Matt Kennard claims in his new book that the bipartisan War on Terror laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency and the rise of fascism. We now face the consequences of empowering extremists to the upper echelons of government power.
Thursday, May 28, 2026
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
How Palestine Activists Eked Out a Win at the Canadian Labour Congress
Canada's biggest labour body agreed to cut ties with its Israeli counterpart
The largest labour organization in Canada has committed to cutting ties with Israel’s trade federation, the Histadrut.
A resolution passed at the constitutional convention of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) in Winnipeg earlier this month also calls on the Canadian government to support a two-way arms embargo, suspend the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement and condemn Israeli settlement expansion.
Kevin MacKay, who attended the convention as a delegate from the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), told PressProgress that, when it came time for the vote, “We had a lot of the biggest labour leaders in the hall lining up at the mic to either speak or show support for the resolution.”
“It’s amazing to have leadership on board,” said MacKay, an anthropology professor at Mohawk College. “That’s not always the case.”
Until the eleventh hour, delegates like MacKay weren’t sure if they would be voting on a resolution to cut ties with the Histadrut — after a resolution to declare trade, services and relationships with Israel to be “hot cargo” was disqualified altogether.
MacKay is a member of Labour For Palestine (L4P), a volunteer-run effort made up of workers from across Canada. The group has been organizing to pass hot-cargo resolutions at provincial labour federations that would instruct workers to refrain from handling all goods produced by, or going to, Israel.
Less than a week before the convention began, activists with L4P got word that the resolution they spearheaded, which would have committed the CLC to issuing a hot-cargo declaration and cutting ties with the Histadrut, had been given a “non-concurrence” decision by the CLC’s General Resolutions Committee, meaning it wouldn’t be presented to delegates for a vote.
“We believe that this is a political discussion and a political decision,” Hassan Husseini, a member of L4P’s national steering committee, told PressProgress just ahead of the convention. (more...)
How Palestine Activists Eked Out a Win at the Canadian Labour Congress
Ireland advances bill targeting occupied West Bank settlement goods
Ireland is advancing legislation to ban trade in goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Ireland is preparing to move forward with legislation that would prohibit trade involving goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, amid mounting tensions between Dublin and the Israeli regime over the war on Gaza and settlement expansion.
Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee said the government aims to secure passage of the bill by mid-July despite pressure from "Israel", members of the US Congress, and international business groups opposing the measure.
The proposed law would mark one of the most significant economic steps taken by a European country against illegal settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territories.
With this step, Ireland joins 9 other countries in calling for an end to Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, warning that escalating settler violence and "annexation" policies are undermining regional stability and prospects for a "two-state solution".
In a joint statement issued Friday, the leaders of Australia, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, and New Zealand condemned continued settlement construction by the Israeli occupation, stressing that such projects violate international law. (more...)
Ireland advances bill targeting occupied West Bank settlement goods
Stopping contemporary fascism: What is to be done?
Contemporary fascism has evolved into a globalized system of authoritarian domination led by the US and its allies, combining military aggression, economic coercion, media manipulation, and institutional capture against resistance movements and sovereign states across the Global South.
The first four months of 2026 will be recorded in the memory of the peoples of the Global South as the period in which contemporary fascism abandoned the last vestiges of hypocrisy. Far from being a mere historical replica of the interwar regimes, this phenomenon has evolved into a transnational architecture of domination led by the elites of the United States and their strategic partners —a hybrid, financialized, algorithmic, and transnational authoritarianism that feeds on digital polarization, institutional capture from within, the commodification of security, and the tacit alliance between military-industrial complexes, technological oligarchies, and reactionary governments — where the threat and coercive use of force have progressively replaced any operative vestige of international law.
The UN and international laws are not ignored out of carelessness or institutional incompetence; they are subjected to a systematic emptying, selectively instrumentalized, and neutralized when they collide with the strategic interests of the hegemonic center. De facto, the law of the strongest prevails, but it is masked in narratives of national security, financial stability, protection of human rights, and other fallacies that function as juridical smokescreens. What until recently was presented as "diplomatic pressure" or "selective sanctions" has been transformed, in an accelerated and structural manner, into massive and arbitrary economic sanctions, direct or covert military intervention, de facto territorial occupation, and planned humanitarian asphyxiation.
From the rupture of the Venezuelan government on January 3 —with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, within the framework of "Operation Absolute Resolve" — to the unjustified and treacherous aggression by the United States and "Israel" against Iran, "Operation Epic Fury", launched on February 28 — which has also reached Lebanon as an object of aggression — the US empire has synchronized its blows with a precision that seeks to eliminate all poles of resistance in a single movement.
However, at the beginning of May, the balance is not what Washington expected. It is true: some progressive States in Latin America have fallen or have been neutralized. Argentina has become a laboratory of the far right. Venezuela is under intervention. To them have been added other countries that have subordinated their foreign policies to Washington: Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, all of which participated in the "Shield of the Americas" summit convened by Trump on March 7, sealing their alignment with the empire's hemispheric strategy within an updated Monroe Doctrine. The dream of a powerful autonomous regional bloc, of ALBA, of UNASUR, has been dismantled, for the moment. An even greater threat now hangs over the region: Cuba and Nicaragua are in the direct line of fire.
But the peoples — that category which desk analysts often confuse with their governments — have not been defeated. On the contrary, in the most extreme adversity, they are discovering new forms of organization and new transnational alliances. Underlying them is a consciousness and a historical memory that fascism will never manage to erase. However, it is decisive that the revolutionary movements be capable of orienting and mobilizing them.
This article aims to provide a diagnosis and a strategic analysis of the situation, identifying the weaknesses that have cost dearly, the threats that are pending, but also the strengths that sustain the resistance and the opportunities that, if well leveraged, can change the course of history. It upholds a fundamental thesis that must be clear from the outset: the most progressive States themselves — even while being capitalist, as well as those that are part of the long-awaited phenomenon of multi-polarization — have the historical obligation to confront this rapidly evolving process of fascistization. Taking a passive, supposedly neutral, stance of "exclusively" national interest — if this were even possible in a globalized world — becomes a boomerang for everyone. Fascism prospers, intends to swallow the weakest and most helpless, but in the end will try to devour the entire planet. This happened with Hitler: he was allowed to advance until, far too late, a limit was imposed on him. Tens of millions of human beings died. History cannot repeat that grave error. (more...)
Stopping contemporary fascism: What is to be done?
Canada needs to stop being America’s doormat
When an Ebola-linked flight bound for Detroit got dumped in Montreal, Canada once again showed how reflexive deference to the US still works
Know what I’m getting really sick of as a Canadian? Harmful deferentiality towards the US that persists despite all the “elbows up” rhetoric.
In the latest example, an Air France fight took off from Paris, heading for Detroit. Do you see anything Canadian in that at all? Canada does!
The airline had royally messed up and let a passenger board from the Congo, the current global headquarters of Ebola. American authorities refused to let the plane land in their territory since they had recently banned all passengers from the Congo, specifically due to the viral outbreak. So, Canadian authorities let the plane land in Montreal. Then they let everyone off and put the passenger in question on the next flight back to Paris.
Why couldn’t they have done all that in Detroit? Is a plane considered to be inside a country the moment it decides it has feelings about the flight? No passenger is technically inside any country until they go through customs anyway. Why did they have to dump it all on Canada? I’ll tell you why. Because they had a choice, and Canada is far too nice.
The answer should have just been “no.” Not “no, but let us convene an interagency working group to explore the emotional implications of saying no.” Just “no.” No getting into the intricacies of Ebola infection risk or whose fault it all is, either. Or whether the guy is actually infected or not. Forget dedicating any bandwidth to any of that.
Perhaps Canada figured that it was doing its buddy, France, a favor, saving it from its own vetting screwup. Again, not Canada’s problem. Let them fight it out with the US. Tell France to threaten to just land the plane on Lake Erie and wish them luck.
It would have actually been the perfect time for Canada to propose, “Hey guys, you know that Gordie Howe International Bridge that Canada paid to build, running from Windsor to Detroit, that Trump insists on blocking? How about we get that sorted out in time to land this plane? Then maybe Canada will be compelled to lift a finger to help out. Otherwise, looks like this is a ‘you’ problem.”
Canada needs to stop doing any and all favors for America that aren’t a net benefit. (more...)
Canada needs to stop being America’s doormat
How Israel and its agents hijacked British democracy
In the Financial Times of 25 April, the conservative columnist Camilla Cavendish wrote casually of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “vanquishing of the anti-Semitic Corbynite left.”
She writes such false oversimplifications regularly, like many other political commentators in the British mainstream media. Labour’s “anti-Semitism” during the years of Jeremy Corbyn — 2015-2020 – as leader of the then-opposition Labour Party is taken journalistically as a given. It is a throwaway piece of reporters’ “dash-matter” to describe his and his supporters’ identities, then and now.
A lie has entered the political language most people use.
Killing Corbynism sets out Israel’s final capture of Britain’s political class and commentariat during the past decade and the smearing of all Israel’s opponents or critics as bigots, anti-Semites, racists and terrorists.
Gordon-Nesbitt shows how the Zionist campaign helped to defeat Corbyn in his attempts to become prime minister of a proper, socialist, human-rights-protective British government: first in 2017, when he did surprisingly well; and again in 2019, when he did not.
Israel and its British-based Fifth Column of propagandists and character assassins helped deliver the party leadership to his deputy, Starmer, now prime minister, an active Zionist and supporter of Israel before and since the start of its genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians after 7 October 2023. (more...)
How Israel and its agents hijacked British democracy
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