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The Ecological Rift: A Radical Response to Capitalism’s War on the Planet
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. Monthly Review Press, 2010. 544 pages. Climate change is often called the greatest environment threat facing humanity. The threat is very real. Unless we cut carbon pollution fast, runaway climate change will worsen existing environmental and social problems, and […]
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Norman Gottwald: A Pioneering Marxist Biblical Scholar
Norman Gottwald belongs to a rare breed — an American Marxist biblical scholar. More than one jarring juxtaposition in that epithet! Unfortunately, he is less well known outside the relative small circle of biblical scholars than he should be. In order to introduce him to a wider audience, let me say a little about his […]
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Lenin and Keynes
At first sight no two persons could have been more dissimilar. One was a Cambridge don, with more than one foot in the British government; a supporter of the Liberal Party, staunchly opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution; an aesthete and a member of the Bloomsbury Group; a life peer in imperial Britain, and a solid, […]
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The Class Dynamics of Asian America: A Primer
The notion that Asian Americans are model minorities originated in the 1960s, mainly in reference to the socioeconomic gains of Japanese and Chinese Americans in particular. It did not take long, however, for that very idea to be applied to Asian Americans as a whole, especially as it continues to be perpetuated by the mainstream […]
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Gilbert Achcar’s Defense of Humanitarian Intervention
Gilbert Achcar defends the recently “UN-authorized” imperialist intervention in Libya on the ground that general principles may require exceptions in concrete cases. “Every general rule admits of exceptions. This includes the general rule that UN-authorized military interventions by imperialist powers are purely reactionary ones, and can never achieve a humanitarian or positive purpose.”1 This kind […]
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The Libyan Rebellion: The West’s Cloak over the Gulf
Fidel Castro was right. The West was planning an attack on a sovereign third world nation imminently: Libya. Nothing like a good old war against brown and black people in Libya by the West to remind oneself of what Western civilisation is all about. Many of us who have been politically active since the 1990s […]
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Interview with John Tully, Author of The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber
Why, of all possible commodities, did you choose to write a book on rubber? The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber” width=”260″ height=”393″ border=”0″ title=”BUY THIS BOOK”>THE DEVIL’S MILK: A Social History of Rubberby John Tully BUY THIS BOOK The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber Book Launch with author John Tully Tuesday, […]
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Counter-Revolution Field Manual
In a speech attacking ‘multiculturalism’ Prime Minister David Cameron argued for a “muscular liberalism” that would actively confront “extremist” ideologies — principally radical Islamism — that fail to conform to “Western values”. The problem is not with Islam per se, he argued, but with those “distortion[s]” of Islam that reject “democracy, the rule of law, […]
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On Recent Attacks on Civil Liberties
GEB Statement on Recent Attacks on Civil Liberties On September 24, 2010, the FBI carried out coordinated raids on the homes and offices of fourteen anti-war activists in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan. During the raids, the FBI confiscated everything from computers and mailing lists to children’s drawings and photos of Martin Luther King. Ten of […]
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They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To! Why Even the Best Post-war Economist Ended Up a Tragic Figure
The Crash of 2008 and its ghastly aftermath was not just an economic crisis but also a crisis aided and abetted by economics. Previously I have written about the Econobubble (the handmaiden of the “real” Bubble) and the toxic theories of economists who were very recently rewarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Following […]
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Notes on Contemporary Imperialism
Phases of Imperialism Lenin dated the imperialist phase of capitalism, which he associated with monopoly capitalism, from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the process of centralization of capital had led to the emergence of monopoly in industry and among banks. The coming together (coalescence) of the capitals in these two spheres led to […]
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Daniel Ellsberg: WikiLeaks Precursor and Unsung Foe of Neoliberal Economics
This is not the first time thousands of classified documents have been “liberated,” revealing to a stunned public how their government has waged a concerted war of disinformation against them for the purposes of bending their will to the demands of a pointless war: a war on the altar of which the deceived public are […]
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Television in Venezuela: Who Dominates the Media?
It is commonly reported in the international press, and widely believed, that the government of President Hugo Chávez controls the media in Venezuela. For example, writing about Venezuela’s September elections for the National Assembly, the Washington Post‘s deputy editorial page editor and columnist, Jackson Diehl, referred to the Chávez “regime’s domination of the media. […]
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Noam Chomsky on Hopes and Prospects for Activism: “We Can Achieve a Lot”
Acclaimed philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He shared his perspectives on international affairs, economics, and other themes in an interview conducted at his office in Boston on September 14, 2010. Keane Bhatt: Your new book Hopes and Prospects begins with the story of […]
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Take a Stand for Peace
This letter invites you to join what will be the largest veteran-led civil resistance to U.S. wars and occupations in recent history, Washington, D.C., December 16: <www.stopthesewars.org>. During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” That was true then — and is even […]
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Taking the Measure of Rot
I gave this talk at a very good conference, New Deal/No Deal, at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, on October 29. The panel chair was Michael Reich, who was the main organizer of the conference along with Richard Walker of the geography department. The dual themes were reflecting on the New Deal […]
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The Contrarian
Over the years Gore Vidal has spilled a lot of ink telling readers how the mass media murdered serious book culture in the United States, but he is the only living US novelist to have his own coffee table book. Snapshots in History’s Glare is a photo album of fine design and no small expense […]
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Iran and Honduras in the Propaganda System: Part 2, The 2009 Iranian and Honduran Elections
As we stated at the outset of Part 1,1 there is no better test of the independence and integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009 and 2010. Iran held its most recent presidential election on June 12, 2009. This followed a typically short three-week campaign […]
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The Palestine Question and the U.S. Public Sphere
The 2010 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, the Palestine Center, Washington, DC, 7 October 2010 Thank you all for coming today, and, to those of you who are watching, thank you for viewing this talk. Those of you who live in Washington, who are subjected to the American media, will probably be relieved to hear […]
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The Language of Power: Interview with Jean Bricmont
Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and is a member of the Brussels Tribunal. He is the author of Humanitarian Imperialism and co-author, with Alan Sokal, of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. He has written critically about ‘humanitarian interventionism’ since the Kosovo war in 1999. In […]