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“Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better”: Gerald Coles via Counterpunch

Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better…. | more…

Gerald Horne on The Majority Report with Sam Seder

Historian and prolific author Gerald Horne talks with Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report, a popular daily political internet show, about one of Dr. Horne‘s latest books, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. | more…

“Capitalism, imperialism and class: essential foundations for a critical public health”

David G. Legge is a teacher and international health policy researcher, based at La Trobe School of Public Health in Melbourne, Australia, who is also active in the global People’s Health Movement. Recently, he wrote a review of four books for the journal Critical Public Health. Three of these books, Health Care Under the Knife; A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism; and Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, were published by Monthly Review Press. | more…

Rethinking Democracy, SR 2018 reviewed by Counterfire

This latest addition to one of the most prestigious journals on the left is a timely examination of the relationship between socialism and democracy. Decades of Stalinist distortion in Eastern Europe still leave a residual notion in the minds of many that these two concepts are, in fact, antithetical. Throughout the era of the cold war, the Western states propagated the related idea that only capitalism was capable of securing the individual freedoms that are synonymous with the idea of democracy…. | more…

The World We Wish to See reviewed by ANTI-IMPERIALISM.ORG

“What to do?” A short question with a very complex answer. In The World We Wish to See, Samir Amin delves into the contemporary political conjuncture with a succinctness and ease that belies the monuments scope of the topic he addresses—how do counter-hegemonic movements find convergence in diversity, in an age when political lines are being redrawn and new issues are being raised, daily, hourly? | more…

A Foodies Guide to Capitalism

“How Foodies Can Understand Capitalism and Farm-to-Table Justice”: YES! mag on Eric Holt-Gimenez’s Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism

A new book aimed at the socially conscious food activist explores how our food system can be a place for transformation through an alliance between the progressive and radical wings of the food movement. ¶ As advocates for a just food system, most of us try to live by our beliefs. Shopping at the farmers markets: Check. Buying local and grass-fed: Check. We rail against Big Food, yet don’t dare, or bother, to look too far beneath the surface …. We are walking, kale-stuffed characters out of Portlandia, better-intentioned than informed. After all, what are we really doing to change the system?… | more…

May 2 thru 9: Get 50% OFF 15 MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS BOOKS about LABOR!!!

Monthly Review Press is offering a 50% discount on selected books about work, workers’ rights, and labor unions—both print and electronic (when available)—starting May 2, and ending midnight May 9, EDT. Just enter the coupon code: WorkIt0518 to receive 50% off at checkout.

Books available at 50% discount:

Chicago, April 17: Howard Waitzkin on Health Care Under the Knife via FRESH Ayers

If you’re in Chicago Thursday, May 17, you’re invited to FRESH Ayers, a discussion series on various books, conducted by Bill Ayers, social justice activist, author, and teacher, Distinguished Professor of Education (retired) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This event features MRP author Howard Waitzkin, who’ll talk with Bill about his latest book, Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond the Capitalism for Our Health. | more…

“Freedom” and “Liberty” Were Only for Whites in Settler Colonialism: Truthout’s Mark Karlin interviews Gerald Horne

Mark Karlin: How did you settle on the title The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism for your book?
Gerald Horne: In my opinion, discussing profound change in the US without a popularizing of the concept of “settler colonialism” would be akin to seeking change in pre-1994 South Africa without underscoring “apartheid.” By adding “apocalypse,” I wanted to at once contrast this account with past accounts, which have tended to stress the “benefits” of settler colonialism, which obviously elides and obscures (if not justifies) genocide and dispossession targeting the Indigenous population of North America and mass enslavement of Africans…. | more…