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"...
February 20, 2024
"Foster and Clark show that the exploitation of wage labor in the capitalist production process is essentially tied to the expropriation of the natural world, the refusal to socially acknowledge care labor as socially necessary labor, the privatization of our common cultural heritage, the treatment of non-white communities as places where the social pathologies of capitalism (unemployment, poverty, and so on) can be concentrated, and so on. From this perspective workers, environmentalists, feminists, community activists, and anti-racists have good reason to make common cause."
February 20, 2024
"We talked long into the night calling into question everything we had been brought up to believe....One night, it was all cozy and almost comfortable when I was in a pub with Billy and Seamus drinking, talking, and laughing for several hours. I would think back on it later with a strong sense of pathos, in light of what happened later, in light of how they both died. On that night, however, we were comrades and all seemed well," says Helena Sheehan in a recent interview with The Irish Echo...
February 20, 2024
Just after January 6th, Gerald Horne was one of the first to remind us that "mobocracy," generally driven by settler colonialist impulses and schemes, has been a potent force throughout this country's history...
February 20, 2024
From Modi’s India to Erdogan’s Turkey neofascist autocratic regimes have taken hold...The result: widespread immiseration and discontent. In its wake, demagogues exploit the situation. They are coming to power by scapegoating, instigating violence against minorities, coupled with loud calls for 'getting our country back,' and lots of flag waving...
February 20, 2024
In a recent review of Rob Wallace' latest work, we are reminded that "If the virus has a source it is not Yunnan but the boardrooms of giant corporations." The review takes the time to name the culprits..
February 20, 2024
While the face of the gun rights movement tends to be white conservatives, Black Americans are also contributing to the recent gun industry boom. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, gun sales by Black men and women rose 58 percent in the first half of 2020 compared to the first half of 2019. The choice that some Black Americans are making to arm themselves in self defense is just one part of a long, complicated chapter in U.S. history. Gerald Horne, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston and author of The Bittersweet Science, joined Tanzania Vega on The Takeaway to discuss.
February 20, 2024
In Guatemala, Congo, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Haiti, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Yemen, Sudan, Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Angola and so many other countries, Washington’s bullets have been deployed in the pursuance of regime change, the protection of US hegemony and opposition to the emergence of truly sovereign post-colonial nations, all in flagrant violation of international law....
February 20, 2024
Michael Heinrich’s projected biography of Marx that is supposed to consist of four volumes is an extraordinary ambitious undertaking. Only the first volume “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society” has been published so far. It covers the years before Marx’s birth (because it deals with his parents) and goes up to his doctoral dissertation done in 1841, when he was 23. The biography is extraordinary ambitious for three reasons....
February 20, 2024
About the time of the First World War, when interest in Marxist theory was virtually nonexistent in the United States, rival schools of thought in Japan emerged, and brilliant debates took place on Marx’s Capital and on capitalism as it was developing in Japan. Forty years ago, Makoto Itoh’s Value and Crisis began to chronicle these Japanese contributions to Marxist theory. Now, in a second edition of Value and Crisis, Itoh deepens his study of Marx’s theories. The promise of these theories has not waned. If anything—considering the failure of Soviet-style socialism and the catastrophe of neoliberalism—it grows daily.
