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How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism

Nick Hubble Tribune Magazine
From William Morris to Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain M. Banks, science fiction has provided an outlet for socialist thinkers – offering a break from a bleak political reality and allowing them to imagine a vastly different world.

Wall Street Vultures Are Set to Get Rich From Water Scarcity

Nick Martin The New Republic
Image in solidarity with the water protectors at Standing Rock.
For the first time California water futures will be traded on Wall Street. Utility companies and agribusiness will be the main purchasers of these water futures, while vulture capitalists rush to find increasingly scarce water for giant water users.

The Biden Presidency: A New Era, or a Fragile Interregnum?

Walden Bello Foreign Policy in Focus
Owing to the erosion of the credibility of globalization and neoliberalism, the return to orthodox centrism is not likely to hold. It will serve as a short-lived interregnum amidst deepening polarization. Now is the time for the left to act.

Can Big Oil Retake Richmond?

Steve Early The Nation
Mike Parker, a key Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) organizer who spent thirty-two years as a union reformer and skilled tradesman in Detroit, is leading a citywide slate of progressive candidates in a run for Mayor. Now, as municipal elections loom in the fall, the business community—led by America’s third-most-profitable company, Chevron—wants to make a political comeback by defeating those who've curbed its influence.

Strange Animals May Have Their Own Distinct Nervous System

John Timmer Ars Technica
If you think this suggests that early animals started out simple and gradually evolved new features, and things like sponges branched off before they were added, you wouldn't be alone. Over the years, lots of researchers argued the same thing. But a recent genome sequence indicated that the oldest branch of the animal family tree that led to the comb jellies, with muscles, nerves, and tentacles, were an older branch than sponges.

The History of Black Cooperatives

Bernard Marszalek CounterPunch
African Americans have a long, rich history of cooperative ownership, especially in reaction to market failures and economic racial discrimination . . . My research suggests that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the history of the United States -- from the introduction to Collective Courage