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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.
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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.