Trending
Your Money, Their Profit
Here's a number to sit with before you read another word: 98 billion birr. That's what a federal audit found had disappeared from public funds in a single nine-month stretch this year — close to 5 percent of the entire national budget, gone — through a corruption network the federal police themselves admitted is too "sophisticated" to fully untangle. That's not a rounding error. That's your money. And I'm about to show you exactly how they took it.
Sira Staff · Sep 6 · 77 readers
Leopold: The Man Far Worse Than Hitler, But You Rarely Hear About — And Why
There's a photograph from around 1904 that a lot of people have seen without ever learning the story behind it: a Congolese man named Nsala, sitting on a porch, staring down at a small severed hand and foot laid out in front of him.
Sira Staff · Sep 8 · 9 readers
Latest
Full archive →
Let Them Tremble at OUR Power
"We were never asking to be seen. We are done being managed. Let them tremble — not because we are many, but because we have finally stopped being afraid of our own strength." Say that sentence out loud once before you read anything else. Remember how it sounds in your own voice. That's the sound they don't want you to hear yourself make.
Sira Staff · Jan 1 · 2 readers
Leopold: The Man Far Worse Than Hitler, But You Rarely Hear About — And Why
There's a photograph from around 1904 that a lot of people have seen without ever learning the story behind it: a Congolese man named Nsala, sitting on a porch, staring down at a small severed hand and foot laid out in front of him.
Sira Staff · Sep 8 · 9 readers
Your Money, Their Profit
Here's a number to sit with before you read another word: 98 billion birr. That's what a federal audit found had disappeared from public funds in a single nine-month stretch this year — close to 5 percent of the entire national budget, gone — through a corruption network the federal police themselves admitted is too "sophisticated" to fully untangle. That's not a rounding error. That's your money. And I'm about to show you exactly how they took it.
Sira Staff · Sep 6 · 77 readers
Mengistu and the Derg Were Never Socialist — Here's the Proof
Every time someone in this country wants to kill a conversation about Marxism before it starts, they reach for the same four words: "Look what happened with Mengistu." I get it. If your grandparents lived through 1977, you didn't hear about socialism in a classroom — you heard about it from someone who buried a brother because of it.
Sira Staff · Sep 5 · 7 readers
Ethiopia at the Crossroads: Who Owns the Future?
Ethiopia is not a country without wealth. It is a country whose wealth is unequally organized. This is an analysis of what that actually means, for the farmer, the worker, the graduate, and the country's fragile peace.
Sira Staff · Sep 1 · 6 readers
The Cover Story: How States Launder Fascist Continuity Behind a Manufactured Enemy
In 1950, 47 percent of the senior officials in West Germany's own Justice Ministry were former Nazi party members. By the late 1950s, that number had climbed to 77 percent. The Interior Ministry wasn't better: 54 percent of its staff between 1949 and 1970 were former Nazi party members, 8 percent of them holdovers from the actual Nazi-era Interior Ministry once run by Heinrich Himmler. These are not activist claims.
Sira Staff · Aug 31 · 3 readers
You Will Never Make It Under Capitalism: The Hustle Trap, Revisited
I used to do the math in my head at night. Ten men control the wealth of the United States — everyone on the internet says so — so if I just built the right app, cracked the right hustle, put in the right eighteen-hour days, I'd be number eleven. I actually believed that. Not as a joke. As a plan. I want to tell you exactly how that ended, because I think a lot of you reading this are still doing the math I used to do.
Sira Staff · Aug 25 · 6 readers
Americans Should Have A Israel Problem. Not a Netanyahu Problem.
Remove Benjamin Netanyahu tomorrow — indict him, vote him out, exile him — and ask yourself honestly what actually changes. The settlement outposts don't disappear. The ministries funding them don't close. The ideological current that produced them didn't arrive with him and won't leave with him. This is the same mistake this newsletter has made about Trump, about Obama, about Haile Selassie and the Derg: treating a system as if it were one man wearing a crown.
Sira Staff · Aug 24 · 2 readers
They Are Stealing From the Poorest People on Earth, and Calling It Development
A shirt sewn in Hawassa sells in an American mall for around seventy dollars. The woman who sewed it took home, that whole month, about twenty-six. Sit with that for a second before you read another word. Twenty-six dollars. Not a day. A month. That gap between what her hands made and what she was paid for making it isn't a glitch in the system. It is the system, working exactly the way it was built to work.
Sira Staff · Aug 22 · 47 readers
Social Democrats, Liberals, and the Sheepdogs: Why Neither Communists Nor Anyone Else Should Trust the Reform
Bismarck built the welfare state to prevent revolution. Bernie pledged DNC loyalty. AOC voted “present.” Mamdani won as a Democrat. A materialist critique of reform as pressure valve, not destination—and what that means for socialism in America.
Sira Staff · Aug 21 · 0 readers
Guide: How to Not Get Smoked
On July 16–17, 1918, the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and servants—11 people in a basement in Yekaterinburg. The question of justification is not a moral abstraction. It is historical necessity. They killed the Romanovs because the alternative was the restoration of a regime that had already proven itself incapable of ruling without mass murder.
Sira Staff · Aug 21 · 4 readers