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The New Global Financial Cold War

Michael Hudson / Bonnie Faulkner CounterPunch
The world is being split into two halves: the U.S. dollar orbit, and countries that the U.S. cannot control and whose officials are not on the U.S. payroll, so to speak.

Corbyn’s Progress

Tariq Ali London Review of Books
The statistics about global inequality desperately need someone who can explain them in terms that can anger, mobilise and inspire people. If Corbyn can do this, it would mark an important shift in English politics.

Poorest Areas Have Missed Out on Boons of Recovery

Nelson D. Schwartz The New York Times
While some communities are currently enjoying the fruits of the recovery, others have sunk further into poverty. According to the authors, this pattern of distress vs. prosperity not only “diverges between cities and states but even more starkly within cities at the neighborhood level." In the period of recovery following the Great Recession, the authors find, jobs in the median U.S. ZIP code grew at less than half the national rate.

What Sparked the Cambrian Explosion?

Douglas Fox Nature
An evolutionary burst 540 million years ago filled the seas with an astonishing diversity of animals. The trigger behind that revolution is finally coming into focus.

Afghanistan: How a Pink Flower Defeated the World’s Sole Superpower

Alfred W. McCoy TomDispatch
Each stage in Afghanistan’s tragic 40-year history of intervention-- the 1980s covert war, the 1990s civil war, and the U.S. occupation since 2001 --- helped transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state --where illicit drugs dominate the economy, fuel corruption and determine the fate of foreign interventions. Afghanistan can only progress when it is no longer a client narco-state with its rural areas dependent upon the opium crop.

'You're Fired!' The Abuses of 'Skilled' Worker Visa Programs

Sarah Jaffe The Progressive
The H-1B visa program is supposed to have safeguards against abuse, including rules designed to ensure that guest workers are not a significantly cheaper option for companies looking to save a buck. But Costa says 83 percent of the H-1B recipients are paid wages below the average for that occupation, because of flaws in the system.

The Post-Hope Democrats

Doug Henwood Jacobin
There's a perverse form of American exceptionalism circulating around the Clinton camp: just because things work in other countries doesn't mean they can work here. As Hillary herself put it, "We are not Denmark. I love Denmark, but we are the United States of America." True enough, but that has no bearing on why single-payer couldn't work here. The only obstacles are political -- elites, which include Hillary and Starr, don't want it.

Criteria of Negro Art

W.E.B. DuBois Red Wedge
"Black Art Matters." If there were a way to sum up the thrust of this essay in one very brief sentence then that would be it. W.E.B. DuBois is one of those thinkers who needs very little introduction: lifelong socialist and Black liberationist, founder of the N.A.A.C.P., author of what is still to this day one of the definitive books on Black Reconstruction in the south. What is often overlooked is how central art was to DuBois' ideas about Black freedom in the U. S.