Crash Crops
Power, poverty and the long divide between Global North and South.
Anthropologist Jason Hickel examines the creation of mass poverty in the Global South - from the exploitation built into the structures of global trade, development programs and aid policies, to the echoes of colonialism in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Jason is author of The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets from Norton Books.
Two strikes and the battle for control of Brazil's oil profits.
Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the strike wave sweeping Brazil's trucking and petroleum industries - in reaction to the coup government's dismantling of the semi-state owned oil company Petrobras and the rising price of oil and gas now untethered from social good and solely tied to international markets.
Brian translated the recent articles Truckers’ strike: not perfect but demands are legitimate and Trucker Strike: Petrobras’ Dismantlement Leads Brazil to Chaos for Brasilwire.
Inside the dark, booming business of coerced immigrant detainee labor.
Journalist Victoria Law reports on the $1-per-day labor of detained immigrants at privately run detention centers - under threat of solitary confinement and lack of food and sanitary items for refusing "voluntary" work - and explains why a series of lawsuits accusing ICE of human trafficking might bring down the private/public exploitation scheme.
Victoria wrote the feature Investigation: Corporations Are Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor. Some Say It’s Slavery. for In These Times.
New ways to be free: On radicalism, resistance and the promise of Black liberation.
Writers Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson look to the enduring, revolutionary promise of the Black radical tradition - as a diverse framework of ideas and tactics to resist systemic violence and White supremacy, and as a path towards liberation, not just against the exclusionary state, but beyond it.
Zoé and William are the authors of As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation from AK Press.
Death and dispossession haunt the American family farm.
Anthropologist Kathryn M. Dudley explores the massive economic crisis hitting small farms across America - as food prices become political tools, profits sink and family farms are swallowed by banks and corporate agri-business, rural American surrenders to a slow decline of poverty, powerlessness and suicide.
Kathryn wrote the article Traumas of Dispossesion for Jacobin.
Don't rock the boat: Tips for smooth sailing on a sea of lies.
In a Moment of Truth, your captain Jeff Dorchen explains why our love is a ship and America is an ocean is lies - surrounded by sharks and New York Times features on Alicia Silverstone and an Orange Neptune and his court of salt-water drunk supporters drying to drag us down before we get wherever this stupid boat is headed.
