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American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting

State conservatives block city progressives

Conservative forces, organized by infamous groups like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), are using their influence in state legislatures to pass preemption laws. The purpose is to stop, and even roll back, the gains of progressive local coalitions by usurping the authority of city governments, thereby rendering popular strategies, like ballot and elected official vote […]

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MLK on Capitalism

We must have a new Poor People’s Campaign and Moral Revival

Channeling the incisive analysis of our best historians, TaNehisi Coates cut through the talking points of political pundits last week to name Donald Trump America’s “First White president.” Writing for The Atlantic, the National Book Award recipient made clear how there could be no Donald Trump without President Obama. The chaos from which the whole […]

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William Pelz - "A People's History of Modern Europe" | Seminary Co-op Bookstores

Making their own history

More than half a century ago, E. P. Thompson pioneered a new approach to labor history in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was dismayed with the bourgeois idea that history is made by great men, and the occasional princess or queen, but also frustrated with socialist histories that replace statesmen and business […]

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Working at Facebook

Who’s working for Facebook?

There are plenty of reasons to be interested in—and, even more, concerned about—Facebook. Many of them are raised in the recent review of Facebook-related books by John Lanchester [ht: db]: the fragmentation of the polity (via the targeting of posts), the dissemination of “fake news” (which played an important role in the 2016 U.S. presidential […]

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Activist being handcuffed in Berkley antifa protests

Thugs and journalists

The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.

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