regimes of both Zionism and political Islam, and looks to a secular order in the Middle East. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image: @iranprotest2019)

Europe

Meloni maneuvers to save offshore migrant camp plan

Italy’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, issued a decree aimed at bypassing judicial obstacles to a controversial deal with Albania to hold and process the claims of asylum-seekers intercepted at sea by Italian forces. The move came days after a special immigration court in Rome ruled that the first group of 12 migrants sent to the repurposed military camp at Gjader, Albania, must be returned to Italy. The court found that the migrants’ countries of origin—Egypt and Bangladesh—are “unsafe,” making their offshore detention illegal. Meloni’s decree asserts the executive alone has the power to make such determinations, setting the stage for a showdown between her government and the judiciary. (Photo: Melting Pot Europa)

Greater Middle East

Turkey strikes Syria, Iraq after Ankara attack

Turkey launched air-strikes on supposed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) targets in Syria’s Rojava autonomous enclave and Iraq’s Kurdistan region in retaliation for an attack on the headquarters of a defense contractor in Ankara. Five were killed and two attackers reported “neutralized” in the explosion and armed assault at the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) facility in Ankara’s Kahramankazan district. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Turkish authorities quickly blamed the PKK. Strikes were reported on the Rojava towns of Qamishli, Derik, Kobane, Tal Rifaat, and Manbij. Rojava’s autonomous authorities said that at least four civilians were killed, including a five-year-old child, and 15 people injured. (Image: Pixabay)

Mexico

Indigenous pastor assassinated in Chiapas

Father Marcelo Pérez, an indigenous Tzotzil Maya priest with the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Mexico’s conflicted southern state of Chiapas, was assassinated immediately after celebrating Mass. He was returning to his car from the church at the barrio of Cuxtitali in the highland city of San Cristóbal when he was shot by gunmen on a motorcycle. Hundreds of mourners attended his funeral the following day in the village of his birth, San Andrés Larráinzar, chanting “Long live Father Marcelo, priest of the poor.” He had received threats for his outspoken opposition to the criminal organizations and paramilitary groups fueling violence in Chiapas. The murder was condemned in a statement by the Mexican Bishops’ Conference, which said the act “not only deprives the community of a dedicated pastor but also silences a prophetic voice that tirelessly fought for peace with truth and justice in the region of Chiapas.” (Credit: Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas via CNA)

Palestine

Anti-Semitism versus anti-Zionism: beyond parsing III

In Episode 248 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the New York Times coverage of the ugly turn in the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, and warns against the targeting of Jews in the guise of a misguided supposed “anti-Zionism.” The ongoing genocide in Gaza urgently demands protest, but just as urgently demands tactically and analytically astute protest that does not play into the cynical weaponization of the accusation of anti-Semitism by Zionist propaganda. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image via frgdr Blog. Hebrew lettering in background spells names of places in Europe where Jews were exterminated.)

Africa

Sudan: Fur leaders reject RSF-backed ’emirate’

Leaders and activists from the Fur people in Sudan’s Central Darfur state voiced their rejection of the Rapid Support Forces’ establishment of a new “emirate” in the ethnicity’s traditional territory for an Arab group that has migrated from the neighboring Central African Republic. They warned of an agenda of demographic change and the empowerment of outside groups at the expense of the indigenous population. The response came after platforms affiliated with the RSF published a video of a celebration held by a group called “Awlad Baraka & Mubarak,” marking the establishment of the “emirate.” RSF Brig. Gen. Mohamed Adam Bangoz addressed the event. (Map via Radio Tamazuj)

Europe

Podcast: Tolstoy would shit II

The bellicose and authoritarian Russian state’s propaganda exploitation of the anarcho-pacifist novelist Leo Tolstoy is an obvious and perverse irony. But a less obvious irony also presents itself. Like all fascist regimes, that of Vladimir Putin is stigmatizing and even criminalizing homosexuality and other sexual “deviance.” Following alarming reports of “concentration camps” for gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Moscow began to impose an anti-gay agenda nationwide. A 2020 constitutional reform officially enshrined “traditional marriage,” while a “gay propaganda law” imposes penalties on any outward expression of gay identity, resulting in police raids on Moscow gay bars. The “LGBT movement” has been designated a “terrorist organization”; media depictions of same-sex love are banned as “deviant content.” Yet the venerable littérateur now glorified as a symbol of Russian nationalism may have himself been gay. In Episode 247 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Javier Sethness Castro, author of Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge 2023).