“As an epidemiologist, you’re supposed to want to put yourself out of business,” Wallace said. “Everyone has bills to pay; I understand that. But the extent to which your corruption might lead to a pathogen that could kill a billion people—that’s where my line is”….“You can intellectually understand something but still not assimilate the oncoming damage,” he told me later, as he recalled the “sour vindication” of having his worst fears come true. “So there’s an aspect of rage, and an arrival at an understanding.” | more…
Zhun Xu, author of “From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty,” spoke alongside Chris Matlhako, Elias Khalil Jabbour, and Bikrum Gill on a panel titled, “Political Economies of Chinese Socialism.” | more…
Chavez inherited an impoverished country with a thin, glittering layer of affluence at the top. To the horror of Washington and Venezuelan plutocrats, he promptly began redistributing wealth to the poor… | more…
In their new book “Extraordinary Threat,” Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur delve into the critical questions: What is the nature of Venezuela’s government? Is it a dictatorship? Are Venezuela’s problems due to misgovernment, or are they due to U.S. interference? What would happen if Venezuela fell to U.S. imperialism? How has the U.S. been able to get away with this? And above all: Taking Venezuela as a case study, how does regime change propaganda work? | more…
…in the service of besieged Venezuela, en route to Iran, another nation similarly blockaded by America, when he was intercepted by Cape Verde authorities and thrown into prison there…. | more…
The conversation begins with the story of Vivian Rothstein’s participation in a 1967 peace delegation to North Vietnam, and her encounter there with the Americans held at Hoa Lo Prison — the subject of ‘Dissenting POWs.’ One might think that that delegation’s visit to Hoa Lo Prison, and the dissent expressed by almost half of its POW inmates, would have been so controversial as to gain a fair amount of attention at the time…. | more…
“Vietnam veterans were commonly portrayed in film and news reports as casualties of the war, their mission sold out on the home front and their homecoming marked by ingratitude and condemnation. Representations of POWs followed a similar path…It was trauma, not politics and conscience, that moved in-service resisters.” | more…
Michael Heinrich “has a powerful critique of vulgar Marxism and the orthodoxies of the 19th and 20th centuries…Nerds, you’re not going to want to miss this one!” | more…
It is worth summing up some of these key lies: 1) Venezuela was “once prosperous.” In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth; 2) Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo…. | more…
Dead Epidemiologists “speaks more plainly than academic jargon is wont to allow. Yet, in my view, this is one of the book’s biggest strengths. It makes the book accessible, and that accessibility is going to be important if we, as a global community, are to tackle the problem that Wallace and his colleagues articulate…” | more…
“I’m going to argue that it’s not only June 19, 1865, that we should mark, but also June 19, 1867, because that’s when the French leader Maximillian was killed. It marks the end of the attempt to continue our enslavement in Mexico. It’s a history that I would urge others to investigate….” | more…
In this interview on KFAI-Minneapolis with hosts Don Olson and Dave Gutknecht, Michael Tigar encounters one of his clients for the first time, live on the radio. | more…
