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The Ballot or the Brick: On Elizabeth Hinton’s ‘America on Fire’ and Vicky Osterweil’s ‘In Defense of Looting’
Two new books trace anti-police uprisings to the urban riots of the Civil Rights era. But as twenty million people took to the streets in 2020, why did so few pick up a brick? And would the movement to which they belong be better off if they had?
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Remove the stain
A blot on the nation.
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The CIA’s outsourced torture is lost to history
The CIA’s notorious practice of kidnapping and displacement gave birth to the post-9/11 torture program. We know nearly nothing about it.
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SpyCops: How the UK police infiltrated over 1,000 political groups
As part of their false personas, many officers entered romantic relationships with politcal activists, leading to the births of a number of children whose mothers were completely unaware of their partners’ double lives.
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Security U.S. fears of China nuclear expansion… déjà vu of Soviet missile gap hype
Media reports from the U.S. this week–regurgitated by the European press–highlighted concerns that China is embarking on a massive scale-up of underground silos for launching nuclear weapons.
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The far Right’s manufactured meaning of Critical Race Theory
Right-wing commentators claim to know what CRT is, while showing no interest in engaging with its ideas, and only very rarely quote the words of its proponents.
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China eradicates absolute poverty while billionaires go for a joyride to space: The Thirty-First Newsletter (2021)
During this bleak period, in late February 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping announced that–counter to this general global downturn–China had eradicated extreme poverty. What does this announcement mean?
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Mobilizations force Biden to enact new eviction ban
The new eviction moratorium was put in place amid protests at the federal capital led by progressive legislator Cori Bush, along with various social movements in the U.S.
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Opinion: From ‘friendly’ state to enmity state
As Texas Republicans pit neighbor against neighbor, we must respond by rebuking bigotry and embracing progress.
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Brazil’s U.S.-backed military regime casts shadow over hopes for 2022 election
Bolsonaro’s candidacy was democratic packaging for the long game of the military’s return to government. As they look to defend their position a year out from elections, the situation has escalated.
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Eviction tsunami crashes, Democrats shrug shoulders
On Saturday, Biden’s half-hearted, last-minute plea for Congress to extend the federal eviction moratorium failed and the measure expired.
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Repressing radical protest, tolerating reactionary violence: The U.S. double standard in historical context
The following essay examines the different reactions to radical and reactionary protest, and situates them in a broader historical context. In doing so, we find that the capitalist state will tolerate reactionary violence to a large extent since it represents no threat to capitalist property relations. In contrast, when faced with radical (and particularly socialist) movements capitalist states engage in much more severe repression.
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Craig Murray’s jailing is the latest move in a battle to snuff out independent journalism
He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”.
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Moving Beyond Capitalist Agriculture: Could Agroecology Prevent Further Pandemics?
The current complex of COVID-induced crises fits hand-in-glove with the system’s “normal” operation. Stability has been the delusional realm of a small sliver of the Global North, awash in post-World War Two imperialism and the repeated reinvention (and re-imposition) of various plantation systems of cheap and racialized labor.
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Daniel Hale sentenced to 45 months for exposing U.S. drones program and kill list
Hale released a total of 17 documents, of which 11 were marked secret and top-secret. One exposed that during one five-month period of the operation, civilian casualties constituted over 90% of the victims of drone strikes.
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Creating a democratically run economy: lessons from World War II price control struggles*
Many activists in the United States are working to build a movement for a Green New Deal transformation of the economy. Not surprisingly, a growing number look to the World War II conversion of the U.S. economy from civilian to military production for inspiration and policy ideas.
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Neo-Liberalism and the extreme Right
Georgi Dimitrov, president of the Communist International, had, at its Seventh Congress, characterised a fascist State as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary section of finance capital”
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Let Cuba Live—The movement standing up to Biden’s maximum pressure campaign
On July 22, U.S. President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris released a “fact sheet” on U.S. “measures” against Cuba. The release from the White House said that Cuba was a “top priority for the Biden-Harris administration.”
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People working a minimum wage job can’t afford rent anywhere in the U.S.
Over 40% of Black and Latinx households pay more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with 25% of white households.
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China takes tough approach to tame tutoring schools
The new set of rules aim to better monitor the education market, which has been blamed for increasingly unfair competition among students.