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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.
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Results and prospects from the U.S. midterm elections: a discussion with Lance Selfa
Red Flag editor Ben Hillier speaks with Lance Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of the essay collection U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty, about the meaning of the midterm election results and what comes next.
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The global rise of fascism: capitalism end game?
It is everywhere. In a few years, it has metastasized like a cancer, on all continents. Its fervent proponents and ill-informed supporters call it populism or nationalism. In the Italy, Germany, or Spain of the 1930s, however, this ideology of exclusion and fear, defined by a hatred of the other, together with a tyrannical executive power, was called by its proper name: fascism.
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Filming in the most depressing city on the Earth: Jakarta
It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.
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Amazon’s accent recognition technology could tell the government where you’re from
AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.
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Everything you thought you knew about Western Civilization is wrong
A Review of Michael Hudson’s new book AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS
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Massive Woolsey fire began on contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory, close to site of partial meltdown
The tremendously destructive Woolsey Fire has been widely reported as beginning “near” the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne), but it appears that the fire began on the Rocketdyne property itself.
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Living our lives inside a tragedy the size of the planet
After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the ‘supermarket of the world’. Instead, Argentina’s economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively sold for the past four decades: structural adjustment.
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Prisoner prophet: revisiting George Jackson’s analysis of systemic fascism
The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing U.S. Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new–both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters–Trump’s emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in U.S. history.
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Fascists in training: Ukraine’s nationalist youth camps
The camps organised by nationalist parties train children as young as 8 to hate Russians, foreigners and gay people—and they now receive considerable government money to do so, reports YURAS KARMANAU
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Edinburgh tells fascist Bannon to go back home
Ex-Trump aide’s visit ‘legitimises racist views’
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California’s wildfire and climate change warnings are still too conservative
Another Hot, Dry Year Is Fueling The State’s Deadliest, Most Destructive Wildfire. Scientists Say Wildfires Here Are Consistently Surpassing Their Projections.
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When media say ‘working class,’ they don’t necessarily mean workers—but they do mean White
Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders.
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Magic imperialism and the great American wall
You all know how the saying goes: “Poor Mexico–too far from God, too close to the United States.”
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Et tu, RT? Amplifying Western disinformation on Rwanda
The Great Lie about the Rwandan bloodbath opened the door to a far larger genocide in Congo and justified U.S. military interventions all over the planet. During a recent campaign event, Florida Senator Bill Nelson said, “That story of Rwanda is very instructive to us because when a place gets so tribal that the two […]