The “K” in the Economy

Private equity and the rise of permanent capital

The consensus is that the road to economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is K-shaped: certain sectors and populations will thrive while others stagnate or decline. Outsized online retailers and digital infrastructure providers, like Amazon, have experienced boom times, while many Main Street small businesses have gone bust. Those with a stake ...
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The “K” in the Economy

How Corporate Subsidies Sink Small Businesses

The Alabama insurance market shows how tax breaks benefit dominant corporations

One of the more pernicious effects of states chucking huge sums of money at dominant corporations is that the lawmakers doing so are harming their own local businesses. Smaller outlets that already face an array of challenges when it comes to competing with the big guys have to just sit ...
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How Corporate Subsidies Sink Small Businesses

Ten Years After Occupy Wall Street

A moment of madness that began on September 17, 2011, illuminated the world where the “99 percent” lived

Ten years ago, on September 17, 2011, a few hundred people spent the night at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and formally initiated the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Occupiers had no immediate goals and the occupation lasted two months. But it wasn’t insignificant, and its importance as an inflection ...
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Ten Years After Occupy Wall Street

Are White People Really in Decline?

No, but when the mainstream media reports changing racial demographics as a contest for social domination, they validate white supremacists’ worst fears

_____ When the United States Census Bureau released its 2020 census on August 12, 2021, the news media highlighted two important trends in race and ethnicity: a drop in the number of white people and a rise in the number of people who identify with more than one racial group. Both facts represent ...
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Are White People Really in Decline?

Cut the Pentagon!

Says Code Pink

_____ CopePink brought roughly one hundred people to the White House to demand that the Pentagon’s budget be cut. Joined by other sponsors of the action in Lafayette Park, they cut up a large cake shaped like the Pentagon. Pieces of cake were passed to the crowd while speakers talked about the next ...
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Cut the Pentagon!

“You Cannot Force Me to Look and Not to See”

Large-scale repression against students and the academic community in Belarus continues

A liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not,not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of Nature.—John Locke, Second Treatise of Government Kids in ...
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“You Cannot Force Me to Look and Not to See”

9/10,11, and 12

The world was bigger then. Our two oceans provided us with the same illusion of protection our grandparents enjoyed

It's not just that I am a man who was born and raised in New York City. It's not just that my family goes back generations here: my dad and his two brothers were cops who patrolled its streets, and my mom worked on the 97th floor of Tower One. ...
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9/10,11, and 12

Creeping Fascism

The Texas law attacking reproductive justice is the antithesis of both law and democracy

_____ Is there any other phrase for the events that have activated the Texas abortion law other than “creeping fascism”?  First, the ban itself is essentially an anti-law, designed to promote vigilantism. In itself, that’s not surprising. S.B. 8 is the culmination not just of numerous state-level laws that have narrowed abortion ...
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Creeping Fascism

By Turning Law Enforcement Over to ‘Abortion Vigilantes,’ Texas Uses Lawlessness to Destabilize Equal Treatment Under Law

So far, it has the Supreme Court’s blessing

_____ The United States Supreme Court finally spoke about a new Texas law that, in effect, creates a market for abortion vigilantism, according to the Editorial Board’s Mia Brett. While the law stands, it invalidates Roe. The high court should have said any law that invalidates a 50-year-old court precedent recognizing ...
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By Turning Law Enforcement Over to ‘Abortion Vigilantes,’ Texas Uses Lawlessness to Destabilize Equal Treatment Under Law

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

The Texas ruling takes us one step closer to the state surveillance of Ceaușescu’s Romania

_____ Across the United States, Republican-controlled legislatures are outlawing abortion, with the hope of bringing the issue before a sympathetic Supreme Court. If they succeed in revoking women's reproductive rights, the U.S. will quickly become a different society—one resembling Communist-era Romania.  “It was a horrible time,” recounts one Romanian gynecologist, referring to the period ...
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How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

Handing Power Back to the Vigilantes

Texas’s new abortion ban erodes the power of the federal government to protect civil rights, and there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much more.

_____ The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right. Since World War II, the Supreme Court has ...
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Handing Power Back to the Vigilantes