Introduction

This is the sixth set of notes for a reading group on Marx’s Capital, and includes a Volume I refresher for further reading of Volume II. There are links to earlier posts and texts that may be useful. Marx is probably too taken with a kind of scientism by proposing...

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  • October 25, 2021

Florida bans its schools from teaching critical race theory On Thursday, Florida’s State Board of Education unanimously voted in favor of an amendment banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools throughout the state. The theory, according to PolitiFact, is a collection of ideas about systemic bias and privilege...

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  • June 12, 2021

I don’t know if this statement has been diarized, my apologies, but it bears repeating often, so if anyone missed it. The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards The Bolding is mine Introduction We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have...

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  • June 6, 2021

When former President Obama introduced the Affordable Care Act, he made the recurring mistake Democrats often commit; negotiating with Republicans in good faith. Mr. Obama took it a step further and negotiated against himself. Although there were varying views within his panel of healthcare experts on how far the legislation...

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  • May 24, 2021

According to new findings from the University of California San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, primarily in summer, unprecedented quantities of heat from the Pacific are pouring into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. This likely explains the rapid decimation of sea ice in the region. The decline has...

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  • April 23, 2021

Very little is known about rainfall in Antarctica; precipitation falls as snow on the bitter cold ice-covered continent. But during the austral summer of 2013-2014, an Adélie penguin colony near Dumont d’Urville station on coastal Adélie Land experienced “unusual and dramatic rainfall event that occurred on January 1, 2014, and that was...

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  • April 22, 2021

Americans should listen to the rational Republicans willing to publicly lift the scales from their eyes, who say their brethren are cowardly. Current and former Republicans like the previous Republican National Committee Chair, Michael Steele, and former Rep. David Jolly have said over and over the current crop of GOPers...

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  • April 12, 2021
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The sparse number of actual carbon capture and sequestration projects plus weak carbon markets amplify the problems of the climate crisis yet to be revisited, post-Trump. Two heartland examples in North Dakota and Texas show how there are several interlocking problems addressing the climate crisis that must be included in future environmental policy. More specifically...

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  • February 28, 2021

​ Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice...

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  • January 30, 2021

Mitch McConnell’s mini-me does his usual reactionary foolishness as the Senators are sworn in for the second Trump trial. “In a 55 to 45 vote that strongly suggested that the Senate does not have the votes to convict Donald Trump, senators narrowly killed a Republican effort to dismiss the impeachment...

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  • January 26, 2021

This post in the Anticapitalist Chat supports a group reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. #GoodMorningMarx #WeeklyMarx Reproduction and accumulation Capital is “self-valorising value”. But for capital to continue to generate new value and create surplus-value, this surplus-value must itself by reinvested back into production – that is, surplus-value must be...

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  • January 4, 2021
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The neoliberals’ “free market” is not going to sequester enough carbon to save the environment. Even Warren Buffett isn’t willing to take a bet on surviving an impending climate crisis catastrophe, because “the rents are too high”. Existential threats have a critical reality, about which ruthless criticism is entailed. Even...

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  • December 27, 2020

This continues the diary of two days ago. Nostalgia is a coping mechanism at the place known for its association with William Faulkner. Oxford Mississippi is a place where the nostalgia for a lost cause remains a kind of delusion. When injuries are imagined and retribution seems easy, this happens where...

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  • December 24, 2020

From The Huffington Post: For weeks, the couple had done almost nothing but sell. Loeffler was one of several senators who faced public outrage for unloading millions of dollars in stock before most Americans understood the towering threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Then shortly before the CARES Act, a...

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  • December 8, 2020

This post in the Anticapitalist Chat supports a group reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. #GoodMorningMarx #WeeklyMarx This covers chapters 15 and 16. Chapter 15 describes more closely the production process and its relation of technology (to power as machinery and as social relation) Chapter 16 begins a discussion of...

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  • November 12, 2020

This story supports a group reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. #GoodMorningMarx #WeeklyMarx This covers chapters 14, 15, 16.  Chapter 14 will provide further evidence of alienation in the division of labor and manufacturing in the capitalist reorganization of labor.  Chapter 15 describes more closely the production process and...

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  • November 4, 2020

From ABC News: As Republican leaders fearful of losing the majority in the U.S. Senate parade through Montana to rally behind embattled incumbent Steve Daines, one has been conspicuously absent: President Donald Trump. The president visited Montana repeatedly in 2018 and hosted huge rallies in a failed bid to oust...

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  • November 2, 2020

From The Daily Beast: x An internal poll from Ossoff’s camp, conducted by Garin Hart Yang Research Group on Oct. 11-14 and shared with The Daily Beast, found that in a head-to-head race, Ossoff met the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff, with Perdue at 45 percent https://t.co/mrp54kSeAh— The...

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  • October 21, 2020

In an interview on CBS Face the Nation Scott Gottlieb affirmed the position that the Trump administration erred in not directing national drug production of antibody drugs like Regeneron’s. x And Scott Gottlieb was just on Face the Nation saying that if we would have had a national response in the...

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  • October 11, 2020

Periodically, ACM readers might want an introduction to anticapitalism. This emerges because of the disinformation propagated by kakistocratic clowns like Trump, who enables neoliberal capitalism while pursuing kleptocracy and monopolizing violence. This is important as yesterday Trump signed an executive order that had no effect on big pharma, and endorsed extrajudicial killing...

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  • September 13, 2020

Human consumption and climate change have sent humanity on a steep, dangerous, and deadly spiral spin toward a “catastrophic collapse” warn researchers. The dire warning is published in the scientific journal Nature Scientific Reports. Physicists Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino layout in their research that there will be a ninety percent chance...

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  • July 30, 2020
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This week I attended (remotely) the Rethinking Economics Festival and encountered challenging pluralist discourses like a platform economy (noting that most of such work is populated by women), decolonizing the Eurocentric position in disciplines, or “fully-automated luxury communism”. I thought I’d share some resource items and make a few observations....

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  • July 26, 2020

Another article from Jacobin magazine worth your reading. The #1619 Project is important for reminding us that while racism is as American as apple pie, its reflexive relationship to modern US capitalism is no less foundational. Modern slavery is most evident in human trafficking, but the structural constraints are as important,...

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  • May 5, 2020

“The Arctic is heating up twice as much as the rest of the planet. With that comes permafrost thawing and the birth of aquifers, it is likely that groundwater transport in the Arctic will be more and more important in the future.” M. Bayani Cardenas, Jackson School of Geosciences Another previously...

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  • March 23, 2020

There were those who warned us about Dr. Robert Redfield when Trump appointed him to the be director of the CDC, and the coronavirus pandemic and the American governments abysmal response to it are proving Redfield’s critics right.  However, Redfield has been able to keep his head down and not...

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  • March 8, 2020

This is worth watching before you head to the voting booth: x YouTube Video Elizabeth Warren sat down for an emotional interview with Jimmy Kimmel that included tears from both Warren and Kimmel—and the requisite amount of shots fired at both former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Donald Trump. Asked by Kimmel if she...

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  • March 3, 2020

Slate has a great piece out about why you shouldn’t count Elizabeth Warren out: Her careful, defensive debate performances and introduction of a hedged phase-in M4A plan succeeded only in helping other candidates. Sanders got a bump among voters who aren’t worried about how polarizing his agenda may be. On...

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  • March 2, 2020

For the past four days, I have heard Trump loyalists like Wilbur Ross and Larry Kudlow, disaffected Republicans like Megan McCain and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, ‘woke’ or former  Republicans like Nicolle Wallace and David Jolly use the phrase, “ this is not political.” What they all have been talking about is...

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  • February 28, 2020

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that...

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  • February 1, 2020

Overview Since the earliest days of Donald Trump’s Presidency, we have attempted to catalog all of the harmful actions committed by his administration. Furthermore, by categorizing these actions by policy areas and scoring their relative impact, we have attempted to understand how the Administration operates and measure where it’s done...

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  • January 20, 2020

Received this e-mail today from the Council for a Livable World: New England is the scene of some of this election’s hottest Senate contests. Council for a Livable World is backing three candidates from the region who are critical to a progressive majority. Sara Gideon of Maine is challenging incumbent Senator Susan Collins....

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  • December 7, 2019

The California legislature has passed and sent to Gov. Newsom SB24, which will require all public universities in the state to offer the “abortion pill” at their health clinics as part of standard health care: Because abortion by medication techniques is both a recognized treatment for the medical condition of...

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  • September 14, 2019

Short Summary A large majority of respondents believed current diagnosis rates are under-diagnosing women relative to men Respondents tended to cite social expectations and biased diagnosis tools for this The online autistic community seems fairly diverse in terms of gender identity and age, and in particular there's a very large...

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  • September 7, 2019

I am not going to make the declarative statement that you may be expecting.  The winner in last night’s debate was the American people. First debates are usually feeling out exercises with onlookers breathlessly waiting for the zinger of the night. Fortunately, the Democratic party did something unusual, they did...

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  • June 27, 2019

Tony Schwartz, who wrote Art of the Deal all by himself before Donald Trump risibly claimed he’d written it, tried to warn us before the election about Trump’s peerless ego and incompetence. And now another ghostwriter, Charles Leerhsen, who wrote Trump: Surviving at the Top for the future global laughingstock, is letting us know just...

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  • May 10, 2019

In solidarity,  Mike Hersh for Alan, Dr. Bill, Dan, Janis, Deb, Kimberly, Bryan, Mike F., and Shayna—your PDA national team. Override Trump’s War Powers Veto Several weeks ago, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) activists voted overwhelmingly to endorse Bernie Sanders for President. PDA is proud to mobilize Bernie supporters with...

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  • April 27, 2019

photo: Bernie And PDA Demand Healthcare Not Warfare In solidarity,  Mike Hersh for Alan, Dr. Bill, Dan, Janis, Deb, Kimberly, Bryan, Mike F., and Shayna—your PDA national team. Sign On As A Grassroots Medicare For All Cosponsor! Lost in all the news from last week, Donald Trump vetoed a joint...

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  • April 20, 2019

For 17 months during the campaign, then candidate, and party clown for hire, Donald Trump assured all and sundry that he only hired the best. And nowhere was that more evident than in hiw high powered legal representation during the Robert Mueller investigation.  There were Ty Cobb and John Dowd,...

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  • April 16, 2019

photo: We Want Bernie Crew In St. Petersburg, FL In solidarity,  Mike Hersh for Alan, Dr. Bill, Dan, Janis, Deb, Kimberly, Bryan, Mike F., and Shayna—your PDA national team. Bernie Launches Senate Medicare For All!Sign On As A Grassroots MFA Cosponsor! The big news last week was Bernie’s introduction of...

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  • April 13, 2019

April 3, 2019   Brussels, Belgium By, Alan Minsky, Executive Director | Progressive Democrats of America Hello, I’m Alan Minsky, the Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America, also known as PDA. Contrary to what our name might imply, PDA is not actually a part of the Democratic Party. We...

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  • April 10, 2019

The Democrats have painted themselves in to a corner with Ilhan Omar. By using selective outrage to vociferously attack Ilhan Omar they are wide open to charges of bullying and their own brand of racism. The backlash has been intense from what I can see. And all this based on...

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  • March 5, 2019

The Democrats have painted themselves in to a corner with Ilhan Omar. By using selective outrage to vociferously attack Ilhan Omar they are wide open to charges of bullying and their own brand of racism. The backlash has been intense from what I can see. And all this based on...

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  • March 5, 2019

photo: National Nurses United Leading On Medicare For All By, Mike Hersh for Dr. Bill, Donna, Alan, Mike F., Janis, Deb, Dan, Kim, Bryan, and Shayna—your PDA National Medicare for All Team URGENT: Tell Congress to SupportExpanded and Improved Medicare For All! Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) was founded in 2004...

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  • February 25, 2019
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Overview Since the earliest days of Donald Trump’s Presidency, we have attempted to catalog all of the harmful actions committed by his administration. Furthermore, by categorizing these actions by policy areas and scoring their relative impact, we have attempted to understand how the Administration operates and measure where it’s done...

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  • January 20, 2019

Keep an eye on this. The US Senate is preparing to hold a vote on actually taking concrete action against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over Kreepy Kushners newest kash kow, Inglorious MBS, over the murder of journalist and permanent US resident Jamal Khashoggi. besides the importance of this country...

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  • December 12, 2018

No lead-in needed; we all know what’s happened, and we all know what looks to be in the works.  Let’s get into the news, but first, let’s get into the players (if you already know all this, feel free to skip): Syria / Assad: No introduction needed. Controls generally the...

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  • April 10, 2018

Four people so far have thrown their symbolic hat into the ring to be the next chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party. Of the four, one Northern Michigan resident is among them – Joel Poynter of Lake County. Poynter was born and raised in Roseville and worked as an engineer...

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  • January 11, 2015