Is there anything people can do about climate change in the Trump era? The new American president has asserted that global warming is a fraud perpetrated by the Chinese to steal American jobs; threatened to ignore or even withdraw from the Paris climate agreement; and pledged unlimited burning of fossil fuels. Whatever the details, Trump’s agenda will escalate global warming far beyond its already catastrophic trajectory. As we learn that 2016 was the hottest year on record, it sounds like a formula for doom.

On October 11 2016, with the presidential campaign still raging, five climate protectors traveled to five secluded locations in North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, and Washington state and turned the shut-off valves on the five pipelines that carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada into the United States. Their action – dubbed “Shut It Down” – blocked 15% of US crude oil imports for nearly a day.

Shortly before leaving America for Britain, after 12 years as a correspondent, the relative of one of my son’s friends politely declined my invitation to visit us in London.

“I don’t think I could go to Europe,” she said. “It doesn’t seem safe.”

Try as I might I could not suppress a laugh. My wife and children are African American. I am British. We were living in Chicago.

This is a peer-reviewed article on which my recent talk by the same name at Chicago's Open University of the Left was based. (and which was previously posted on the GST website).  This gives more detailed and specific material on the subject.

Miguel Urban argues that Europeans are being given a false choice between neoliberalism and nationalism.

A lifelong Marxist-Humanist-Anarcho-Utopian scholar and activist reflects on the challenges and prospects for the emerging resistance.  Greeman writes:

... Crony capitalism, although often dictatorial, is not yet fascism. It is of course nationalistic, authoritarian, racist, misogynist, fundamentalist and warlike, and it might easily degenerate into fascism – for example in the case of a crisis triggered by its Leader. But we are not there yet, and the goal of our united resistance is to block the road to fascism and nip it in the bud before it overwhelms us through the usual violent blitzkrieg tactics. Fascism’s rise depends on organized, aggressive movements allied with elements of the official police, capable of intimidating opponents and social movements in the streets. Mussolini had his Red Shirts, Hitler his Brown-shirted Storm troopers. Trump – although he is worshipped by the members of the KKK, white nationalist militias, right-wing racist cops, and domestic terrorists who bomb abortion clinics, mosques, synagogues and black churches – is so far only a virtual-reality one-man show. That could change, so let’s watch out...

A reflection on the unique current relevance of social ecology’s communalist politics in our time.  The article's broad historical scope addresses everything from ancient Greek democracy to the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee confederacy, the Paris Commune, the Zapatistas and the current Kurdish revolution in northern Syria.

From Nick Powers of the NYC Indypendent, arguing that, with rising inequality, white-identified folks are choosing to abandon the politics of ‘respectability,’ in a rather twisted mirror image of what happened during the rise of an increasingly mainstreamed and commercialized Black Power politics in the late ‘60s. An insightful contribution to the ongoing debate over 'white identity politics' and Trumpism.