(This article was first posted at Caracas Chronicles) A month or so ago, my wife came home growling about a pro-chavista program she’d heard on KPFA radio. Of course, I thought, what’s new? Originally founded by Lewis Hill in 1957 as a “free speech” station that crossed boundaries and included broad swathes of countercultural and…
(This is a second flyer I wrote for the Dan Kovalik event. It’s probably more useful in that it has bullet points and works for concision, but that would be a judgment others would have to make. I tried to avoid redundancies, but there may be some. Here it is, in any case.) Many of…
I wrote this piece as a flyer to hand out at the Dan Kovalik talk in Berkeley. This version contains all the links. Venezuela is suffering today under a set of failed policies and unkept promises made by the late President Hugo Chávez and maintained by the “chavista” loyalists under Nicolás Maduro. Chávez promised to…
My piece on the art of avoiding reality, particularly Venezuelan reality, is up at Caracas Chronicles. It’s short, not-so-sweet, and to the point. I’m learning to economize on words these days… Update: It came out in Spanish at Tal Cual digital here, thanks to the work of Guillermo Useche. How is it that the socialist…
You can read the “Clifnotes” version of the Human Rights Report on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela here. I’ve highlighted it and added colored type so you can skim through the document and still be home for dinner tonight. Those who lived through the terrible years of the 1980s when death squads terrorized Central America,…
I’m writing these reflections after publishing “Fascism: The Left Project that Keeps Giving at Caracas Chronicles. This is a longer post below, wherein I develop some ideas that I only touched on in the CCs piece. Someone asked me recently why I’m always attacking or criticizing leftists. They mentioned that there was plenty on the…
Since I wrote my piece on the situation of Maduro’s “hostages” for Caracas Chronicles (The Human Bargaining Chips of the Maduro Regime) National Assembly Deputy Gilber Caro has been released, likely in anticipation of the visit by Michelle Bachelet. But there are still hundreds being held in Venezuela’s overcrowded prisons (that being said, our own…
In May I published my critique at Caracas Chronicles of the Weisbrot-Sachs’ paper on the US sanctions on Venezuela. I titled it, “Pandering to the Imperial Left.” Now a much better critique (I’m not ashamed to say) has come out with the Brookings Institute, a collaboration between four real economists. It’s available for downloading at…
Thanks to journalist Douglas Farah for his great report on the Bolivarian money-laundering empire, out now in Spanish. You should definitely take an hour and a half to listen to this panel at the CSIS website.
I did an interview with Danielle Smith for a Calgary radio station. My part starts at 1:09:00 (one hour nine minutes exactly into the show). Danielle refers in the beginning to my just-published post at Caracas Chronicles, Reruns in Norway, which you might want to read for background. I spent time talking about the possible…
Think “reactionary” only comes in a right wing flavor? Take a look at the Bolivarian solidarity movement and think again. Find the link to the article in my blog.
An incisive and urgently needed political critique that can only be ignored at great cost.
A great job! (Readers) will appreciate your critical insights and the story you’re telling.
Clifton Ross is the author, translator and/or editor of a dozen or so books of fiction, poetry, interviews, and political thought, particularly from Latin America, where he has traveled extensively. He has written and directed one feature-length film and a number of shorts. In 2005 Ross represented the U.S. in the World Poetry Festival of Venezuela. Four years later he publishedTranslations from Silence, which won the 2010 Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence from Oakland PEN. His most recent book is Home from the Dark Side of Utopia, a political memoir released in July 2016 by AK Press.
