Link to an article by Wayne Au:
Tag: Politics
Alan Nasser – Could Student Loans Lead to Debt Prison?
Felipe Demier – The Senses of a Prison
Link to a machine translation of an article by Felipe Demier:
“The Senses of a Prison: Lula, Democracy and the People in the Dining Room”
Kenneth Surin – Lucrative Dealing in the Age of Austerity
Link to an article by Kenneth Surin:
“Lucrative Dealing in the Age of Austerity”
Bonus links: Making Money and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and The Triumph of Conservatism
Jerry White – Teachers Unions Intensify Efforts to Suppress Growing Class Struggle in the US
Link to an article by Jerry White:
“Teachers Unions Intensify Efforts to Suppress Growing Class Struggle in the US”
Bonus link: Poor People’s Movements and “Making Greater Possibilities Inconceivable: Another Thought or Two on the Logic of Lesser Evilism”
Matt Bruenig – How Did Private Property Start?
Link to an article by Matt Bruenig:
“How Did Private Property Start?”
Bonus quotes:
“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men” (1755)
“The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of law. Law functions only insofar as its subjects are fooled, insofar as they experience the authority of law as ‘authentic and eternal’ and do not realize ‘the truth about the usurpation’. That is why Kant is forced, in his Metaphysics of Morals, to forbid any question concerning the origins of legal power: it is by means of precisely such questioning that the stain of this illegitimate violence appears which always soils, like original sin, the purity of the reign of law.”
Slavoj Žižek, “The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis,” from Psychoanalysis and… (Feldstein and Sussman, eds., Routledge 1990).
Rob Urie – Democrats and the Crisis of Legitimacy
Link to an article by Rob Urie:
“Democrats and the Crisis of Legitimacy”
Bonus links: “No Box For That” and “Malcolm X and the Democrats: Excerpts from Peter Camejo’s Autobiography, North Star“ and Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-driven Political Systems and “Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies”
Joan Roelofs – How Effective are International Human Rights Treaties?
Link to an article by Joan Roelofs:
“How Effective are International Human Rights Treaties?”
Bonus links: “Military-Industrial Complex Introduction” and “America’s Permanent-War Complex”
Ben Norton – Former CIA Director Admits to US Foreign Meddling, Laughs About It
Link to a news video by Ben Norton:
“Former CIA Director Admits to US Foreign Meddling, Laughs About It”
Bonus links: “Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies” and Killing Hope and “Overthrow: 100 Years of U.S. Meddling & Regime Change, from Iran to Nicaragua to Hawaii to Cuba”
Bonus quote: “Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.” Frederick Douglass – July 4, 1852
Sarah Bruch & Joe Soss – The Lessons Students Learn
Link to an article by Sarah Bruch & Joe Soss:
Bonus links: “Red Diaper Babies” and Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Richard Shaull Quote (“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”) and Deschooling Society and The Struggle for the Meaning of Society As Such and “Elite Universities Are Turning Our Kids Into Corporate Stooges”