2026 WORLD CUP

Conflict and controversy hang over World Cup as 100-day countdown kicks off

Tuesday marks 100 days until the start of the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Iran's participation in the tournament is in doubt after American and Israeli armed forces launched strikes on the country, while controversy over ticket prices, drug wars in Mexico and travel bans imposed by United States President Donald Trump are also casting shadows over preparations.


Issued on: 03/03/2026 - RFI

Forty-eight teams will compete for the 2026 World Cup which takes place between 11 June and 19 July in the United States, Canada and Mexico. 

AFP - ULISES RUIZ

Iran's soccer chief Mehdi Taj said he and senior government officials would assess whether the squad should take part in the competition, which begins on 11 June.

"It's not possible to say exactly, but there will certainly be a response," Taj said during a panel discussion on Iran's IRIB Channel 3.

"This will surely be studied by the country's high-ranking sports officials and there will be a decision on what's going to happen. But what we can say now is that due to this attack and its viciousness, it is far from our expectations that we can look at the World Cup with hope."

Iran booked a place in the tournament at their fourth successive finals last year, by topping Group A in the third round of Asian qualifying.

They are scheduled to play in Group G with Belgium, Egypt and New Zealand, with their matches taking place in Los Angeles and Seattle.

If they were to finish their pool in second place and the US also finish the group stages as runners-up, the sides could meet in the last-32 knockout round.

If Iran were to withdraw, a replacement team would likely come from the Asian Football Confederation.

Criticism of ticket prices

Questions over Iran's participation follow doubts over the suitability of hosts Mexico, after the death on 23 February of drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes following a Mexican special forces operation. The attack led to more than 60 deaths around Mexico in a series of reprisals.

Following assurances last week from Fifa boss Gianni Infantino, Mexican president Claudia Scheinbaum also assured fans they would not be at risk when attending matches in Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara.

In addition, the price of tickets is causing controversy. The cheapest range from €103 to €228 for group-stage games that do not involve co-hosts.

England's Football Association shared pricing information with the England Supporters Travel Club showing that if a fan bought a ticket for every game through to the final it would cost just over €7,000.

Fifa has reduced some prices in the wake of criticism. Fan organisation Football Supporters Europe welcomed this move but said the revisions did not go far enough – and highlighted the absence of a pricing structure for disabled fans or complementary companion tickets.

Nigeria and Tunisia bosses ignore World Cup fortunes for Cup of Nations clash

It said: "For the moment we are looking at the Fifa announcement as nothing more than an appeasement tactic due to the global negative backlash. We call upon Fifa to engage in a proper dialogue to arrive at a solution that respects the contribution of fans, and the dignity of fans with disabilities."

Fifa says nearly 2 million tickets have been sold in the first two sales phases. Residents of the three host countries drove the most purchases, followed by fans in France, England, Germany, Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Argentina.

One month before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Fifa said 2.89 million tickets had been sold for 64 matches in eight stadiums. Overall, 3,182,406 tournament tickets were sold, harvesting nearly €700 million in revenue.

Travel bans

US travel and visa restrictions could also limit the number of supporters at matches on American soil.

Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire are among dozens of countries whose citizens now face new entry restrictions under a policy introduced by President Donald Trump on national security grounds. Iran and Haiti are subject to broader suspensions.

The measures do not apply to players, coaches, officials or accredited staff, who will be allowed to enter the United States for the tournament. But for many ordinary supporters, obtaining a tourist visa is now likely to prove difficult.

Fan groups have warned that the restrictions risk excluding thousands of supporters from the expanded 48-team competition, much of which will be staged in US cities.
The race for the title

On the pitch, defending champions Argentina will begin their campaign on 26 June in Group J. The South Americans open against Algeria in Kansas City before further group matches against Austria and Jordan.

France, beaten on penalties by Argentina in the 2022 final in Doha, begin what is set to be Didier Deschamps’ final tournament as head coach against Senegal on 16 June. They will also face a team from the intercontinental play-offs before concluding the group stage against Norway.

The final will take place on 19 July at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in New Jersey.

READ MORE Travel bans, border tensions, ICE raids: Trump’s impact on World Cup plans

 

‘Stark global inequality’: Calls for taxes on private jets grow louder as uber-wealthy flee Dubai

Copyright Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By Liam Gilliver

Published on 05/03/2026 - EURONEWS

Private jets are up to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes – and are now being used to escape escalating conflict in the Middle East.

Price-gouging private jet firms have been inundated with demand, as the uber-wealthy scramble to flee Dubai amid the war on Iran.

After strikes targeted luxury hotels and Dubai International Airport – the UAE’s main aviation hub – officials confirmed that all flights had been grounded over the weekend. Following the 48-hour shutdown, Dubai International resumed a limited service, with airlines such as Emirates stating priority was being given to passengers with earlier bookings.

With thousands stranded and fearing for their safety, many attempted to escape Dubai and drive four hours to Muscat in Oman. Some even attempted a 10-hour journey over to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

However, the majority of commercial flights from Muscat to Europe were fully booked until later this w

Due to skyrocketing demand, the price of chartered flights has reportedly spiked – with the mega-rich forking out a staggering €200,000 to get out of the city or nearby regions.

Football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo’s private jet left Saudi Arabia on Monday night, while Italy’s defence minister Guido Crosetto and his family returned home on a military aircraft last weekend.

‘Flying above the chaos’ in Dubai

Tyrone Scott of War on Want, a UK-based charity that works to fight poverty and defend human rights, tells Euronews Green that the influx of private jet use exposes a “stark global inequality”.

“When crises hit, the world’s wealthiest can quite literally fly above the chaos, while millions of others are left trapped in conflict zones or facing closed and heavily secured borders,” he says.

Dubai has long been a playground for the rich, attracting wealthy individuals due to its glitz and glamour, and lack of income tax. But its appeal – amplified by social media influencers – has been built on the backs of migrant workers, who human rights organisations say have faced systematic exploitation.

In 2023, non-profit FairSquare found that migrant construction workers on Dubai’s COP28 site were put to work outdoors in extreme heat that “posed serious threats to their health and could be fatal”.

A 2024 investigation also warned that low-income migrant workers in the UAE were being disproportionately affected by a prolonged dengue outbreak following devastating spring flooding.

Related

• ‘A world chained to fossil fuels’: Does the war on Iran prove it’s time to quit oil for good?

“As cases of dengue have rampaged through the community, the toll on migrant workers, who live in marginalised neighbourhoods and struggle to access quality healthcare, has been particularly harsh,” James Lynch, FairSquare’s co-director, said at the time.

For these workers, who are the backbone of Dubai’s impressive skyline and vast shopping centres, escaping the conflict isn’t an option.

“The inequality at the heart of this story is also the root of the climate crisis,” says Hannah Lawrence, a Stay Grounded spokesperson.

“While the super-rich are able to pay tens of thousands of Euros to flee on private jets, those most impacted by war and the climate crisis cannot.”

Lawrence argues that safety should not depend on one’s ability to afford a private jet. “Everyone deserves safety and a future in which they can thrive,” she adds.

“We must end the skyrocketing inequality of private jets, luxury tourism and the privileges of the ultra-rich.”

‘Escalating climate breakdown’

Private jets are also notorious for their environmental impact, which studies show is a huge contributor to climate change.

Analysis from Transport & Environment found that private flights are five to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes per passenger, and 50 times more polluting than trains. Despite this, private jet emissions have increased by 46 per cent between 2019 and 2023.

“At a time of escalating climate breakdown and global instability, it’s indefensible that this level of carbon-intensive luxury remains largely untaxed and unregulated,” Scott says.

“Governments should be looking seriously at measures like strong wealth taxes and levies on private jet use to curb excessive emissions and ensure the richest contribute their fair share to addressing the crises their lifestyles help fuel.”

Can a wealth tax help fight the climate crisis?

Calls for more aggressive taxes on carbon-intensive luxury items and fossil fuel profits have gotten louder in recent years, as the super-rich continue to flout what Oxfam describes as “gross carbon recklessness”.

A report from the NGO group published in January found that the richest one per cent exhausted their annual carbon budget just 10 days into 2026. This is where CO2 emissions exceed limits to keep the world within 1.5℃ of warming, as set out in the Paris Agreement.

The analysis also found that the richest 0.01 per cent exceeded their carbon limit in the first 72 hours of the New Year (3 January). Experts argue the uber-wealthy must slash their emissions by 97 per cent by 2030 to meet legally-binding climate targets.

Oxfam is now calling on governments to introduce a ‘Rich Polluter Profits Tax’. It says implementing such a policy on 585 oil, gas and coal companies – which many wealthy individuals invest in – could generate more than €340 billion in the first year.

It is also urging a ban or punitive tax on “carbon-intensive luxury items” such as super-yachts and private jets. The carbon footprint of a super-rich European, accumulated from nearly a week of using these fuel-guzzling modes of transport, matches the lifetime carbon footprint of someone in the world’s poorest one per cent.

How climate change disproportionately affects the poor

Scientists have repeatedly warned that poorer nations will be most impacted by climate change, despite often having the smallest contribution to rising temperatures.

A 2025 report from World Weather Attribution analysed 22 climate-fuelled disasters from last year, and found that globally, women carry an ‘unequal burden’ that often increases their risk from dangerously high temperatures.

However, the inequality goes much further, and can actually be seen in scientific evidence itself. Many of WWA’s studies in 2025 focused on heavy rainfall events in the Global South, a collective term for countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania (but not Australia and New Zealand) which are commonly referred to as “developing” or “less developed” nations.

In general, these countries are poorer than nations in North America and Europe, have higher levels of income inequality and suffer lower life expectancy.

But scientists repeatedly found gaps in observational data, arguing that reliance on climate models developed mainly for the Global North prevented them from drawing confident conclusions.

“This unequal foundation in climate science mirrors the broader injustices of the climate crisis,” the report adds.

You Bet Your Life (Insurance): U.S. Private Equity Comes For Your Annuity – Analysis

March 4, 2026 
By Eileen Appelbaum


There are signs that private equity’s destabilizing role in the insurance industry is growing.


In 2020 and 2021 (as we wrote at the time), large private equity (PE) firms were buying up life insurance companies to gain control of their huge annuity assets. Insurance companies had invested the premium payments for clients’ retirement savings in safe, publicly traded and highly liquid stocks and bonds. But years of low interest rates crippled this asset business, and the returns on these investments were no longer adequate to fund the required annuity payments.

As a result, insurance companies were anxious to unload their annuity portfolios. Large PE firms saw an opportunity to quickly increase their assets under management by acquiring or taking control of managing these annuity assets.

An annuity is a long-term contract with an insurance company that provides retirement income to individuals, who pay a premium that is invested by the insurance company and grows tax-deferred. When the individual grows old, they receive regular payments that fund their retirement. Annuities are attractive to private equity firms because they are a source of ‘permanent capital’ that replenishes as premium payments flow in and offset outflows to recipients of annuity payments. PE firms were confident they could increase returns on these assets and make them profitable by investing some of these annuity assets in illiquid private market equity buyout and credit funds. Smaller PE firms also got involved by buying up smaller insurance companies.

At the end of 2020, PE firms controlled $471 billion (nearly 10 percent) of annuity assets and had acquired 50 of the 400 annuity companies in the US. Apollo, which had a majority stake in Athene, the life insurance company it had founded in 2009, acquired all of its annuity assets In 2021 — worth about $194 billion at the time. Apollo said that it planned to invest about 5 percent of Athene’s funds in riskier, fee-paying alternative assets, including its own PE and debt funds. In 2021, Blackstone paid $2.2 billion to American International Group (AIG) for a 9.9 percent stake in its life insurance and annuities unit and gained control of the investment decision of much of its portfolio of annuity assets. Blackstone also struck a deal in 2021 to buy a life insurance unit of Allstate Corporation. As a result of these transactions, Blackstone’s insurance assets under management reached $150 billion by the end of 2021. The insurance assets it controls accounted for a third of Blackstone’s overall assets under management that year. In July 2020, KKR announced it was buying the life insurance and retirement income company Global Atlantic Financial Group for $4.4 billion and taking over management of about $70 billion of Global Atlantic’s assets. The deal raised the assets KKR managed on behalf of insurance companies from about $26 billion to more than $96 billion, and increased KKR’s total assets under management by 30 percent.


Fast forward to the fall of 2025, and we see that this trend towards investing in private assets is intensifying. According to Mark Friedman of PwC, there has been a seismic shift; he reports that a recent survey found close to three-quarters of insurers now own private assets, and a second survey of 410 insurance companies found that 91 percent planned to increase their allocations to private markets over the next two years.

Indeed, Apollo, Blackstone, KKR and their rivals have loaded up their own annuity businesses with private credit investments. And clients holding annuity contracts have found themselves with increasingly risky assets. Back in 2020, risky private investments made up a small share of annuity asset investments. But this proved to be a successful strategy, boosting the returns of the life insurance companies owned by the large PE firms — enabling them to undercut rivals and increase market share. Other life insurance companies soon followed, including traditional companies like MassMutual that now hold a large number of private market illiquid bonds.
Murky Level 3 Assets Add More Risk

Fueling concerns about these investments is that they include so-called Level 3 assets. The lack of transparency in private equity and other private markets is well-known. But these illiquid assets are even more opaque; they lack reliable market pricing, and often have unreliable private ratings or no formal rating from a rating agency. There are no market mechanisms for determining the price of these assets or the amount of reserves insurance companies with these assets should hold.


PE firms express confidence in the ratings of these assets, but regulators and others question whether they are overvalued. In just a few years, investments in riskier assets that include Level 3 assets reached 18 percent of the insurance industry’s $3.8 trillion in fixed income holdings. Level 3 assets accounted for about a third of Athene’s and Global Atlantic’s total assets in the third quarter of 2025. The concerns that were raised a few years ago that annuity assets of PE-owned insurance companies would be used to bailout or boost the performance of affiliated private equity funds are no longer theoretical. The highly regarded AM Best insurance rating agency found that about a fifth of investments by Athene’s US Life Group and by KKR’s Global Atlantic now come from loans to affiliated funds. In particular, private equity-owned insurers are allocating a lot of their investments to affiliated credit funds.

PE-owned insurers are, as the Financial Times put it, the lifeblood of private credit. This self dealing is also a concern. Are PE firms using annuity assets of insurance companies they own to provide loans to their affiliated private equity and private credit funds to shore up struggling portfolio companies, or distressed loans made by their credit funds? The lack of transparency makes it impossible to quantify.
The Serious Risks Facing Annuity Policy Holders

Evaluating PE investments is challenging because little reliable public information exists about how these firms invest insurance assets, making it difficult to gauge the effect on returns to beneficiaries. Moving annuity investments into private credit funds with Level 3 assets increases the risk that some of these investments will fail, slashing the retirement income of beneficiaries. It also provides PE firms with opportunities to earn high fees for managing the assets. These fees also reduce returns to annuity holders and may wipe out the added return to compensate annuity holders for the higher risk these assets carry. Level 3 loans are especially illiquid, making them more difficult to trade than other private market investments. This makes them difficult to sell to meet annuity retirement obligations as well as redemptions by policy holders in the case of a personal emergency or an economic slowdown and cash crunch.


The surge in redemptions in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with the third quarter raised questions about whether some insurers might fail and leave their annuity policyholders dependent on reduced payments from state guaranty funds for retirement income. The International Monetary Fund raised another issue; their 2023 study found that PE-backed insurers have fewer liquid assets than is the case for all insurers, making them more vulnerable to an increase in corporate defaults and credit downgrades caused by a slowing economy.

The situation is rife with conflicts of interest, most notably PE firms providing valuations for credit funds with Level 3 loans and asking annuity holders to trust them. But even rated bonds can be problematic. Rating firms have conflicts of interest since they are paid by the companies whose bonds they rate. The ratings potentially understate the riskiness of the bonds. Regulators and others concerned about the financial stability of insurance companies and their annuity asset investments question whether this debt is riskier than the ratings indicate, meaning that insurers could experience unexpected losses, making them unable to pay promised benefits to people counting on annuities to fund their retirements. Opportunities for corrupt self-dealing are widely available as PE firms can use the insurance assets to shore up the finances of failing or struggling funds they own.
Cracks Emerging in Private Credit Funds

Evidence of potential problems arising from investments in private credit funds by insurance companies, whether owned by PE or not, are beginning to emerge. Unrelated problems at two life/annuity insurance companies have heightened concerns about the financial stability of private equity-owned insurers.

In 2015, PE firm Golden Gate Capital established Nassau Financial as a life insurance platform. In 2016, Nassau Financial acquired troubled life and asset insurance company Phoenix, among other companies, and renamed it PHL Variable Insurance Company. To reduce its liabilities, PHL entered several reinsurance deals with Nassau-owned or affiliated reinsurance companies based in Bermuda in 2019. But these deals failed to put PHL on a sustainable course. On March 31, 2025, the Connecticut Insurance Department (CID) took PHL into “rehabilitation” to try to restore it to financial stability. CID found that PHL had negative $900 million in capital and surplus, its assets will be exhausted in 2030, and it will be unable to pay approximately $1.46 billion owed to policy holders at that point. PHL’s auditor said it doubted the company could move forward as a going concern.

By December, it had become clear that PHL could not be rehabilitated, and CID turned to liquidation as the better option. The regulator found that PHL lacked enough assets to make restructuring a viable option, and that liquidation would lead to larger payouts to policyholders. In the meantime, until a final order determines PHL’s fate, policy holders are caught in a Catch-22. While CID sought to rehabilitate PHL, it froze more than $500 million of policyholders’ retirement income, leaving many of them in the lurch. To add insult to injury, policyholders had to keep their policies active. This meant policyholders had to continue paying premiums without knowing if they would ever receive the payments they were counting on to fund their retirement. This led to a steady increase in lapsed policies. These policy holders will not receive any benefits from the premiums they had paid for years or even decades. While those with active policies have continued to receive retirement benefits, All benefits will cease 30 days after a liquidation notice is released. Active policy holders will be eligible for reduced benefits from the state’s insurance guaranty program.


The second example involves Atlantic Coast Life (ACL), Sentinel Security Life (SSL), and Haymarket insurance. ACL and SSL are units of PE firm Advantage Capital, known as A-CAP. The asset manager is PE firm 777 Partners and Bermuda-based reinsurer 777 Re, whose principals are Josh Wander and Steve Pasko. 777 Partners began leveraged buyouts of soccer teams in Britain, France, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy and Belgium, and quickly met resistance from managers and fans. Wander and Pasko spent millions of dollars acquiring stakes in European clubs, and some of that money allegedly came from the two insurance/annuity companies owned by A-CAP. In 2023, the empire of European clubs collapsed. Lawsuits filed against 777 Partners and 777 Re are asking for tens of millions of dollars in repayment. Corruption is also alleged by a London PE firm with a fund that focuses on investments linked to life insurance companies. The PE firm is suing Wander, Pasko and the CEO of A-CAP because 777 Re used $350 million it had committed to another company as collateral for a loan from the London firm. The implications for the PE-owned life/annuity companies in the US are not yet known, but are likely to be negative.

PE firm 777 has been in other trouble with regulators. In 2024, insurance regulators in Utah and South Carolina told five insurance companies to reduce their investments in 777 Partners because they were overcommitted to the PE firm and exceeded the maximum investment allowed.

Large PE firms that own insurance/annuity companies are nervous that the many small PE firms emulating their money-making ways will bankrupt the insurance companies they own — which they fear may bring down the lucrative house of cards they have built in the last 4 or 5 years. They don’t want regulators to turn their focus to the dangers of this use of insurance company assets to fund private credit funds. The company giving them angina is Acquarian, a small private equity firm founded in 2017. Acquarian plans to acquire Brighthouse Financial, a problem-ridden life insurance company with more than $230 billion committed to life and annuity policy holders. The deal is not yet final. Apollo and Carlyle, major PE firms, had previously looked into acquiring Brighthouse and decided against it after evaluating the challenges and demands of the company.


In November 2025, Aquarian made an offer to acquire Brighthouse at the eyebrow-raising price of $4.1 billion, double the valuation that other PE firms came up with. The concern is that companies like Aquarian and Brighthouse are using annuity assets to make ever more risky investments in order to break into a crowded field and gain market share. And they are right to be concerned. Regulators are raising questions about the difficult-to-measure risks to the financial system from this money-making PE business model in the private credit market.

Investors have already begun voting with their feet, dumping shares in the fourth quarter of 2025 in PE firms including Ares, Blue Owl, KKR and Apollo. Concerns that annuity investments may be overvalued have bubbled up over the past year. The triggering event for the wave of redemptions at the end of 2025 was a fear that many software companies that have borrowed from PE-owned private credit funds are vulnerable to AI and may not be able to repay the loans they took out. The lack of transparency surrounding private credit funds makes it impossible to evaluate just how vulnerable they are. But some investors are not waiting to find out.

Eileen Appelbaum

Eileen Appelbaum is co-director of CEPR and fellow at Rutgers University Center for Women and Work. She has held visiting positions at the Wissenschaftszentrum (Berlin), University of Manchester and Leicester University (UK), University of South Australia, and University of Auckland (New Zealand). Prior to joining CEPR, she held positions as distinguished professor and director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University and as professor of economics at Temple University. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Women more likely to choose wine from female winemakers

Washington State University

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PULLMAN, Wash. — Promoting women’s ownership in wineries can boost sales among the largest group of U.S. wine consumers, who happen to be women.

Messages like “proudly made by a woman winemaker” increased women’s intentions of purchasing wines, particularly when the label’s artwork reinforced the point with feminine gender cues such as flowers. Women were also willing to pay higher prices for those wines, according to the research from Washington State University and Auburn University.

The findings are noteworthy because 59% of all wine purchases in the United States are made by women, said Christina Chi, coauthor of the research and professor of hospitality business management at WSU’s Carson College of Business.

Wine is often considered a cultural product, where the winemaker’s identity plays a role in shaping the brand’s image, she said.

Women winemakers, however, are less likely than their male counterparts to include their names on bottle labels or draw attention to their gender. Their reluctance may stem from concerns about prejudice toward their products in the male-dominated wine industry, Chi said.

“Our findings suggest that women winemakers and winery owners can benefit by being more visible,” she said. “The research shows that they can disclose their ownership with confidence and leverage it as a marketing strategy.”

The possibilities include putting “women-made wine” statements on labels or packaging, and retail store displays featuring women-made wines.

Demi Deng, an assistant professor at Auburn who earned her doctorate at WSU, is the first author on the research published in International Journal of Hospitality Management. Ruiying Cai, an assistant professor of hospitality business management at WSU, also contributed.

The new findings build on earlier studies showing that women are more inclined to buy wine with feminine gender cues on the labels. The 2024 research – by Cai, Chi, Deng, and WSU Emeritus Professor Robert Harrington – received widespread publicity. Beverage trade journals carried the story, and women winemakers were enthusiastic about the findings.

“As researchers, we want our work not only to have societal impact, but to have practical significance for the wine industry,” Chi said. “From the response, we saw that women winemakers were following our research and were eager for additional studies about women wine consumers.”

More than 1,000 U.S. women participated in the most recent research, which involved a three-part study.

First, the researchers replicated the 2024 findings about feminine cues on wine labels. Using a fictitious Columbia Valley red table wine, the women surveyed expressed higher intentions of purchasing the wine when the label’s artwork featured a bouquet of flowers versus a masculine portrait. They were also willing to pay $3.50 more per bottle – about $17.75 for wines with feminine labels compared to $14.25 for wines with masculine cues.

In the second phase of the study, a “woman-made wine” statement was added to marketing materials. Women consumers had even stronger purchase intentions for wines with both the statement and feminine artwork on labels, the research found.

In the final phase, photos of women winemakers were further added to the marketing materials. But women were less likely to buy feminine-label wines when the female winemakers were pictured. Rather than focusing on the “woman-made” messaging, consumers’ decisions may have been swayed by whether they related to the individual women portrayed in the photographs, researchers said.

The studies also tested the marketing strategies on wines with masculine labels. Adding a “woman-made” statement significantly increased their appeal to women consumers. And when female winemakers were pictured in the marketing materials, women were willing to pay $3 more per bottle for wines with masculine labels.  

Besides helping women winemakers market their products, Deng said she hopes the research will draw attention to women’s contributions to the industry. In the United States, about 18% of winemakers are women.  

Deng worked as a sommelier in New Zealand before she earned her doctorate. “I actually encountered a lot of women winemakers, but their names aren’t visible in the wine market,” she said.

---

Journal

International Journal of Hospitality Management

DOI

10.1016/j.ijhm.2026.104596 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Her wine, her way: How women’s ownership disclosure in wine marketing shapes women consumers’ choices

Article Publication Date

26-Feb-2026

Stalin’s latter-day defenders

By Paul Le Blanc

Published date 28 February, 2026

First published at New Politics.

In Stalin’s Shadow: Leon Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials
By Douglas Greene
London: Resistance Books, 2025

A serious development on the left — accompanying a flourishing of “campism” (i.e., seeing the world as divided into a U.S.-led “imperialist camp” and a “progressive camp,” which includes dictatorships in Russia and China and elsewhere) — is the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin, elevating him into the Revolutionary Pantheon, justifying the policies and practices for which he has long been condemned. For many, this smacks of the “revisionist” project advanced by such people as David Irving: seeing Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement as representing a reasonable German patriotism, denying the reality of a Holocaust destroying millions of Jews and others. While many on the left have effectively challenged Nazi apologists and Holocaust deniers, a systematic left-wing critique of the new wave of Stalinist revisionism has been missing. Until now, thanks to the efforts of Douglas Greene. Grover Furr — one of the authors Greene critiques — describes him as an “incompetent and dishonest Trotskyite.” But this isn’t quite right.

Greene’s identity

I first became aware of Douglas Greene during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, when he organized a series of diverse left-wing speakers (some far more prominent than me) to give informational, agitational, and educational talks for the consideration of the mostly young activists gathered at Boston’s Occupy encampment. From online contributions in one or another Trotskyist or Trotskyist-influenced site, I soon found that he was a writer as well — part of an undefined but vibrant left-wing collectivity discussing left-wing history and theory, sometimes putting forward ideas I disagreed with (far more critical of Jacobin and of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], for example, than I was inclined to be), but always offering thoughtful comments and to a significant degree going in a positive direction. Then, as “an independent Marxist and historian” with no clear organizational affiliation or academic credentials, he began to publish books.

I’ve recently acquired Greene’s first book, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Haymarket, 2017), but it was his second that I chose to read first, A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism (Zero Books, 2021). It was far better than the ultra-left hit piece I had expected. Despite an occasional gap or inaccuracy, it was seriously researched, packed with useful information and interesting ideas. Whether or not one fully agrees with him, he is someone worth reading.

As already noted, however, there was an urgent need to quite seriously confront the recent works of Stalin’s latter-day defenders — works undermining the democratic and humanistic qualities at socialism’s very core. Greene has moved forward to fill the gap. His third book is a quite interesting but prohibitively priced, 350-page hardback, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union (Lexington Books, 2023). His fourth is the volume under review.

Greene’s gallery

Greene presents a gallery of four Stalin defenders.

One is the already-mentioned Grover Furr (1944– ), professor of medieval English literature at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who has from 2011 to 2025 published at least seventeen books defending Stalin—in some cases with a primary focus on demolishing Trotsky. This quantity of publications causes Greene to devote two chapters to Furr; his conclusions are devastating:

The trouble with Furr’s work is not just that he makes up facts.… [H]e can cite genuine data in support of his claims. A cursory look reveals that his work is filled with abundant quotes, facts, and snippets of real information.… It is full of facts and footnotes.… [Yet] his overarching approach is to cherry pick data to fit his pre-existing conclusions. To achieve this, Furr utilizes a two-pronged approach of inflating any facts that he believes support his conclusions, and he either discredits or ignores everything which contradicts his thesis. (131)

While not formally identified with any political group, an examination of Furr’s Montclair State website includes a Politics and Social Issues page that has a link to the homepage of the Progressive Labor Party, with this comment: “Ever since the anti-war and anti-racist movements of the ‘60s I have found this to be the best of the ‘alternative’ sources. Relentlessly anti-capitalist, resolutely pro-worker and pro-employee generally, it’s the best source of class analysis of the world’s events.” Beginning in 1962, as a Maoist-oriented split-off from the Communist Party USA, at moments it played a significant role in U.S. “new left” activities of the 1960s and early 1970s; it then broke “to the left” from Maoism, and shrank into what many perceive as an ultra-left, self-isolating, and irrelevant sect.

Perhaps the most prestigious of Greene’s subjects is the late Italian scholar Dominic Losurdo (1941–2018). At first adhering to the massive but increasingly reformist Italian Communist Party, in the early 1990s Losurdo participated in a substantial break-away, Communist Refoundation. By the end of the decade, this group splintered—and Losurdo joined one of the smaller splinters, which adopted the old name “Italian Communist Party” and was influenced by the late post-Mao Chinese “market socialist” leader (Mao had persecuted him as a “capitalist-roader”), Deng Xiaoping. But Losurdo’s prestige has flowed not from his political history, but from his academic and literary achievements.

As director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, Losurdo taught history of philosophy as faculty dean of educational sciences. He was also prominent in professional associations devoted to the study of Marx, Hegel, and Leibniz.

But most important, he produced a number of significant works that combined his revolutionary political commitments with his scholarly expertise, including Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso, 2014), War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (Verso, 2020), and Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy (Verso, 2024). His most controversial works, however, have become more generally available (certainly for those reading in English) since his death: Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (Iskra Books, 2023) and Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn (Monthly Review, 2024).

There are two lesser-known figures with whom Greene deals. They lack the quantity and quality of output of Furr and Losurdo, but also enjoy a certain influence: Ludo Martens (1946–2011) and Bill Bland (1916–2001). Martens was a prominent figure in the Belgian far-left, a founder and leader of the Maoist-oriented Workers’ Party of Belgium. His key work on this topic, Another View of Stalin, was published in 1994. Bland, originally from Britain, moved to New Zealand in the 1930s, where he became active in the Communist movement, and after returning to Britain, played a prominent role as an educator in the Communist Party of Great Britain. He drifted toward Maoism after the mid-1950s, but by the 1970s had concluded that Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha’s represented a preferred alternative to Chinese Communist “revisionism.”

Greene’s achievement

A problem with all-too-many of those responding to what is presented by Stalin’s defenders is an inclination to settle for old clichés and contemptuous dismissal — but Greene’s approach is far more engaged, substantial, interesting, and useful. He gives serious attention to the four defenders of Stalin, each of whom has a different, distinctive approach. He clearly and dispassionately states their actual positions, often with generous quotes, and then frankly explains where he thinks they go wrong. He begins by sketching the social-political context from which they emerge, then gives a sense of some of their major ideas and the deficiencies of those ideas, shifting to the actual “how” and the “why” of the Moscow Trials and of the more extensive purges and repression in the USSR of 1935–39. He concludes with an exploration of “conspiracy theories,” while considering what whirled out of control in the Soviet Union of the late 1930s and also what to make of the resurging attacks on anti-Stalinism by Stalin’s latter-day defenders. The final chapter also has hints of relevance for the irrationalism and conspiracy theories related to today’s right-wing resurgence.

As a bonus, Greene generally includes in each of the chapters an interesting “interlude,” focusing on something related to the general topic, with intriguing subtitles: Vyshinsky’s Tribunal; Leon Trotsky, Georges Danton, Judas Iscariot, and Benedict Arnold; Spanish Inquisition; The River of Blood; The Confession; Wails at a Gangster’s Funeral; Shattered Faith.

Among the strengths of In Stalin’s Shadow is the fact that it isn’t hobbled by an exclusive reliance on Trotsky and Trotskyists in determining what is and isn’t so. His scope is far more interesting than that, and refreshingly wide-ranging. He isn’t afraid to connect with the serious scholarship of such figures as Sheila Fitzpatrick and J. Arch Getty (neither of whom is in any way “Trotskyist” — and both of whom have sometimes been accused of “Stalinist” leanings). He makes good use of their valuable contributions. Getty, for example, notes how impossible it would have been for Stalin to be “all powerful” — dovetailing with Fitzpatrick’s attention to Stalin’s reliance on a somewhat diverse team for the development and implementation of what are seen as “Stalinist” policies.

Another strength of Greene’s work is that he doesn’t simply lump together the four figures in his gallery but emphasizes important differences in the ways they deal with Stalin. Of course, they all unabashedly defend Stalin’s interpretation of Marxism (i.e., his “Marxism-Leninism”). They also embrace the four elements of his basic political orientation: the “socialism in one country” commitment; the “revolution from above” that promoted forced collectivization of land and hyper-industrialization; the extensive and brutal use of repression against political opponents; and the consequent cultural regimentation to mold “correct” attitudes among the population.

And corresponding to the insight of Fitzpatrick and Getty, none of them believe that Stalin somehow did it all. Yet here is the realm in which disagreements unfold among the defenders. There are divergent accusations that the defenders level against Stalin’s comrades:

Some of those claiming to support him were actually working against him (generally to enhance their own power and material privileges) at the expense of Stalin’s good and revolutionary intentions.

The development of a Stalin “cult of personality” (which Stalin allegedly did not support) was used by such double-dealers to cover their tracks.

Some (such as the heads of the secret police) were also in league with foreign powers — imperialists, Nazis, etc. — and used their authority to protect corrupt Communists and repress honest Communists. In making this case, Grover Furr devotes considerable attention to the alleged duplicity of NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov.

Splintering

Not all the defenders are in agreement with each other’s various points. For example, Bill Bland contends that within the Communist International a blatantly reformist “people’s front” line became dominant despite Stalin’s own revolutionary intentions and that Comintern chieftain Georgi Dimitrov was a secret enemy of Communism, serving not Stalin but instead erstwhile Nazi captors and imperialist masters. All of this goes too far for some of Stalin’s defenders.

On the other hand, it seems likely that, despite such divergences, most Stalin defenders would be inclined to agree with Grover Furr’s approach: Stalin never lied and was basically correct in all that he sought to do; the confessions wrung out of the Moscow Trial defendants prove that they and Trotsky were working with imperialists and fascists to destroy the Soviet Union; it is likely that they were guilty of even more criminal activity than what they confessed to.

It is Dominic Losurdo who is not in full agreement with this. He is not reliant on the forced confessions of the Moscow Trials, and for him, Stalin’s hands are far from clean. His line of argument is similar to the classic defense of Stalinism by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror (1947), which consciously inverted Arthur Koestler’s anti-Communist novel about the purges, Darkness at Noon (1940). Losurdo argues:

One need not be a Communist to recognize that “Stalinism,” with all of its horror, is a chapter in the liberation movement that defeated the Third Reich and that provided the impetus for anticolonialism and for the struggles against anti-Semitism and racism; every honest historian knows this. (Quoted by Greene, 27–28)

Greene notes that for Losurdo, “Stalinism was a historical necessity for the USSR since it represented political realism” (28). He continues:

Losurdo argued that Trotsky’s “utopianism” needed to surrender to Stalin’s “realism.” However, Trotsky was unable to accept this alleged necessity and accused Stalin of betraying the revolution. Ultimately, the division between radicals and moderates inside the Communist Party resulted in a bloody civil war. (28–29)

In this “Bolshevik Civil War” Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and others ended up plotting against Stalin and his policies—leading to their own betrayals, which culminated in bloody purges and the Moscow Trials. Losurdo, while not relying on trial testimony, does cite other bits of evidence, which Greene conscientiously demolishes. But these bits are beside the point. “However tragic Losurdo may consider the Bolshevik Civil War and the purges,” Greene notes, he believed that they were “necessary for the construction of socialism.” Greene sums up that for Losurdo “it does not matter how absurd or stupid the show trials were, what matters is that Stalin was on the right side of history and Trotsky was not” (49).

Conclusions

To get to the bottom of this, one must examine what actually happened in history — which goes beyond what is possible within the confines of the present book review. Provisional thoughts, however, can be offered.

Greene summarizes his own consideration of the evidence with the comment that “the narrative of the Moscow Trials was an irrational worldview expressing itself in Marxist jargon” (250). Such irrationality, and the horror of the consequent policies (following Losurdo’s line of argument) resulted in the construction of a so-called socialism so corrupted that it was incapable of enduring. This raises questions as to whether Stalin was “on the right side of history.”

It seems worthwhile to consider Greene’s proposed alternative: “Based on Marxist reason, not conspiracist mysticism, it is possible to not only understand the world, but to truly liberate people from oppression” (252).

Paul Le Blanc, emeritus professor of history, serves on the editorial board of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso) and is author of a number of books on labor and socialist movements, most recently Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (Pluto Press, 2023).