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The 200-year history of the Monroe Doctrine is a history of US imperialism. Among Washington’s recent junior partners, Israel stands out as an accomplice to the US imperial project not only in the old world but in this hemisphere as well.  Beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the course of what is labeled Manifest Destiny (term was applied in 1845) will be charted through the 19th century.  The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 is a continuation of the planned expansion across the North American continent. As the 19th century proceeded apace, the North defeated the South during the 1861-1865 Revolt ...

ICSS 20200809 Sun, Aug 9, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm7 75th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bombing  By: Raj Sahai Two Atomic bombs dropped three days apart August 6 and August 9, 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two Japanese cities, changed the trajectory of the world. To the US citizens, it was portrayed by the US government and the Mass Media as necessary to end WWII with a country that had started it by a surprise attack on the US Naval Base in Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, bringing a reluctant US into ...

8 Years Before is an independently-funded documentary film directed by international journalist Donald Courter and produced collaboratively with international heavyweight fighting champion Jeff Monson. The film portrays in stark detail the long saga of suffering that the Donbass people endured at the hands of the Ukrainian military, following the 2014 Euromaidan coup d'etat. Through primary source accounts and interviews with ordinary citizens of Donbass, human stories with a perspective never before seen in the mainstream media are brought to light. Speaker: Don Courter Moscow-based journalist, filmmaker, and activist.  He is the director of 8 Years Before ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank – three of the most highly regarded international economic organizations – all predict lowered growth expectations for the decade ahead. If three major capitalist institutions are foretelling economic uncertainty and instability, it is because we are exiting a distinctive era of capitalist restructuring. That era gave capitalism a new lease on life, with growing profits, hyper-accumulation, and vastly expanded speculative investments. Little of that enrichment was shared with the masses, resulting in unprecedented inequalities of income and wealth. According to our speaker, Greg Godels, liberal and ...

Afghanistan - Between Two Cold Wars  -  Sunday September 19 2021 10:30 AM Pacific Time - Dr. Bahman Azad Our program will trace US involvement in Afghanistan back to the 1950s Cold War to exert strategic control of the Soviet Union’s borders, especially after the Iranian Revolution. Combatting terrorism was not the issue. Rather, the US nurtured politicized Islamic jihadists in the form of the mujahedeen and the Taliban to destroy the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. From 1978-1992, the socialist-oriented government instituted modernization, emancipation of women, literacy, and land reform programs, only to be reversed.. From 1978-1992, the socialist government ...

The loss of socialism is not as permanent as it appears and until capitalism’s inherent contradictions are resolved, its resurgence is not as improbable as Dugin suggests. Until then, we as Marxists should not dismiss those who have picked up the mantle of anti-imperialism since the demise of the former Soviet Union, no matter which political form it takes shape. By denouncing Dugin as a “fascist” and treating his work as unworthy of serious consideration, one is only showing that he is right to say that Marxism has become irrelevant in today’s world and Western capitalism is here to stay ...

Robert Jensen will outline four key challenges facing humanity: size, scale, scope, and speed. What is the sustainable size of the human population? What is the appropriate scale of a human community? What is the scope of human competence to manage our interventions into the larger living world? At what speed must we move toward different living arrangements if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences? The sooner we face the realities of these challenges without unwarranted faith in ideology or technology, the more likely we can create the conditions for a soft landing for humanity. These ideas are drawn from ...

Goldman Sachs bank research this past week published a report that 300,000,000 jobs worldwide will be impacted by the now accelerating introduction of Artificial Intelligence software (machines) that will either eliminate or sharply reduce the hours of work for workers involved in simple decision-making tasks like customer service reps, paralegals, receptionists, retail services, human resources reps, copywriters, basic software coders, and countless other occupations. Its report updates that of five years ago by McKinsey Consultants that estimated 5 million jobs impacted.Academics hail the news that it will mean a sharp increase in productivity (and therefore profits which they don’t say) ...

 John Willich was a Prussian army career officer who quit after 25 years to become a carpenter. He was a German 48er who formed the proletarian army in the German Revolution with Friedrich Engels as second-in-command. He was exiled to England, where he joined Marx and Engels. Polemics between Willich and Marx-Engels led to his joining an opposing communist faction. In the 1850s he emigrated to the US where he become involved in communist clubs. He was an abolitionist who worked with free African Americans. In the Civil War, he started an innovative and highly praised German regiment. Conclusion: along ...

Silicon Valley Bank - previously the 16th largest bank in the US and reportedly a source of funding for half of all the tech startups in the US - has collapsed. It’s now become clear the more general banking crisis that has emerged is not due simply to a rogue, mismanaged bank that over-extended itself during the recent tech boom and then somehow mysteriously imploded in just 72 hours, March 7-9, until seized by the FDIC on the morning of March 10, 2023. Deeper, more systemic forces are at play—in the case of both the SVB collapse and the now ...

This program will address how the Korean peninsula was tragically split, why it remains so, and its contemporary implications. Once part of the Japanese Empire, the Korean conflict degenerated into a stalemate. Most important was the admission by then US Secretary of State Dean Rusk on how the 38th Parallel was agreed to as the infamous demarcation line; why the decision was made to cross the 38th parallel; and how George Kennan urged Truman not to. This last development is most significant. And, how the stalemate in Korea impacted whether the U.S. would intervene in North Vietnam in April-May 1954 ...

After brief presentations by three ICSS members, Raj Sahai, Gene Ruyle, and Roger Harris, we will have an open discussion on this important topic ...

Nora Barrows-Friedman of The Electoric Intifada will present and lead our discussion Nora Barrows-Friedman is a journalist, editor, radio broadcaster, musician, and mother. Since 2012 she has served as associate editor and audio production director for The Electronic Intifada, an independent publication focused on Palestinian issues. She is the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014) ...

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ICSS 20200712 Sun, Jul 12, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm Covid-19 and the crisis of neoliberalism - Basudev Nag Choudhary The COVID-19 disease caused by the novel corona virus has turned into a global pandemic with almost 5.5 million people confirmedly infected and over 3.5 hundred thousand deaths around more than a hundred countries. Irrespective of the fact whether the virus is a bio-weapon or naturally mutated, our aim is to show how it has impacted upon the global capitalist economy. Contrary to what is being campaigned from the mainstream institutions, it will be shown that the capitalist economy already ...

ICSS 20200816 Sun, Aug 16, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm Coronavirus: Scientific Realities vs. Economic Fallacies We are pleased that Georgi Marinov, Stanford postdoc in Genetics, , has accepted our invitation to speak about his recent article in LEFTEAST on this subject. Georgi Marinov, a post-doc researcher in Genetics at Stanford, has written one of the most prescient, widely-read, and important articles written from a Left perspective on COVID-19 pandemic and what we need to do to address it. Dr. Marinov describes the virus and the difficulties of knowing whether people will develop lasting immunity to it, and of developing ...