Archive | Newswire

  • Margaret Thatcher

    Willetts the conqueror (part 1): market populism

    This is Part 1 in a five-part series on Willets: Introduction; part 2; part 3; part 4. In the first installment of this multi-part critical review of David Willetts’ (2017) A University Education, we look at his ‘revisionist’ history of the university as it is modernised through successive historical periods – medieval, modern and neoliberal […]

  • Never again. Photo: Getty

    The market can’t solve a massacre

    The massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, one month ago today, left seventeen children and school staff dead. It was the third highest-casualty mass shooting at an educational institution in American history (after Virginia Tech—32 dead—and Sandy Hook—27) and the ninth highest-casualty single-shooter mass shooting in modern American history.

  • Cold War.

    Washington’s century-long war on Russia

    The United States has launched a three-pronged offensive on Russia. First, it’s attacking Russia’s economy via sanctions and oil-price manipulation. Second, it’s increasing the threats to Russia’s national security by arming and training militant proxies in Syria and Ukraine, and by encircling Russia with NATO forces and missile systems.

  • Money.

    Biofinance

    Capitalism has been the subject of too many conflicting definitions for any of the claims that follow to have any purchase on truth — understood as an adequation to the real. Beneath the numerous disagreements, however, a common substratum can be gleaned between the liberal Smithian, and the classical Marxist and Weberian positions: capitalism is a system geared at fostering accumulation for its own sake.

  • OSS Society- Gina Haspel.

    New CIA director Gina Haspel oversaw torture at a black site then lost evidence of it

    As “chief of base” of a CIA Black Site in Thailand, Haspel oversaw the torture and waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, who still hasn’t been charged with a crime.

  • Teaching by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

    Willetts the conqueror (part 3): human capital

    The following post is the third instalment of the multi-part review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Life’, you can find here the Introduction; Part 1 and Part 2. Parts 3 and 4 take a slightly different approach, diving deeper into the fundamental principles of marketisation, which centre on the conversion of qualitative experience and practice into quantitatively measurable outcomes, which can in turn become proxies for higher education’s exchange value.

  • Cape Town Water.

    Notes from the future

    What’s happening in Cape Town now might soon happen to many places in the world. To prevent socio-ecological crises like this we need to manage our resources more rationally and collectively.

  • We are students not customers

    2008 financial collapse all over again…? We need to understand the student loan speculation bubble

    For those who may have missed it, a major economic indicator emerged regarding student loan debt last week. Excessive debt, like student loans, has become one of the biggest barriers to current economic growth in the United States. On Thursday, March 1, 2018, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, appeared before U.S. Congressional representatives.

  • Eye of the snow storm.

    Willetts the conqueror (part 2): creative destruction

    Welcome to Pt. 2 of the multi-part critical Review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Education’. This part of the Review focuses on Willetts’ plans for so-called ‘alternative providers’ – a euphemistic term which should be read as synonymous with for-profit colleges and universities – and his reflections on wanting to see a British higher education (HE) monopoly rise up to compete with global HE mega-corporations.

  • Cuban Woman

    Cuban women: A revolution within the revolution

    It is almost impossible to talk about future projects in Cuba or the work done over all these years to construct a socialist society, without mentioning the role of women in decision making and their contribution in key spaces since the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959.

  • Leopoldo Lopez.

    The New York Times’ uncanny comparison of Leopoldo Lopez with Martin Luther King

    Journalistic standards simply don’t apply when it comes to the NYT’s coverage of Venezuela’s radical right-wing opposition, argues University of Oriente Professor Steve Ellner.

  • Health Care for the People.

    Utopia and healthcare (part 1)

    I’ve written quite a bit about the U.S. healthcare dystopia over the years—including a seven-part series back in 2016.* But I haven’t yet addressed the utopian dimensions of healthcare reform.

  • David Willetts

    Willetts the conqueror: introduction

    Before Jo Johnson and Sam Gyimah, there was David Willetts. As the Minister of State for Universities and Science from 2010 until 2014, under the Tory-led ‘coalition’ government, Willetts oversaw the introduction of a market into the English higher education system – often referred to as ‘marketisation’.

  • Free public transit

    The case for free public transport

    Transport has undergone enormous changes in recent decades, both in Scotland and across the world. Some have been cyclical: in Scotland’s capital, trams were built, dismantled, and then reintroduced. In other areas, we have seen consistent trends like the steady deregulation and privatization of services, which has left Edinburgh as the sole city in Scotland with a municipal bus operator.

  • Tariq Ali

    “The Left is a bit stuck in what needs to be done today”

    In September 2017, Tariq Ali visited our office in São Paulo for a long conversation. Here’s what he said about Chávez, Lula and the end of the “pink tide” in Latin America

  • Capitalism vs. Socialism

    What do we mean by socialism?

    What the hell is socialism, anyway? Over the last decade, it has been one of the most frequently looked up words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. And it’s easy to see why so many people feel the need for clarification.

  • President Donald Trump

    Federal court denies Trump’s last-ditch attempt to derail the youth climate lawsuit

    A federal court has denied the Trump administration’s last-ditch effort to prevent a landmark climate lawsuit from going to trial. It called the motion “entirely premature” and argued that the administration had failed to reach the “high bar” required for dismissal.

  • West Virginia teahers.

    The lesson from West Virginia teachers? If you want to win, go on strike

    For many years now, observers have been ringing the death knell for the U.S. labor movement. West Virginia teachers haven’t just pumped life back into that movement—they’ve reaffirmed the fundamental principle that the key to building power and winning is for workers to withhold their labor.

  • Hugo Chávez in love of Venezuela

    Five years on: the revolutionary legacy of Hugo Chávez

    Five years have passed since the death of Hugo Chávez. I had known him for almost ten years and had an enormous respect for his courage, honesty and dedication to the fight against oppression and exploitation.

  • Sea Ice.

    NASA Studies an unusual Arctic warming event

    Winter temperatures are soaring in the Arctic for the fourth winter in a row. The heat, accompanied by moist air, is entering the Arctic not only through the sector of the North Atlantic Ocean that lies between Greenland and Europe, as it has done in previous years, but is also coming from the North Pacific through the Bering Strait.