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Donald Rumsfeld—RIP: Berlin Bulletin No. 191, July 3, 2021
Don’t speak ill of the dead, they say, but if I were to choose candidates for a Hall of Evil Fame, I’d have to ignore such advice; the late Donald Rumsfeld would be close to the top of my list.
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The United States tries to take advantage of the price Cubans are paying for the blockade and the pandemic
This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world.
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Cuba faces looting, whose hands are behind it?
The Cuba “protest-story” is not a single incident. Similar foreign interference happened in other countries. The Cuba-protest-incident is not going to be last attempt by the Empire.
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Imperialism, Migrant Labor, and the Nation: The Canadian Example
By centering “human capital” and providing more pathways to work and residency for higher-skilled migrants, despite lower-skilled migrant workers having a far greater desire to temporarily migrate and permanently settle, Canada is able to continually reap the benefits of both high-skilled and low-skilled labor without having to socially reproduce either.
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There’s a dirty tricks campaign underway in Peru to deny the Left’s presidential victory
The campaign to overturn Peru’s presidential election results is one of “unconventional warfare.”
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The Political Economy of Hybrid Corn
In bourgeois society a violation of property rights is the supreme injustice. Hybrids provided a solution in agriculture. Commercial hybrids decrease the yield of the following generation. This means that farmers have to renew their seed every year. Hence, hybrids create a perpetual market for seed.
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The institutional murder of Fr. Stan Swamy
This is not a natural death, but the institutional murder of a gentle soul, committed by an inhuman state.
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Dossier No. 42: Defending our sovereignty: U.S. military bases in Africa and the future of African unity
Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah noted, seeks to fragment Africa, weaken African state institutions, prevent African unity and sovereignty, and thereby insert its power to subordinate the aspirations of the continent for pan-African consolidation.
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Dick Lewontin, 1929-2021
If find it hard to recount Dick’s [Richard C. Lewontin] scientific accomplishments—not because I don’t know them, but because they’re already well known and you can read about them in many places. He made fundamental contributions in theoretical population genetics, in experimental population genetics (out of his lab came the first assays of genetic variation at individual loci using both electrophoresis and DNA sequencing), and even in ecology. He never wrote a trivial paper.
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Revolutionizing the narrative: Building a principled Pakistani solidarity movement for Palestine
As part of the ongoing Nakba, Israel has once again unleashed its latest reign of terror on Palestine, in response to resistance by Palestinians against ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem (meant to eviscerate both Palestinian social and cultural life from the city).
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Soil ecology and capitalism agriculture: Fred Magdoff interviewed by Farooque Chowdhury
Ecological and social conditions are mostly ignored in a system in which profit is the goal: Fred Magdoff discusses capitalist agriculture
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Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty, and Pandemic Prevention
COVID-19 and other zoonotic outbreaks such as Ebola are illustrative of the complex interactions between deforestation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction, and human health and safety.
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Rob Wallace on the political economy of pandemics
Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and such leaders across the world are malicious miscreants, convening necropolitical death cults. But the alternatives, also tied to capitalist sociopathy, are only a little bit better. Our “progressives” worship at the altar of the circuits of capital.
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Small State but big questions
A week ago Saxony-Anhalt voted! The media prediction – a neck-and-neck race – was cock-eyed! But outside Sachsen-Anhalt (in German), did anyone really give a damn? Yes, some did!
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The Modern Tecumseh and the Future of the U.S. Left
Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. His dream of an Indigenous confederacy largely died with him. Yet his appreciation of the moment and the possibilities for transformation lived on and should give us all pause.
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Dossier no. 41: The farmers’ revolt in India
India’s big capital, in close cahoots with the political class, took advantage of privatisation policies to seize public resources (including profitable public sector assets), acquire vast tracts of land by displacing village and forest communities, control the nation’s mineral resources, and undermine public sector banks through a cascading set of fraud and non-payment schemes.
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Lefebvre and Althusser: Reinterpreting Marxist Humanism and Anti-Humanism
Since the October Revolution, Marxism has experienced almost as many crises as capitalism itself. Meltdowns of capitalism usually come as little surprise to savvy Marxist theorists but economic crises are one thing; economic crisis plus a global pandemic is something else again, beyond an everyday capitalist norm, more akin to the political-economy of wartime. Pandemic, like war, threatens not only life and limb, but also solidarity and tender acts of human togetherness.
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Americans must recognize economic classes
There appears to be a reluctance in the United States to wear the mantle of “working class.” Its connotation appears to be a relic from the economic revolutions of Europe in the late nineteenth century. However, they remain the economic class that built the nation’s now failing economy.
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Red Alert: Only one Earth
A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Making Peace with Nature (2021), highlights the ‘gravity of the Earth’s triple environmental emergencies: climate, biodiversity loss, and pollution’.
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U.S. imperialists deprive Cuba of syringes that are needed now
Cuba, the first Latin America country to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines, presently is short of syringes for immunizing its population against the virus. It’s not feasible for Cuba to make its own syringes. The U.S. blockade prevents Cuba from importing them from abroad.