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Tidbits - Aug. 9, 2018 - Reader Comments: Ron Dellums; What Trump Knew, When; Spike Lee; Boots Riley; Religious Freedom; Jewish Voice for Peace on Jeremy Corbyn; Nuclear Free Future Month; Resources; Announcements; and more...

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Reader Comments: Ron Dellums Remembered; What Trump Knew and When; Spike Lee; Boots Riley; Religious Freedom Under Trump; Israel-Ukraine; NATO; Jewish Voice for Peace on Jeremy Corbyn; Nuclear Free Future Month; Resources; Announcements; and more...

Why Europe's Center-Left Keeps Losing Elections

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
Voters can't tell the difference between the center left and the center right, and they don't want either. As the center-left accommodated itself to capital, it eroded its trade union base. Where center-left parties embraced unabashedly progressive policies, on the other hand, voters supported them

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Where Prince Charles Went Wrong

Zoë Heller The New Yorker
Critiquing a somewhat fawning book by a well-trod biographer of the Atlantic aristocracy, the reviewer nevertheless finds enough merit in the work to present a picture of the royals and their long-suffering and sometimes insufferable prince as a window on Britain's royal family and a glimmer as to why masses of British subjects still revere the preposterous institution.

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New Women, Free Lovers, and Radicals in Britain and the United States

Claire Griifiths The Times (London) Higher Education
Rebel Crossings charts six 19th century socialists as they journey from the constraints of Old-World Britain to a New-World America. They were part of a wider historical search for self-fulfillment and an alternative to a cruelly competitive capitalism. The book surveys the interaction of feminism, socialism and anarchism, bringing fresh slants on political and cultural movements and upon influential individuals including Walt Whitman, Eleanor Marx, and William Morris.

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Doris Lessing's MI5 File: Was She a Threat to the State?

Lara Feigel The Guardian (UK)
The security services set out to ensnare Lessing. But they weren't sure where she lived, why she went to Communist party meetings or even whether her nickname was Tigger or Trigger. M15 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal. Lara Feigel interrogates the secret archives.

Theater Review: "Cuckooed" True Story by British Comic And Activist of How Arms Company Spied on Him

Lucy Komisar The Komisar Scoop
True story about BAE Systems, the UK's largest aerospace and weapons company. BAE is the major bad guy in the play, as well as a major bad guy among arms traders. (In 2010, BAE pled guilty in the U.S. to charges of false accounting and making misleading statements in connection with an arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The issue was bribery to get a Saudi contract. British Prime Minister Tony Blair quashed an investigation there, as he wanted the contract.)

Europe’s Perpetual Crisis

Conn M. Hallinan International Policy Digest
Why, given the failure of austerity economics, haven't we seen a policy shift to stimulation of the economy?...the push for yet greater austerity has less to do with a deep concern by Europe’s elites over debt—it is high but manageable—than as part of a stealth campaign aimed at dismantling rules and regulations that protect worker rights, unions, and the environment. Meanwhile Washington is concerned with the effect of the economic crisis on the viability of NATO.
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