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Colored Property & State Debt with David Freund
In this episode, we talk with David Freund, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. David is the author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America, an award-winning book that tracks how the language of racial exclusion was re-coded in terms of markets, property, and citizenship in the post-World War II era.
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The propaganda multiplier: how global news agencies and western media report on geopolitics
In this case study, the geopolitical coverage in nine leading European newspapers was examined for diversity and journalistic performance using the example of the Syrian war.
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Why so hostile? Busting myths about heterodox economics
Does accepting the term heterodox economics mean we accept our marginal disciplinary status? No. On the contrary, we use the term in order to challenge this marginalization. If people find the heterodox label confusing, we should be able to clarify where we are coming from.
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Warnings of ‘Gulf of Tonkin 2.0’ as Trump officials blame Iran for oil tanker attacks
It’s obvious that Bolton and Pompeo are trying to create a Gulf of Tonkin incident with Iran.
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Making excuses for unemployment: The myth of a “skills gap”
The current labor force participation rate of prime age workers, those 25-54 years, is a case in point. It remains below the previous peak rate in 2008, and even further below the peak rate at the turn of the century. We would need an additional 1.2 million employed prime age workers to match the 2008 labor force participation rate and 2.5 million more to match the turn of the century rate. Still it appears that at the present moment unemployment is no longer a major political issue.
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Cuban “troops” saving lives in Venezuela
Cubans are truly committed to the principle of sovereignty, we are protective of our independence, and we would never do to others what we would not allow to be done to ourselves.
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A Climate Emergency Manifesto to avert climate catastrophe
The panic button needs to be hit to declare climate emergency. We need serious action now; there is no more time to waste.
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Guaido Requests U.S. military ‘cooperation’ to oust Maduro as U.S. vessel violates Venezuelan waters
A meeting between Guaido’s team and the U.S. Southern Command is being organised.
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On Eric Hobsbawm and other matters
The failures of Richard Evans the biographer reveals the greatness of Eric Hobsbawm the historian.
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Pasqualina Curcio: ‘Hyperinflation is a Powerful Imperialist Weapon’
“Unilateral coercive measures…[directed by the U.S. against Venezuela] affect the entire population in a deliberate and systematic manner. That is why, in accordance with the Rome Statutes [of the International Criminal Court], they are crimes against humanity.”
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Venezuela’s crisis: a view from the Communes
Federico Fuentes explores grassroots communal organisation, and the tension between popular power and sectors of the government.
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Could this be the most Marxist film ever made?
Can a film be true? More to the point, can a film about capitalism avoid being recuperated by the system as just another commodity to make money for the culture-industry? Predictably, Riley sides with Marx, who said: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question…. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
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Trump continues Obama’s war on whistleblowers, arrests another alleged Intercept source
This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong.
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Note from USA: The A to Z of the American Police State
What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theatre. And what political theatre it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.
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We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limb
When the late South African artist Tito Zungu wanted to depict the world of the migrant labourer, he settled on the envelope. It was by infrequent letters that the migrant would be able to be in touch with family – letters dictated to professional letter writers at one end, which would be read out by professional letter readers at the other.
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Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism
In the final stage of fascism, the fascist state has consolidated power and freed itself of its petty-bourgeois class origins. Poulantzas says that this is the most brutal stage, for it involves violent purges at the state level to remove the petty-bourgeoisie, and terroristic repression over the masses.
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Dossier 16: Resource sovereignty—the Agenda for Africa’s exit from the state of plunder
In this interview Gyekye Tanoh, head of the Political Economy Unit at the Third World Network-Africa based in Accra (Ghana), elaborates upon the themes of corporate plunder, resource nationalism and people-centered forms of resource management in Africa.
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A first-hand account from Caracas from the day of the coup through May Day
Today there was a farcical attempt to take a military airport that fizzled. It turned into a dozen or so guys throwing stones and being ignored. The Guardian is shamelessly running video of something that happened weeks ago as though it were today. We were there and it was all normal.
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The Atlantic illustrates everything that’s wrong with media coverage of Venezuela sanctions
“Trump’s Venezuela Policy: Slow Suffocation,” an Atlantic report (4/17/19) by Uri Friedman and Kathy Gilsinan, passed up a rich opportunity to expose the humanitarian pretexts for economic intervention, and instead exhibited the worst tendencies of corporate media coverage of U.S. policy in Latin Ame
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Seven theses on the Capitalist Democratic State
What is the capitalist democratic state and how should it be confronted? This question has bedevilled the left for generations. On the one hand, a social democratic conception of the state as a neutral institution that needs to be occupied and captured by bureaucrats with the right ideas has lead to experiments in socialist governance that have failed to overcome the private power of capitalists and turned toward neoliberal reversals