Category: Articles

The world’s coup-plotters and warmongers haven’t given up on getting their hands on Venezuela’s oil, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

THE International Monetary Fund (IMF) is poised to deny Venezuela over $5 billion of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to bolster its reserves on the grounds that the elected President Nicolas Maduro is not the undisputed legitimate leader of the country.

The overall SDR fund, worth $650 billion (£459bn), is to be allocated to help emerging and low-income nations deal with mounting debt and the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The people of Ireland have the right to shape their own future, as agreed in the Good Friday Agreement, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

LAST week saw the outcome of the inquests into the deaths of the victims of the Ballymurphy massacre.

The coroner found that all 10 of those shot dead between August 9 and 11 1971 — in the days following the introduction of internment without trial — were “entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
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We need to step up our campaign against the illegal US sanctions on Venezuela, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

AN overwhelmingly damning report by UN special rapporteur on human rights Alena Douhan has catalogued the massive harm inflicted on the Venezuelan people by the illegal sanctions imposed primarily by the US but also by Britain, the EU and Canada.

Yet less than a month after its publication in February, President Joe Biden has chosen to renew by executive order what the Obama administration in 2015 termed “a national emergency with respect to the situation in Venezuela,” on the absurd grounds that the country continues “to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
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Other countries have enforced and completed successful lockdowns, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE — it’s time we followed these proven steps

NOW is the winter of our discontent — and the Tory government is entirely to blame.

More than nine months into Britain’s Covid-19 crisis, Boris Johnson and his ministers have failed utterly to protect public health and to drive down infections.

This is not just incompetence — although that has been in evidence — it is fundamentally a failure of policy.
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We all lose as water companies fail again, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

IT WAS recently revealed that London could face a “mass water shortage” by 2040 if urgent action isn’t taken to fix pipes.

For those of us who opposed Thatcher and the Tories’ privatisation drive, including water, initiated in 1989, and the love affair of all governments with privatisation and linked policies such as PFI and outsourcing ever since, this news may not have come as a surprise.
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KEN LIVINGSTONE looks in-depth at the story of US sanctions on Venezuela

THE imposition of sanctions is just one of many weapons used by the United States in its war on Venezuela, but a particularly deadly one.

The ultimate goal is “regime change” — to bring down the country’s government and gain access to the wealth to be made from the largest oil deposits in the world.

Two legal mechanisms laid the groundwork for these long-running sanctions, which have been extended again and again during the Trump presidency.
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The recent fare rises announced are yet more proof of the failure of railway privatisation, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

MUCH of the “mainstream” media has been woefully negligent in holding Boris Johnson and co to account for their disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic and deepening economic crisis. One element of this is that there has not been much attention drawn to the different aspects of a deepening cost-of-living crisis facing many people.
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KEN LIVINGSTONE looks at the motivations behind the illegal ‘regime change’ in Bolivia last year

IN NOVEMBER 2019 President Trump welcomed the coup in Bolivia that toppled its democratically elected president, Evo Morales, as “one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.”

But, in fact, like the 1953 coup in Iran or the slew of other coups that the US has supported, funded or organised in the last seven decades, at stake was the control and exploitation of scarce natural resources — in this case Bolivia’s reserves of lithium.
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Sanctions and even interventions against the small Latin American nation are part of a pattern of desperation from an ailing US empire, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

A LEAKED document revealed by Nicaragua’s independent “Radio La Primerisima” has shown that the Trump administration is accelerating its plans — illegal under international law — to enforce “regime change” in Nicaragua.

The 14-page plan produced by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sets out how it expects a contractor to achieve or support a change in government that will be favourable to US interests.
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Cuban humanitarianism deserves admiration and respect, not sanctions and smears, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE

ONE of the most astonishing expressions of reactionary “Trumpite” politics during the global coronavirus crisis took place recently when three hard-right Republican senators — Ted Cruz, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio — introduced a Bill which calls for sanctions against countries which work with Cuban medical brigades.

Amazingly, it also seeks to classify Cuban medical brigades as victims of human trafficking.
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