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Who’s working for your vote?
In 2018, Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analytics company, dominated the news about political campaigning and data. But they are not alone in using personal data for political influence. Since we began actively documenting this industry, our global list has expanded to 329 organisations, and it is still growing.
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Dating brokers: the dating industry surrounding dating profiles
In May 2017 artist Joana Moll, alongside Tactical Tech, purchased 1 million online dating profiles for 136€ from U.S.Date, a supposedly U.S.-based company that trades in dating profiles from all over the globe.
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Promote the health of all the people of the world
Earlier this month, in Savar (Bangladesh), over 1400 delegates came to the fourth People’s Health Assembly–first held in 2000 by popular health organisations to drive a global dynamic to champion public health measures. At the centre of the discussions were increased health inequalities–between the rich and the poor certainly, but also sharply between affluent states and states that have found their wealth robbed by colonialism and the adverse order produced over the past fifty years.
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Left behind
The historically low black unemployment rate is one of Donald Trump’s favorite applause lines. Even Reuters [ht: ja] declares that Trump is right.
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The commune and 21st century socialism: A conversation with Robert Longa of El Panal Commune
In this interview, VA talks with a key cadre of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force, an organization based in the 23 Enero barrio that has worked to build Venezuela’s most emblematic urban commune.
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An Excerpt from Green Earth
Kim Stanley Robinson describes himself as “a patriot of the genre” of science fiction, writing at the intersection of science and politics for over three decades. His work is striking for its warmth and realism.
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Green paradoxes: How climate change policy preserves climate change causes
Why are societies failing to effectively respond to climate change? Why is it that “environmental degradation increases amid the growth of environmental attention and concern,” as Alexander Stoner and Andony Melathopoulos put it?
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With tensions mounting over Kerch Strait incident, will Ukraine replace Syria as focus for U.S.’ Russia containment strategy?
As has been the case in the past, it seems that the U.S.’ botched proxy war in Syria will spur Washington to seek to revive the proxy war in Ukraine.
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What would Marx have said about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?
Twitter says it is about “what people are talking about right now”. Facebook argues its “mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them”.
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Radical black feminism and the simultaneity of oppression
As the word intersectionality falls from the lips of Hillary Clinton and increasingly is normalized and sanitized, we should be clear about its radical moorings.
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We need to strengthen the public in the U.S. public sector
Many people have given up on the idea of government as an instrument of progressive social change, especially the federal government.
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Fake news on WhatsApp swayed Brazil’s election. India should be worried
WhatsApp and fake news go hand-in-hand in both Brazil and India. And judging by the Facebook-owned messaging app’s effect on Brazil’s recent presidential election, India may be slated for some serious trouble next spring.
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Malcolm X would say Russiagate is a fool’s game
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” —Malcolm X
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If the field cannot feed the farmer, then burn the field
A few days from now–on 29-30 November–a very large number of people will gather in New Delhi, the capital of India, to say that they stand with India’s farmers (kisans).
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Amazon, Google & Big Tech’s productivity paradox
Whatever you may think of the multi-billionaire founders of Amazon and Alphabet-Google,(1) there would seem to be one undeniable fact about their companies: they have massively improved productivity. Amazon has an e-commerce system that delivers very efficiently; Google has revolutionised Internet search.
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Was the gravedigger thesis central to Marx’s theory of the working class?
This article summarizes Matt Vidal, “Was Marx wrong about the working class? Reconsidering the gravedigger thesis,” International Socialism 2018.
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U.S. intel will bring Assange to the U.S. in Chains
Julian Assange, a hero in the struggle against imperial wars and the lies that states tell to justify them, is in mortal danger.
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The defeat of democracy in Brazil
Many wonder how it is possible, following the democratic governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma Rousseff, that Brazilians have elected as President a shady federal deputy and die-hard defender of the military dictatorship that ruledthe country 1964-1985.
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Humanity faces simultaneous climate disasters: study
The future risk of dealing with multiple climate impacts at once depends on geography and whether humanity succeeds in rapidly drawing down greenhouse gas emissions.
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Neo-Liberalism and the diffusion of development
Capitalism in short was the panacea for mass poverty in the third world and not its progenitor as the Marxists had been arguing. The crisis that is enveloping the third world economies at present, is putting an end to that claim.