February 20, 2024
The economic expansion just prior to the pandemic seemed to justify optimism about inequality. But Covid-19 showed just how little grounds there were for optimism. The pandemic demonstrated how poorly prepared for such a crisis a society could be that fails to provide universal, high-quality health care to a significant proportion of its population, as the case and death rates in the United States have demonstrated…
February 20, 2024
Marx’s reflections assume the existence of a money commodity, in this case gold. If a commodity functions as money, then the value of the money commodity is no more imaginary than the value of other commodities….
February 20, 2024
When I was still in a 401(k)-like plan and approaching age sixty-five after thirty-seven years of university teaching, I took stock of my future retirement income. I wanted to know what it would look like in terms of achieving the 70 percent of pre-retirement income that retirement experts state is necessary to maintain one’s standard of living…
February 20, 2024
In their new book “Extraordinary Threat,” Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur delve into the critical questions: What is the nature of Venezuela’s government? Is it a dictatorship? Are Venezuela’s problems due to misgovernment, or are they due to U.S. interference? What would happen if Venezuela fell to U.S. imperialism? How has the U.S. been able to get away with this? And above all: Taking Venezuela as a case study, how does regime change propaganda work?
February 20, 2024
In this moment of what a philologist or scholar of poetry might call correctio, Michael performs the self-reflexive, intertextual move of being in conversation with his own text as a form of revision….
February 20, 2024
“Here are a few pieces of advice I got from Michael, that I would have liked to have had earlier in my career: Make sure your case tells a story – a story of your client and a story of the law…Be wary of judicial and prosecutorial ego – but know that there are people with both power and conscience…Trust the capacity of jurors to learn and dispense justice…Decide what you want and ask for it…Don’t mistake lawyering for movement work – but don’t forget about the movement either…Believe that one case at a time can, over time, make a difference…Bring others along on your journey – and remember their contributions to it with graciousness and gratitude…..”
February 20, 2024
“…In 2018, Venezuela was only able to import $11.7 billion in goods, according to Torino Capital. The impact on medicine imports was especially destructive. According to U.S. economist Mark Weisbrot, while its economy was still growing in 2013, Venezuela was importing about $2 billion per year in medicine. By 2018, that amount had fallen to an astonishing low of $140 million—an especially horrifying development because medicines are much more difficult to substitute with local production than food. It is impossible to deny that a collapse in medicine imports has killed thousands of people between 2017 and 2018, as Mark Weisbrot and U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs argued in a paper published in April 2019. Weisbrot and Sachs cite a 31 percent increase in general mortality in the 2017–2018 period, according to a survey by anti-Maduro Venezuelan academics. That increase works out to an extra forty thousand deaths….”
