Human Consumption
We always have each other: #FreeBlackMamas and the fight to end the money bail system.
Attorney Nnennaya Amuchie discusses the work of National Mamas Bail Out Day, a nation-wide campaign to raise funds to free incarcerated Black mothers in time for Mother's Day, and places the campaign's resistance to the coercive nature of money bail in a larger contexts of prison abolition and Black solidarity and support in the face of state violence.
Nnennaya's group is still taking donations for the DC. / Maryland / Virginia area via their Generosity page.
The inequality engine: How American tax policy values wealth over work.
Historian Julia Ott explores the tax system's role in amplifying American inequality - from the low capital gains tax that values investment over labor and leads to assett bubbles and market crashes, to the Clinton-era takeover of Democratic Party policy by the investor class - and calls for a broad movement dedicated to tax justice beyond just demanding Donald Trump's returns.
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Julia wrote the article How Tax Policy Created the 1% for Dissent.
France, Macroneconomics and the triumph of the neoliberal project - for now.
Economist Mark Weisbrot explains why Marine Le Pen's electoral defeat is not a victory for the French left, but of the neoliberal order that creates the conditions for far-right politics, and digs into the political economy of France and the Eurozone to explain why new French president Emmanuel Macron's policies are guaranteed to fail, and just might provide an opening for the actual left, if the EU doesn't collapse first.
Mark wrote the articles Curb Your Enthusiasm: Macron Is Just The Beginning Of A New Fight For France And Europe for Huffington Post and How the Eurozone Damaged French Politics—and This Year’s Presidential Election for The Nation.
Beyond sanctuary: On Muslim-Latino solidarity and national immigration reform.
Immigration researcher Karina Moreno calls for Muslim/Latino solidarity in the Trump era - in the face of security state expansion into the lives of immigrants, and as an alternative to the mainstream left's localized, piecemeal failures to protect immigrants - and explains why only national immigration reform can defeat the threat of the ban, the wall and the raid.
Karina wrote the artilce A Politics of Solidarity for Jacobin.
On the natural history (and future) of cannibalism.
Zoologist Bill Schutt examines the long, bloody, somewhat recent history of cannibalism - as survival tactic, religious ritual, and media subject - and looks beyond pulp sensationalism to humanity's shifting values around the subject, from cannibalism's practice around the ancient world to the Greeks who took it off the menu.
Bill wrote the book Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History from Algonquin Books.
Getting away with what they can: Pollution, poverty and the plant next door.
Journalist Sharon Lerner reports on the large-scale poisoning of a small, poor town in Louisiana - as residents of St. John the Baptist Parish suffer cancer and neurological disease rates hundreds of times the national average - and explains why, with an already underfunded EPA under Republican attack, environmental pollution and its related illnesses threaten the lives of more Americans.
Sharon wrote the article The Plant Next Door for The Intercept.
Shaking the invisible hand: On Adam Smith's magical thinking.
In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen bites the invisible hand that feeds our capitalist delusions, critiques the fashion choices of the Enlightenment's major thinkers, and points out the part where "The Wealth of Nations" takes a major leap into magical thinking - a place we've been living in for 242 years.
