February 20, 2024
Seemingly the only people supporting the opposition and their supposed leader, Juan Guaidó, are outsiders like the United States government and the Biden administration, which continues to recognize Guaidó as President despite Guaidó never getting a vote...
February 20, 2024
Federal criminal defense attorney David Oscar Markus periodically interviews famed trial lawyers about their most fascinating cases for his podcast, "For the Defense." This week, he featured Michael Tigar, published several times by Monthly Review. Markus introduces the episode: "Michael Tigar is exactly what action is all about... I mean, in 1999 there was a vote for lawyer of the century: Clarence Darrow was #1, Thurgood Marshall was #2, and you know who was #3?"
February 20, 2024
Interviewer Charisse Burden-Stelly begins, "....apocalypse represented, for African and indigenous folks, the end of life as they knew it—that is, a life free from enslavement, genocide, and ongoing violence wrought by the insatiable drive of the group that came to be known as “whites” for endless profit. This ending was simultaneously the beginning of a capitalist world economy rooted in racial hierarchy, imperial domination, and militarized social relations, of which neoliberalism is merely the most recent enunciation."
February 20, 2024
As a work of social history, Jazz and Justice traces the origins of Jazz in the northern part of this hemisphere, but the issues it raises are quite contemporary. As his reviewer notes, "the now-common expression 'gig work' originated in the jazz world. The near-endless list of Black jazz musicians who have died early deaths is testimony to the overwork the gig economy forced on them."
February 20, 2024
"...from the world of Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory through to that of the Marsalis family, with the common thread being New Orleans, often cited as the birthplace of the music...an anatomy of resistance; at every stage, despite Jim Crow, gangsters and extreme violence, jazz developed and bloomed...."
February 20, 2024
Rob Wallace's timely new book Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 has officially circumambulated the globe, from Canada and India, to Greece and Italy, to Basque country and onward.
February 20, 2024
If you want to hear more of the details and stories around the trials of the Chicago 8, Julian Assange, Lynne Stewart, Pinochet, and dozens more dramatic court cases with direct impacts on each of our daily lives, then it will be well worth your while to give your ear to Law and Disorder's most recent conversation with Michael Tigar. Still, in his book Sensing Injustice, Tigar goes well beyond merely, if magnificently, narrating a profound array of legal battles. Tigar well understands the limits of law in the fight for justice, and of the role of the lawyer — as do his fellow lawyers Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith —and challenging existential questions about the nature of the legal profession also come up in the Law and Disorder interview.
February 20, 2024
Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the pathbreaking Capital and Imperialism—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production...
February 20, 2024
“In the middle of 1856, the soon-to-be-celebrated poet Walt Whitman visited an impounded slave ship in Brooklyn. The taking of the ship was an unusual occurrence, as it was one of the few illegal slavers seized by an otherwise lethargic Washington, D.C., and Whitman wanted to give his readers a tour of the vessel, which had been designed to add even more enslaved laborers to the millions already ensnared in this system of iniquity, including of its hold, where those victimized were to be 'laid together spoon-fashion.'”
February 20, 2024
Comparing the health systems of Cuba and the United States, Don Fitz' book "Cuban Health Care" presents a startling statistic: The cost of healthcare per person in Cuba is one twentieth that of the US. "Why?" Peter Arkell asks, and Fitz answers: “Poor countries simply cannot afford such an inefficient health system"...
