Norman Otis Richmond and Malinda Francis, hosts of WBPU-LPFM 96.3 “Black Power 96.3 FM,” Saint Petersburg, Florida, catch up on current politics with historian Gerald Horne, author of dozens of books, including the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century  | more…

Jaisal Noor, of The Real News Network, talks to Gerald Horne, historian and author of the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse about fighting for basic rights amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the increasingly catastrophic government response to it. Is there any reason to hope, given the dire economic outlook and two unappealing options at the ballot box in November? | more…

Capitalism has always been international in nature. Even reaching back to its earliest embryonic form, in the concentrations of industry and merchant capital in Renaissance Italy, capital depended upon a European-wide trading market. The system’s true emergence came in the context of the European conquest of the Americas, its trading outposts in Asia, and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. An international hierarchy enabled by atrocity, war and plunder has always been central to the functioning of capitalism… | more…

Popular uprisings are rarely as spontaneous as the mainstream press often makes them out to be. Instead, from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring and beyond, they are more often the result of extended grassroots organizing, previous actions and strikes, and even legislative campaigns. The rates of participation are almost always linked to the amount of organizing that took place weeks, months and even years before the event takes place. ¶ It is this understanding that makes Cal Winslow’s recently published book Radical Seattle such an excellent history…. | more…

COVID-19 like most disease is democratic—it can affect anyone, although with differing options to respond to it. The world, including the US, is not democratic. This does not bode well. But we can move forward because simple individualism contradicts the interdependency of this COVID crisis. ‘We’ all suffer when one person circulates with symptoms—and we will flourish if we accept responsibility to isolate/distance and protect one another…. | more…

Where did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading…. | more…

Over the last few decades John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have been at the forefront of showing how classical Marxism is the foremost tool in explaining capitalism’s rift with the ecological systems that support our society. They have shown how Karl Marx’s idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ explains how capitalism is a break with other historical modes of production, a break that has transformed our relationship to the natural world and then broken the ongoing metabolism between humans and the planet. Reading this book while trapped at home during the Covid-19 pandemic it is very easy to see the practical application of Marx’s metabolic rift theory…. | more…

Fred Wilcox tells the story of peaceful resistance met by cruel violence, over a period of fifteen years, by a people whose love for their families and communities, the sea, their rivers, lakes and bogs, pitted them against Shell Oil -one of the world’s most destructive predators. Through their struggle, they have also shown us a way of resisting the powerful corporate/government interlock which threatens communities with destruction of the environment and their way of life…. | more…

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, explains, via The American Scholar, that if we want to understand global outbreaks of infectious disease, you have to look at global agriculture…. | more…

Viewed, it would seem, from every possible angle, jazz seems to be a topic about which there is little left to say. But no one has quite seen it in the lurid, smoky light of the jazz demimonde – a world of pimps, gangsters, strung out divas, knife-wielding trumpeters, Bolshevik pianists and impresarios in white hoods. The author’s research is breathtaking. To read the book is to be barraged with anecdotes, quotations, statistical asides and mini-histories that are often no more than a paragraph long…. | more…

“Creating an Ecological Society is an important and timely book for two reasons. First, the authors merge two rich areas of discourse—environmental conservation and anti-capitalism—in a seamless narrative that underscores both the urgency of our times and the opportunity of the moment. Second, authors Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams describe how creating an ecological society based on a set of shared values can directly improve the lived experience of individuals across the globe… | more…

Imperialism does not play out much in the 2020 presidential race. That says more about US corporate power over the two political parties and other institutions such as the new media, e.g., Comcast owning MSNBC. ¶ Meanwhile, as the US has deindustrialized, 79 percent of the globe’s industrial workers toiled in the Global South in 2010, over double the figure in 1950. The fruits of their exploited labor sell in the Global North | more…