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U.S. isn’t leaving Syria—but media lost it when possibility was raised
At a rally in Cleveland last week, President Donald Trump said that the U.S. will get out of Syria “very soon.” It is now clear that the 4,000 U.S. troops currently occupying Syria (Washington Post, 10/31/17) will in fact stay in Syria (Independent, 4/4/18), even though keeping troops in another country in defiance of that […]
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Another Latin American soft coup on tap? Western media decries Evo Morales’ candidacy
Supporters of Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, wonder why his popular government can’t enjoy the same privilege of indefinite re-election afforded to many Western leaders without being called a “dictator” by media. Is it truly concern for “democracy” or is another agenda at play?
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Pentagon capitalism and silicon valley
The weaponized nature of the tech industry is a pandora’s box that may prove impossible to close. Yet Google’s employees are resisting their company’s continued work to upgrade the U.S. war machine.
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MLK: A snap shot in time
The line of preachers stretched 100 yards to the door of Columbus, Georgia’s radio station WOKS, where the pastors had each been allotted a few minutes to testify to their deep commitment to the ideals espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shot down in Memphis three days earlier. Nearly every Black minister in town was there, waiting his turn to lie. Although they would sound like an amen corner for “the Movement” on this mournful Sunday morning, the assembled clergymen had, in fact, acted as the front line of resistance to King’s gospel of nonviolent confrontation with the white powers-that-be.
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“We did not feel we belonged to the same Europe as them”
Given the context of Ernaux’s book, which traces different instances of French and world political history over the span of 66 years, one can clearly infer that the “we” of this passage refers to French people and, by extension, Western Europeans as a larger group. As a Macedonian, I am inclined to think that I am not and probably never will be a part of this “we”.
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Privitization of public education
For the first time in American history, students in more than half of all U.S. states are paying more in tuition to attend public colleges or universities than the government contributes.
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Ecuador, Assange and the empire: anatomy of a liberal sellout
Under Ecuador’s new government, the gagging of Assange has long been a matter of when, not if. It’s only the latest sign of a once-defiant nation’s newfound subservience to Washington and Europe.
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50 years after 1968: students strikers attacked again
Not an April Fool’s joke. Here are the facts: Four days ago (March 29) the ultra-conservative Dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court, and held over in jail for arraignment by the Chief Prosecutor–all on the complaint of nine student strikers, who claim to have been brutally assaulted with Dean Philippe Pétel’s active complicity while ‘occupying’ a school auditorium.
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Theresa May is playing a reckless game of nuclear roulette
BACK in May 2017, just prior to the British general election, I wrote a piece arguing that a victory for Theresa May would see Britain dragged further towards war with Russia.
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Teachers strikes fever spreads
It started with a few hundred West Virginia teachers and school employees pulling one-day walkouts. It became an unqualified victory in that state, which educators elsewhere were quick to emulate.
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Interview with Joseph Halevi
Joseph Halevi was born in 1946 in Haifa, which then was part of British Palestine but since 1948 in Israel. Most of his earlier life was spent in Rome, where he graduated in Philosophy and Political Economy. He has been Professor of Economics at the Interna-ional University College Turin, Italy, since 2010.
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Technology and capitalism 150 years after Das Kapital
Today, one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the first volume of Capital, Marx remains our contemporary.
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How the United States ‘hacked’ Russia’s elections in the 1990s
In a recent interview that went viral, Russian President Vladimir Putin repudiated NBC journalist Megyn Kelly, when she pressed him on the so-called “Russiagate” scandal.
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The stormy petrel
In Moscow there has been something like a revival of interest in the immortal Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, who called himself Gorky, the Bitter One. Even Gorky’s portrait, which had been removed from the title page of the influential literary magazine Literaturnaja Gazeta, is shining there again next to Pushkin’s.
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The danger of being wrong about animal rights
Dogs and suitcases are personal property under the law. For the most part, that enables humans to use, neglect, and abuse them indiscriminately. Dogs and other nonhumans have been property at least since the invention of money as suggested by the common etymologies of “chattel,” “cattle,” and “capital.”
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University strikes: where do we go from here?
On February 22nd the University and College Union (UCU) called for the beginning of a nation wide strike in response to Universities UK’s (UUK) attempt to shift of the Universities Superannuation Scheme from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution pension.
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Surveillance capitalism and the state: Facebook devastated on multiple fronts as data theft crisis grows
Material collected by Cambridge Analytica via Facebook quizzes—which included detailed psychological profiles of unsuspecting users for the purpose of “behavioral microtargeting”—was used by the campaigns of Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and right-wing Super PACs tied to billionaire Robert Mercer.
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Gun controls in old East Germany
Strict weapons’ laws in the old East Germany, undoubtedly a restriction of on freedom, meant that there were virtually no shooting deaths and never a single mass shooting, in schools or anywhere else.
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Google and corporate news giants forge alliance to defeat independent journalism
The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”
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Willetts the conqueror (part 4): audit culture
This reserve army provides an increasing number of desperate and mostly unionised workers to occupy the new, outsourced, deprofessionalised jobs while remind those lucky enough to retain work that they can be replaced if they dare to cause trouble.