Tag: Poverty

  • The Battle for Income Equality

    Questioning the statistics in Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, with intent to undermine his thesis, is futile. Even if Piketty’s alert that returns on investment have exceeded the real growth of wages and economic output, which means that the stock of capital is rising faster than overall economic output, is not […]

  • Paradise: A Dystopian Anti-Capitalist Gem

    ​The 2023 German film Paradise went virtually unnoticed by commentators on the socialist left. Yet, it is amongst the best dystopian anti-capitalist films produced in the decade. The film follows the life of Max, an employee of Aeon, a company that buys life years from the poor to give them to the rich. Yes, you […]

  • Why I Believe What I Believe About the Chinese Revolution

    Why I Believe What I Believe About the Chinese Revolution

    Liu Hongjie (China), Skyline, 2021. Late last year, a colleague sent me a letter decrying some of my writings about China, notably the last newsletter of 2023. This newsletter is my response to him. ** The situation in China is the cause of a great deal of consternation amongst the left. I am glad you have raised the […]

  • The Distortion of Science

    Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests. Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact. The Unmaking of Science […]

  • Freedom: One Liberated Apple at a Time

    Freedom: One Liberated Apple at a Time

    A minor but significant spark of direct action occurred in New York on 15 December. A group of people entered a Whole Foods store (owned by Amazon), took groceries without paying and exited wearing Jeff Bezos masks. Independent reporter Talia Jane posted the following on Twitter/X: The action was in protest against corporate wealth alongside increased […]

  • The Dangerously Appealing Style of the Far Right

    The Dangerously Appealing Style of the Far Right

    Emilio Pettoruti (Argentina), Arlequín (‘Harlequin’), 1928. Before he won Argentina’s presidential election on 19 November, Javier Milei circulated a video of himself in front of a series of white boards. Pasted on one board were the names of various state institutions, such as the ministries of health, education, women and gender diversities, public works, and culture, all recognised […]

  • Taxes in America Are Unfair to Most Americans

    For decades, time and again, America’s tax code has been twisted and tweaked to give tax breaks to the top and crumbs (or nothing) to the tens of millions on the bottom and in the middle. Levels of wealth and inequality have become so gross that experts are clamoring for change, painting unflattering portraits of […]

  • How the International Monetary Fund Continues to Shrink the Poorer Nations

    How the International Monetary Fund Continues to Shrink the Poorer Nations

    From 9 to 15 October, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their annual joint meeting in Marrakech (Morocco). The last time that these two Bretton Woods institutions met on African soil was in 1973, when the IMF-World Bank meeting was held in Nairobi (Kenya). Kenya’s then President Jomo Kenyatta (1897–1978) urged those […]

  • Cliodynamics

    Cliodynamics

    Clio, Muse of History, Charles Meynier (1768–1832) Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, (2023), is one of the founders of the new ‘science’ of cliodynamics, a discipline which coalesced in the 1990s, statistical juggling ‘facts’ from the past, stitched together from bare bones (literally) of archeology, climate, geopolitics, crimes, […]

  • Fast-Food Graveyard: Sickened for Profit

    The modern food system is responsible for making swathes of humanity ill, causing unnecessary suffering and sending many people to an early grave. It is part of a grotesque food-pharma conveyor belt that results in massive profits for the dominant agrifood and pharmaceuticals corporations.    Much of the modern food system has been shaped by big agribusiness concerns […]

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