Matt graduated from University of Leeds in the UK. Since then he has completed a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University in New York City, where he lives now. He has written for the Guardian, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, New Statesman, amongst others. 
mattkennard@thecommentfactory.com
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Si la perspectiva de unas elecciones te desespera, considera al ejemplo del gobierno boliviano, liderado por Evo Morales como una fuente de inspiración
The backbone of Morales’s reform programme was the creation of a new Bolivian constitution, which was ratified by a public referendum in 2009. Morales has signalled that he will make the implementation of the new constitution his main legislative priority at the start of his second term. In a country that is often compared to apartheid South Africa, as the stark divisions of poverty and inequality are marked along racial lines, this constitution represents Bolivia’s Freedom Charter
TY: Rachel and I went to Cuba and we sat in the famous Hemingway Bar – and it was extraordinary, because when we went there we had this friend who lives in Cuba, and he said, “Look I can’t go in with you,” and we said, “Yeah you can, we’ll sort it out”, and it [...]
The current Tekel and union movement is also up against a notoriously barbaric police force, which has unleashed violence and mayhem at regular intervals on peaceful demonstrations in Istanbul and around the country, most infamously at the annual May Day celebrations
MK: I mean because a normal Iraqi may be thinking: “Oh Rumsfeld, maybe twenty years ago, was supporting Saddam.”
JS: Well it’s more complicated than that.
MK: Well, he was selling him weapons – I mean alongside all the other powers.
JS: I think their story… we didn’t by the way – as far as I know. But the story on that is actually more complicated. But, you know, they will accuse the Americans of all sorts of things and there is certainly, as it were, in the Arab street a feeling of complaints about hypocrisy and double standards. At the same time the Arab street wants many of the things that the West has including education and scientific research and so on… Listen I’m going to have to go, is that alright?
That’s a possibility. It’s only a possibility but I think whether that grassroots movement inside the Democratic Party develops or not what is most important is the development of a mass movement outside of the party system. That is, yes, the streets. The kind of movement that in the years of the civil rights movement against racial segregation or in the years of the movement against the Vietnam. A movement that is outside of the orthodox political institutions but which creates an atmosphere in the country and enlists enough people in its cause and frightens the establishment sufficiently so that something is changed
Zinn was also saying explicitly something I had been thinking but never had the confidence to say: “My work, like everyone else’s, is subjective”. He wasn’t afraid to admit it. At university we were taught to revere the great historians who provided the “truthful” account of the past. But, said Zinn, everything was and is subjective, and not benignly subjective either. History had since its inception been skewed in the service of power, status and money. This was explicit in the days of the court historians, paid by the Crown to write their hagiographies, but it continues to this days with elite universities such as Harvard giving their most prestigious history chairs to people such as Niall Ferguson, who has put his mind in the service of entrenched power since the start of his career, while spurning the excavators of real truth such as Zinn
I think in the past few rather than people being very into irony and very cynical, people are trying to work out how they relate as individual to the world because the world is impinging on our lives so much – we can’t deny it anymore that there is a crisis going on in the world, so it is impinging on the world they do. It doesn’t mean they do very direct images about it, but there is certainly that anxiety about how to live and what to do in the world is coming through in the work
The effete art-industry intellectuals and academics who have proposed for so long that political art is merely crude agitprop or literary doggerel are being made to look stupid by a new generation of artists who don’t think see their role as making pretty pictures and designing clever concepts for boardrooms. They are using creativity as an integral part of a justice movement that is inchoate but growing in substance and definition. They have internalized Brecht’s timeless dictum that “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer to shape it”
I think there should definitely be an investigation into the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. That’s without question, and it would be unthinkable not to have an investigation if this was any other state than Israel. Look at what happened in the aftermath of NATO’s attack on Serbia and the atrocities in Kosovo. The perpetrators of the attacks were hunted down and put on trial, and the search still continues for those responsible
“Although I am an anti-capitalist I think that Climate Camp should focus only on pressuring people, and governments to cut emmissions. Trying to change the global economy and trying to get commissions cut is too big a task. Cutting emmissions is the most important thing, and that can probably on be done through capitalism, so we are just going to have to deal with the devil.”
“I see myself now in a position of homage to him. For me Che is my leader, ” he says. “What he did cannot be forgotten.”
