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FX’s Taboo Is More Fun to Think About Than to Watch

Matt Zoller Seitz New York Magazine
Taboo is about the return of the repressed, but also the suppressed, with the protagonist serving as a vessel for social commentary about the species-wide violence and corruption wrought by imperialism, racism, and capitalism.

A Viable Billionaire Tax?

Josh Hoxie Inequality.org
New paper makes the case that a global billionaire tax is ethical, good for growth, and could solve a lot of the world’s problems. Oh and politically viable.

Walter Rodney and the Racial Underpinnings of Global Inequality

Tianna Paschel Items
While inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1% own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations. In a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.

'Tomorrow is Too Late' -- When Fidel Castro Urged Urgent Climate Action at the 1992 Rio Summit

Fidel Castro Climate & Capitalism
The United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was supposed to establish guidelines for sustainable development. At the Summit, then Cuban President Fidel Castro gave a speech (short), warning of the dire consequences of failing to reverse course. Castro long warned that capitalism was threatening to destroy human civilization through ecological destruction, with the poor of the global South its first victims. Speech reprinted below.

Measuring Global Inequality

Michael D. Yates Monthly Review
The response to growing economic inequality must start with mass resistance within every country and maximum solidarity among all workers and peasants, in rich and poor countries alike. The details of such struggles have to be worked out in each place. The key is solidarity among all workers and peasants, within and between the states of the world.

books

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

Walter Johnson Boston Review
Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

Sympathy for the Devil?

Seth Ackerman Jacobin
The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war politics of the reactionary Tammany-versus-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that followed.

Hydrocarbons and the Illusion of Sustainability

Kent A. Klitgaard Monthly Review
A system based on the fair distribution of use values, decent work, and production and consumption levels that remain within nature’s biophysical limits cannot occur without the abandonment of a social order based on profit and accumulation.
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