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At the bottom of the wealth pyramid
Yesterday, I looked at the enormous wealth of U.S. billionaires and the growing gap between them and the rest of the American people.
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Faith, myths, and Black Prometheus
The mythologizing thought and rhetoric that sees in human struggles the pitting of god against god is as ancient as any human storytelling. More recently Black Theologians have seen in the history of black people the need to efface a white God who condones oppression and to replace him with a black God of the oppressed. Hickman’s book provides the link that ties the ancient and the modern together.
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Economist Harry Magdoff UVM lecture – the ‘Stock Market Crash’
Harry Magdoff at UVM on the Stock Market Crash. Intro by Abbas Alnasrawi. Sponsored by SPARC.
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How to make the Trump era seem like fake news
Congratulations, smart American shopper! You have just overcome months of electorally induced PTSD by purchasing a Li’l Orange President®! These droll, five-inch-high orange neo-fascist dudes are living genetic replicas of our current U.S. president!
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From gender to Jamaica
It didn’t affect many people directly, but even small victories are welcome these days. Germany’s Constitutional Court just ruled that no-one should be forced to declare themselves officially male or female. It thus created a third open category anyone can opt for (or be opted by parents when still a child). I think everyone can […]
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Letter from the U.S.: Trump and Bannon take control
Writing in the October 28 New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks said the preceding week was “when Donald Trump and Steve Bannon solidified their grip on the Republican Party and America’s national government”.
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A century after the Bolshevik Revolution
In the world we’re living in, it’s not enough to solve the tension between capital and work, the ongoing crisis of civilization urgently demands that we address the tension between capital and nature, which is currently compromising the existence of life in our planet.
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FARC’s insurgent feminism moves from the battlefield to society
Diana Lozado was 21 when she left her home city of Nieva and fled into the jungle to fight with the FARC. She had always been fascinated by the guerrilla movement and its fight against inequality in the countryside, and Lozado wanted to be part of it.
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The “Amazon Amendment” would effectively hand government purchasing power over to Amazon
This week, representatives of three major internet platforms — Google, Facebook, and Twitter — are testifying before Congress about their role in facilitating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But a fourth giant sat comfortably removed: Amazon.
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W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction” and the new (Marxist) historiography
What follows is the paper I gave this past weekend at the ninth annual meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History in Dallas. I received excellent comments from our chair, Amy Wood, and from several audience members–comments that have made me rethink some of my argument. But I publish here without editing in the hopes that I receive more comments.
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The other battle: to consolidate commandante Chavez’s dream
Beyond electoral battles and victories, the Bolivarian Revolution must fight a strategic battle every day; that is the battle of ideas. This cannot be waged simply through theoretical debate alone, but through the real practice of political ethics.
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When 20,000 American nazis descended upon New York City
In 1939, the German American Bund organized a rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
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Marxian economics
This entry begins by setting out the core ideas of Karl Marx (1818–83), with particular reference to the theory of historical materialism and its application to the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s theory of value and distribution receives detailed attention, followed by his models of capital accumulation and economic crisis.
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Tax cuts: It’s all about capitalism
Powerful corporations and the rich in the United States continue their winning ways. By narrow margins, both the House of Representatives and Senate have agreed on a budget proposal that calls for an increase in the federal deficit of $1.5 trillion dollars in order to fund a major reform of the U.S. tax system that will make the rich and powerful even more so.
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100,000 indigenous people join national strike and the repression continues
Colombia is in an environment of almost permanent mobilization of social and political movements due to the government’s failure to follow through on the agreements it has made in different spaces of negotiation, its continued campaign of violence against members of social movements, and its silence in the face of renewed paramilitary violence in the territories of Colombia.
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Stuart Hall’s deconstruction of fate
The island of Barbuda is currently devoid of human life, a bleak reality that is both unfathomable in its scope and seemingly inevitable under the conditions of racialized capitalism. The severity of Hurricane Irma’s impact was undoubtedly worsened by the gross consumption of natural resources, particularly by nations that historically benefitted from colonialism and the construction of empire.
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Radical municipalism
Last week saw a flurry of humiliating pitches by North American cities for Amazon to pick them as the location of the corporation’s second headquarters.
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This year’s real Halloween horror
The Mars family has made billions selling us M&Ms, Snickers, and countless other Halloween treats for a century now. But when it comes to paying tax, the Mars family seems to be all tricks and no treats.
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The IWW saga in new light
Frank Little and the IWW is a family story—Jane Botkin’s own family story, as she rightly says. It is hers because she did not know anything about her great uncle growing up. She puts the story together, piece by piece, before our eyes, and that is large part of the pleasure of this text.
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Neo-liberal capitalism and its crisis
“Neo-liberal capitalism” is the term used to describe the phase of capitalism where restrictions on the global flows of commodities and capital, including capital in the form of finance, have been substantially removed.