In this post, I will not cover what has been well-covered elsewhere: The derailment itself (50 cars, 20 of which carried toxic materials, 14 of those vinyl chloride), the subsquent fire, which burned for three days, the ultimate “controlled release” of the poisonous gas, the toxicity of vinyl chloride, the effects of the poison on locals, their pets, and their streams, or the arrest of the reporter who asked questions at Governor DeWine‘s presser.

Conor: Germany’s swift demise reminds me of the German intelligence agent Bachmann in “A Most Wanted Man.” He’s led to believe he’s operating on an equal level with CIA and British intelligence only to realize too late he was being played the whole time.

Like a traveler sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift toward evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Built on seven hills, Newton was one of America’s earliest commuter suburbs.

Yves here. This piece gives a wide ranging, historically based description of how free market ideology supported colonialist exploitation and often expropriation under the banner of trade.

Yves here. There have been a lot of suggestions about how to improve the Biden student debt forgiveness plan.

We — I’ll use the royal “we” here — at NC have long been aware that analysis and coverage of Russia’s tactics and strategy in Ukraine that is not dictated by organs of state security here in the United States is an inverted pyramid resting on a very small point: A small group of dissidents willing to go on the record with their views.

Notice how the amount of Western reporting on Ukraine has fallen off dramatically? That’s because the war is going well for Russia and its allies.

In this extremely short and simplistic post, I will do what it says on the tin: Scrape away the already deeply impacted layers of wartime propaganda. I propose to do this in the old-fashioned American way: By following the money.

Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion.

Amazon continues to abuse its warehouse workers, both in its day-to-day treatment of them and in its thuggish, law-breaking campaign to prevent unionization in the U.S.

The IMF caused social and economic decadence in the world; they and other international financial organisations are responsible for the global crisis.

Resilience cannot be restored without public spending, but the rentier business plan is to minimize taxes by shrinking the government, especially by privatizing its public utilities and other functions to create opportunities for charging monopoly rents, and to oppose taxation of economic rent.

This article would have been very useful if it had stuck to its headline warning, which is more or less along the lines that Xi has made very clear that he’s not going to allow investors, above all foreign investors, to exercise more influence in Chinese business and society.

The cost and time involved in validating Bitcoin transactions makes it unusable in retail transactions. So they will always be foreign currencies, where you have to trade in and out of them into a real world currency.

Nearly half a millennium ago Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Princedescribed three options for how a conquering power might treat states that it defeated in war but that “have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom.

For a period of time after this article was originally published (February 18, 2021) it was scrubbed from Google’s search index. When the author, Lambert Strether, realized the piece had been “censored,” it was published a second time on March 1, 2021 with an analysis of the purging. Subsequently, the article magically reappeared in the search […]

The extensive commentary I have read on the Capitol Seizure of January 6 has not, to my knowledge, focused on two aspects of the event: The first is the class composition of the rioters. The second is the actual cost of the event.

Sarah Jones, in The Coronavirus Class War in New York Magazine, does a neat, tidy job of kneecapping the notion that the anti-lockdown protests are manned by workers who want to get back to their jobs so they can start making money again.

Given the dramatic rise in unemployment, cuts in hours, and sharp decline in gig economy work, it isn’t surprising that hunger is becoming more common, particularly among families with children. Nearly half the U.S. couldn’t withstand a $400 emergency, and most households that have taken hits are seeing bigger income losses than that.