The belief that racism is ineradicable has inevitably shaped the character of antiracism today by Kenan Malik ‘‘Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well. Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us. Surely, they must know… Read More The paralysing pessimism of Critical Race Theory
First posted April 11, 2012 By Colin Leys and Barbara Harriss-White The dominant process underlying the transformation of life in all societies, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, is the conversion of things and activities into commodities, or commodification. In advanced capitalist countries this process is now outstripping our political and social capacity to adjust… Read More Commodification: the essence of our time
Chrissy Stroop For centuries, American evangelical Protestants have been obsessed with religious ‘revival’. Fear of ostensible societal, moral, and religious ‘decline’ is the other side of the same paranoid Christian coin. The United States, deeply influenced by early Puritan settlers and other assorted Christian fanatics, has been slow to secularise relative to European countries. In fact, the… Read More Americans are rejecting religion as the Christian right becomes more extreme
Priti Gulati and Stan Cox TomDispatch May 23, 2023 Let me offer a small prediction: between this moment when I’m writing the introduction to Priti Gulati and Stan Cox’s new piece and the moment, a few days from now, when it’s actually posted at TomDispatch, the question isn’t whether there will be another mass shooting in… Read More The Violent Urge for Supremacy in the World’s Two Largest Democracies
Brett Christophers Coming up with economic policy is a difficult, unforgiving task. To make the best of it, it helps to work with an accurate model of how the economy works. If you use a misleading model and act on it, you can’t reasonably expect good outcomes: in that scenario, we end up, as JM… Read More Look at what hedge funds really do – and tell me capitalism is about ‘rewarding risk’
NB: To begin with, its global warming, not ‘climate change’, the term is itself an example of Orwellian manipulation. DS By Kathleen Dean Moore / Salon In medieval times, gamekeepers trained dogs to the hunt by setting them on the trail of a dead rabbit they had dragged through the forest. Once the dogs were baying… Read More How Big Oil is Manipulating the Way You Think About Climate Change
United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) decried the massive profits of the pharmaceutical industry during a House hearing on Tuesday, arguing that the public should be given the option to buy into government programs like Medicare. “I believe that the profit-seeking motive in the pharmaceutical industry is out of control, and I think that… Read More Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez torches Big Pharma’s ‘out-of-control’ and ‘predatory’ profiteering
Christopher Knaus Stan Grant walks away from presenting job at the national broadcaster, after coverage of the King’s coronation prompted torrent of vitriol It was a moment of reckoning. Stan Grant, one of Australia’s most prominent Indigenous journalists, stared down the barrel of a live camera, stony-faced and red-eyed, to explain why he was stepping… Read More Racism in Australian media
Marina Prentoulis New Democracy’s victory was not unexpected, but the eye-watering share of the vote the party received is a different matter. The conservative government often points to its record of growth and investment, backed by European Commission forecasts, but the proceeds of this have not been felt evenly: a growing number of Greece’s population over… Read More Centre-left politics has been dealt a crushing blow in Greece. What can we learn from it?
First posted July 14, 2012 The word ‘nationalism’ itself dates from the early nineteenth century and marked the increasing use of national identity in order to make political claims. So to argue that national identity is pre-political is itself a political statement. It is becoming chic among some of Europe’s young elites to call for… Read More Alternatives to the nationalism of the conspicuously ignorant: Markha Valenta
After the truth-shower 