The principles of market economy – fair play, voluntary exchange and limited government interference – lie squashed today as we witness the elites of the world take over the reins of economic and political structures with tariffs, sanctions, ‘deals’ and outright resource grab wars.https://thewire.in/economy/worlds-elite-trump-greenland-venezuela-davos 

The latest geopolitical ongoing; the assault on Venezuela, Trump’s threats of seizing Greenland, the controversial ‘Board of Peace’ plan for Gaza, all show that it is time for another round of resource grab. In fact, resource grab is the central principle of capitalism. 

Every sane person knows the real motive behind the political turmoil in Venezuela was oil.

With high national debt, rising consumer debt, inflation and inequality, the US economy is facing significant challenges at home. It needs more resources to stay afloat. It needs to maintain its petrodollar hegemony to stay on the top. For the unaware, the US dollar is deeply linked with oil money. In the early 1970s, the US signed a contract with Saudi Arabia that all oil trade payments must be done in dollars. That forces countries to maintain a balance of dollars in their forex accounts. But today, the world has shifted. BRICS countries hold over 40% of the world GDP. An estimate says about 20% of global oil trade is already happening in other currencies, Euros, Chinese yuan, rubles and even digital payment systems. And this was exactly the crime of Venezuela. It had started to accept payments for its crude oil in yuan and other currencies. Trump’s outbursts on Truth Social clearly show how much a talk of this de-linking of dollar from oil trade ruffles them. 

A study published in Lancet looked at the impact of US sanctions on 152 countries between 1971 and 2021. It estimated that about 600,000 deaths occurred each year in these 50 years in these countries as a direct and indirect result of US sanctions. The scale of this data is horrifying. Between 1971 and 2021, US sanctions have caused about 3 crore deaths in 152 countries.

In this new vision, the US refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of other nations. Either they work as extended colonies of the US, or they face its ire.

What’s appalling is these are not even the legitimate interests of a nation, but of a few elite corporations. Perhaps that is why a real-estate man like Trump is their best bet to make the best deals. 

Obviously, the rich gathered in Davos are not going to call out the systems that benefit them; instead we are going to see more false propaganda that educates us all that this is the best possible system in the history of humanity. And so, the principles of market economy – fair play, voluntary exchange and limited government interference lie squashed in the process. The inherent contradictions of capitalism are now glaringly exposed. Do we need more evidence of advancing neo-imperialism? 

by Kavita Kabeer

21/01/2026

Is EPFO the reason your employer isn’t depositing your provident fund? https://the-ken.com/story/epf-defaults-are-off-the-charts-blame-the-epfo/ the EPFO steadily dismantled the systems meant to spot defaults. Internal systems that once flagged defaulters were scrapped, and local offices say even obvious signals like payments slowing then stopping were routinely ignored... The fix was supposed to be technology. Essentially, big data and smarter systems. Much of that tech either doesn’t exist or work, or sits behind opaque processes that field officers can’t actually use.

While some regional PF offices sporadically release names of defaulters, the EPFO does not publish a comprehensive list with the names and amounts in default. But the scale of the problem can be gauged from the “arrears management” section in its annual reports.

Between March 2019 and March 2023, the arrears by employers ballooned over 70% to over Rs 15,000 crore (over $1.6 billion). And in the next one year, it had increased another 70% to almost Rs 26,000 crore. Nearly Rs 10,000 crore of that is thanks to about 2,400 employers, each of whom had arrears of Rs 50 lakh or...

Naturally, there’s a vacuum. Nearly 70% of establishments registered with EPFO are now classified as non-contributory, up from roughly half five years ago. Some may fall outside the law. Many don’t. So, employees usually find out only when they try to withdraw their money, or when their families have to.

A fire at a Goa nightclub recently made all of this impossible to ignore. Twenty workers died, but EPFO officers later admitted they would struggle to secure provident fund, pension, and insurance benefits for the families because the employer had been defaulting for years without detection.

Anand’s story today traces how a drive to end the inspector raj hollowed out enforcement without a working replacement, and how amnesty schemes with token penalties reshaped incentives. It also sits alongside our earlier reporting on EPFO’s other failings, from masked inefficiencies dressed up as high returns to a long-simmering crisis of claim rejections.

The largest island in the world, Greenland (that is not green at all but rather covered by white ice), has in recent months and even several years become one of the hottest geopolitical spots and disputes in world politics and international relations. The island, which has been administratively part of the Kingdom of Denmark for two centuries, has seriously caught the eye of the USA, namely its Trump administration, which firmly claims that the island simply must be under direct control and administration of the USA for its national security, otherwise it will be “swallowed up” by Russia and China (whose [Russian] submarines already operate around the island). The latest statements by NATO leaders support the idea of “Russian occupation of Greenland” as the reason for the increased presence of (small and meager) NATO soldiers on the island, but in essence, this position advocates the transfer of the island under American administration.

Greenland politically belongs to Denmark, i.e., the European Union, and in a military-political sense to the NATO pact. Geographically, it belongs to the North American continent and is closest to Canada, not the USA, and far away from Denmark.

in this whole policy of transferring Greenland to the US, the biggest real winners will be China and Russia, and the only loser, along with Denmark, will be the European Union. The diplomatic moves of Beijing and Moscow on this issue clearly indicate that they are de facto staying on the sidelines, with the US award to Russia likely being a solution to the “Ukrainian Question” according to the Russian will, while the award to China remains a secret, as in many other similar cases so far.

by Dr VladislavB Sotirovic

19/01/2026

  Abduction in Caracas https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/abduction-in-caracas?pc=1732 Tariq Ali.. To accuse a sitting president, whom you’ve just kidnapped while bombing his capital, of ‘conspiracy to possess’ automatic weapons is grotesque. Bondi is setting up a show trial, but it may not be as easy as she thinks. Without any doubt, some of the best US lawyers will defend Maduro and take up his case.

Rubio himself comes from a distinguished cocaine family, heavily implicated in the drug trade throughout South America. His relatives have been involved in smuggling cocaine into the United States for years. As Secretary of State, he has put drug dealers into every pro-US government on the continent. Unsurprisingly, some are saying that the assault could actually be a Rubio move to defend US-sponsored drug-runners against the more autonomous dealers who also exist in that part of the world.

Another irony is that Delta Force, the US state-terrorist special forces team that abducted the Venezuelan president, is itself widely regarded as operating a drug-trafficking network within the United States.

it’s a travesty to accuse the Chavistas of being anti-democratic from the start. During the Chávez period, the opposition newspapers and television stations blasted propaganda non-stop, attacking the regime – something you could never have seen in Britain or the United States. When people said to Chávez, ‘We should crack down’, he said, ‘No, we fight them politically’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncd14jm4L4M  interview from June 1986 exploring sustainable and culturally appropriate alternatives to conventional development

https://youtu.be/EnWMRR6ZCgU 
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

https://vimeo.com/256475432?fl=pl&fe=cm 

https://vimeo.com/242981518

Rhiannon Firth https://vimeo.com/566159521?fl=pl&fe=cm 
Mutual Aid Organising, Political Utopias, and Immanent Revolution

 Anarchism, Utopia & Mutual Aid | Rhiannon Firth | ARG Episode 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtrg2NaWJPE
Anarchism Research Group Loughborough

contemporary political utopias, the recent proliferation of mutual aid organising and the dangers of state co-optation, and the concept of Immanent Revolution.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rhiannon-firth-mutual-aid-anarchist-preparedness-and-covid-19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEets6m8Yls Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal hit out at the detaining authority for missing a vital video from the protest and played it inside the court while hearing the petition by SOnam Wangchuk's wife Geetanjali Angmo 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm01cYcPe5A  100 DAYS OF ILLEGAL ARREST? SC SOON ACTION ON SONAM BAIL? 

http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/articles/50906/Reverse-Contradictionary-_-Dictionary-of-New-Worlds;jsessionid=CF01AA77A86E447F9C3AC45E180160D1

 https://www.krisispublishing.com/prodotto/reverse-contradictionary/ 

The entire cultural output of humanity is being fed into AI. Large Language Models are ingesting not only books, articles, and blogs in their entirety, but also the content of our private written and spoken conversations. LLMs are boiling lakes and burning down forests to generate texts based on statistical mediocrity, which we are supposed to worship as the beginning of a great new gilded age.

This is where Reverse Contradictionary comes into play — a collaborative effort by critical media titans

 New spaces: the Public Domain of media  http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/ 
 
The culture of independent communication in any form, from video activism to free radios to Free Software, has opened a new space among common media and technologies, a space whose political and cultural citizenship must now be recognized.
 
The cultural, political and legal frame of this movement is a space that we call Public Domain of communication. As a Public Domain we understand a sphere which does not belong neither to the State nor to the Market, but to the whole society, and it is managed and controlled by the society itself (not to be misunderstood with the public service performed by the State).
 
The actors that have contributed more to the extension of Public Domain must now work on the internal self-organization and external visibility. See the Dutch campaign Public Domain 2.0 (www.waag.org).
 
The new autonomous public domain of communication must be recognized by institutions as means of participative democracy and new municipalism. Institutions must finally support the instruments and solutions to transform the fordist society into a post-fordist society.
 
4. New policies: the culture of new media
 
Institutional policies on new media only consider the question of access (often in a market-oriented perspective) and do not understand their value as means of democratic participations and as catalyser of culture and innovation.
 
During the last years, thanks only to new spontaneous practices coming from the society, a new media culture was able to grow. The delay of institutions has allowed the independent communication movement to reach the critical mass and self-organise into autonomous entities.
 
Italian cultural policies only invest on the preservation of cultural heritage and not on innovation, as it happens in the north of Europe. This intellectual gap only considers new media as new containers for old contents. They need to be recognized as autonomous forms of culture and social experimentation.
 
5. Tactical media: television meets the net
 
The net has represented the period of discovery and training to participative media. But it is still television that maintains a central role in society, culture and politics. For this reason, it is necessary to deconstruct it in a real democratic way, and to let the television medium meet the net medium. Television must be considered a new prosthesis and an extension of the net: but to avoid another media alternative "ghetto", the horizontality of the net must meet the "socialising" power of television.
 
Strategies of independent communication are: gaining access to channels and technologies, proliferation of broadcasters, production of alternative contents. For Urban Televisions the nodal point is not only the simple control of channels or contents, but the re-conquest of the collective enunciation of the message. That is, the re-conquest of the public and collective role represented by television.
 
Working today on the television medium can be interesting only if it is transformed into a new participative, transparent and ethical medium: in order to address its power to the cultural and economical development of society itself, and not only to support market or political consensus.
 
6. Tactical television: public access channels
 
For this reason it is necessary to create Urban Televisions in the form of open access television channels and to promote a social and communitarian participation to them.
 
"Public access" means a TV channel not only accessible, but managed by the communities that compose the social life of a city. Public access has a meaning if it is used for a collective content sphere, and not for a top-down programming.
 
"Community television" means a television that is not only a simple public access and a rhetorical exercise of free speech (open publishing) but is also able to "make society" and build social texture (community access and not simply open access).
 
Urban Televisions are based on a wide social participation and does not only involve media activists and practitioners (as it happens in several independent project).
 
Urban Televisions have a social mission and status safeguarded by an Ethical Chart that recognizes all rights, duties and pleasures of a participative communication.
 
The Italian delay in public access media must face those European experiences that show the possibility to create televisions managed from the society itself.
 
7. Tactical contents: from national programming to urban programming
 
Urban Televisions are televisions that make information, entertainment and culture and are able to construct a daily narration where the whole society recognizes and confronts itself. Urban televisions re-conquest programming as a genre of collective narration. Instead of a national programming, backbone of the political consensus and of the social biorhythms, an urban programming is built bottom-up.
 
The heart of Urban Televisions is a Community Programming which mirrors the whole social mosaic and leaves its spaces to self-organisation of communities and single citizens. Community Programming also organises democratic spaces of confrontation and respects the most radical and anti-conformist styles and contents.
 
8. The urban model: television rooted in the urban life
 
Independent communication must discover the city again as a new dimension of action, because the city is the first and elective ground of making society. A public access city television can root easily into any sector of civil, cultural and economical life. Urban Television turns out to be a precious means and a model of participative municipalism.
 
We have to stop considering the movement as the first speaker of free communication and be prepared to make society and conquest everyday life spaces. The aim of the Manifesto of Urban Televisions is to transform an international innovation movement into a movement that actually builds up society.
 
9. The economical model: non-profit cooperative media
 
New models of social communication are only credible and alternative to monopoly if they are economically autonomous. Media-activism must avoid some of the errors made in the past: in its history it has created ruptures and invented practices that the market has promptly colonised (e.g. Italian free radios of the '70 which cleared the way to commercial radios).
 
Urban Televisions are based on a model of non-profit social cooperation, where profits are re-invested into new productions and projects for the communities.
 
Urban Televisions work as meta-medium of local economy in a post-fordist perspective: they trig the multi-media economy, valorise bottom-up productions and realize a content economy with social aims.
 
10. The political model: the autonomy of society
 
Urban Televisions are born out of the initiatives of society and not out of institutions or market. Institutional policies must recognize self-organisation in the field of culture and media, and must avoid the simulations of "civil society" and "social communication" for political or commercial purposes.
 
Urban Televisions inaugurate a new relationship between the society and the economical and institutional subjects. This way they overcome the old vertical structures of mediation and political representation to give room to new horizontal and autonomous networks, more suitable for the contemporary post-fordist society.