Category: Monthly Review Press Blog

Gerald Horne on The Critical Hour: US Jails Privatizing Inmate Health Care See (Even) Higher Death Rates

February 20, 2024

For months now, we’ve read news stories of how people inside prisons are “sitting ducks” for COVID-19. In fact, incarcerated people across the country are dying at increasing rates in detention facilities where masks are often nonexistent and social distancing impossible. Although most of these prisons are government-run, around 10% are owned privately by corporations, which intensively put profits before the humanity it cages. Dr. Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse joins hosts Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon on Radio Sputnuk’s The Critical Hour to discuss a Reuters article reporting that “jails with health care overseen by private companies incur higher death rates on average than those with care handled by government agencies….”

Preventing the next disease from escaping: CounterPunch reviews “Dead Epidemiologists”

February 20, 2024

Covid-19 comes from the primary forest, from bat caves. In a world without industrial agriculture encroaching on that forest, in a world without the corporatization of a wild-food industry, Covid-19 would probably never have left those caves. As it becomes endemic, it may become unstoppable. But not so the next pestilence. If we revamp our food production system now, maybe the pathogens lurking in primeval forest viral reservoirs will stay there…

Vijay Prashad via Democracy Now!–on the U.N. World Food Programme winning the Nobel Peace Prize

February 20, 2024

Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, has also written several books, most recently, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations. He appears on the Friday, Oct. 9 edition of Democracy Now! to discuss with host Amy Goodman the breaking news that the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the U.N. World Food Programme. “I couldn’t be happier… This hunger pandemic is paralyzing perhaps 2.7 billion people,” says Prashad. “What could only make me happier, Amy, is if, next year, the Cuban doctors win the Nobel Peace Prize…”

Gerald Horne and Aisha Cort on Black Internationalism, Communism, and Cuban History

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, historian and author of many books, most recently, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talks to Luna Olavarria Gallegos and Aisha Cort, hosts of Havana-based Belly of The Beast Cuba about Black radical traditions in respect to Cuba and the United States…

Gerald Horne Traces the Long History of White Supremacy, via WORT FM’s “A Public Affair”

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author, talks with Allen Ruff, host of A Public Affair on radio WORT-FM, Madison, WI, about Horne’s most recent book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Dr. Horne retells the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas; how “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and how “genocide and mass enslavement is somehow a step forward for humanity.” He also offers examples of how colonial history manifests in the present day, including the Founding Father worship of the hit musical Hamilton and the growing popularity of QAnon conspiracies….

Snappy, absorbing, illuminative account of a life on the American & Irish Left: Logos reviews Sheehan’s “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

February 20, 2024

Helena Sheehan is a well-known and well-established presence on the Irish Left, an activist-academic with a strong form in meditative Marxist thought as well more accessible political commentary. As she shows in her new memoir, Navigating the Zeitgeist, it would be almost too obvious to say she led an interesting’ life, moving from post-war suburbia and a brief period as a nun, to communism and Irish republicanism; she narrates each of these stages of her life in a fast-moving and engaging (but not always problem-free) style….

Gerald Horne presides at “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” by Ishmael Reed

February 20, 2024

Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author–most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse–appears in this Powerhouse Arena launch for the publication of The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, a play written by poet, essayist, and playwright Ishmael Reed. Originally produced at the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Haunting dismantles the phenomenon of Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Broadway hit musical, Hamilton. Reed uses the musical’s crimes against history to insist on a radical, cleareyed look at our past…

Competing with Nature: COVID-19 as a Capitalist Virus: Spectre interviews Rob Wallace

February 20, 2024

RW: As far as Trump getting COVID-19, I think it’s a spectacle and palace intrigue – it serves as a distraction. The very fact that he contracted it is at the same time stupefying, astonishing, and yet utterly predictable….

Socialist Review on John Bellamy Foster’s “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology”

February 20, 2024

We live in a world that is facing a profound and deepening ecological and social crisis. People are searching for an understanding of how this all happened, and what can be done about it. In The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology John Bellamy Foster has written a comprehensive account of the many socialist thinkers who have developed ecological critiques of society. It is essential reading for all who want to change the world….

“What’s up, Comrades?” Red Library talks to Eric Chester about “Free Speech & the Suppression of Dissent During WWI”

February 20, 2024

Eric T. Chester, author of the newly released Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, talks to Comrade Adam (a.k.a. Chairman Bane), host of the Red Library podcast, about the differing contexts of suppression of free speech in the UK and the U.S., Eugene Debs, the IWW, Samuel Gompers and the ALF-CIO legacy, and some of the legendary IWW strikes and labor drives during the period…