Unlike the Soviets, who had the good grace to implode pretty much alone, collapse of the United States could bring down the international capitalist system along with it.
Tied to a drowning man - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
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Globalisation has drastically tilted the balance of the struggle between labour and management in favour of trans-national corporations. In the US, the result has been five decades of falling median wages. (Total wages, on the other hand, have soared, with the rich and superrich raking in more than ever.) Easy credit provided a Band-Aid to rising income equality during the 1980s and 1990s. When the housing bubble burst and the credit markets froze in 2008, American consumers - who drive 70 per cent of economic activity - went from feeling poor to being poor. Un- and underemployed, they couldn't earn money. Their credit lines cancelled and curtailed, they couldn't borrow it. Forced to live within their increasingly limited means, the formerly middle class stopped spending. And here we are. Gross domestic product would have to be at least 4 per cent on an annualised basis to start to bring down unemployment. The actual figure is 0.8.
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Everywhere you look, there's terror that the world, by tethering itself to the once-invincible US monolith, has handcuffed itself to a fat, drowning man—one who's about to suffer another heart attack. The central bank of China, the communist-in-name-only nation that holds $2tn in its foreign exchange reserves—more than two-thirds of the total—plus $1.2tn in US Treasury bonds and notes, is loudly demanding that the US cut its deficits.
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Invisibility and Negrophobia in Algeria - Arab Reform Initiative - 0 views
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In post-independence Algeria, autocratic elites have chosen to characterize the Algerian people as a homogenous block with a single culture (Arab-Islamic), religion (Islam), and language (Arabic) because they consider diversity to be a source of division and a threat to the country’s stability and their hold on power. Identity issues, which the regime insists on controlling, are also used to divide and rule. Aware of this, from the beginning, the Hirak downplayed identity and difference within the movement while focusing on getting rid of le pouvoir (Algeria’s military elite and their civilian allies that rule and exploit the country) as a whole, root and branch.
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placing pressure on existing tensions between Arabs and Amazighs (Berbers) and between Islamists and secularists
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Black Algerians find themselves in a perplexing situation during the current slow-moving peaceful Hirak for democracy. Concentrated in the Saharan south of the country, to an extent, Black Algerians are literally not visible to other Algerian citizens – self-identified white Arabs and Amazighs – who are overwhelmingly found on the northern Mediterranean coast. Nevertheless, Black Algerians are indigenous to Algeria’s Sahara,7Marie Claude Chamla, “Les populations anciennes du Sahara et des regions limitrophes,” Laboratoires d’Anthropologie du Musee de l’Homme et de l’Institut de Paleontologie Humaine, Paris 1968, p. 81. and hundreds of thousands of others, across 13 centuries, were enslaved and forced across the desert to Algeria from sub-Saharan Africa. The history of servitude has stigmatized Black Algerians, generated Negrophobia, and fostered a need – so far unrealized – for the mobilization of civil society organizations and the Algerian state to combat anti-Black racism in the country
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Why the history of the vast early America matters today | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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A more capacious geography for early America, and deeper research in both slavery studies and Native American history, are showing not only a more complex era but much more connection among seemingly remote people, places and phenomena.
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In recent decades, historians have revealed a much more complex, Atlantic and globally connected, fully continental and foundationally Native, multi-imperial history. Not only is what we know about this period fuller and richer, but the way that research insights are coming together now informs a very different picture of early America – and thus of the nation’s foundations and development.
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A turn to Atlantic history produced a wealth of studies on the dynamic economic, political and religious developments that revealed the ocean to have been an early modern commercial highway, powered by the Atlantic slave trade.
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Racist Commemoration of Greco-Roman History as White History :: Pharos - 0 views
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while “Today in White History” implies that the Venus de Milo is the work of a “white” person, this is not a category that Alexander of Antioch, born in what we now call Syria and what the Greeks called Asia, would have been placed in by any of his contemporaries. This even more true of the emperor Elagabalus, who (besides becoming an icon for transgender people) was a priest of a Semitic god before becoming Emperor.
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Anyone can mix up Euripides’ birthday, but it takes a white supremacist to insist that white identity is something that is stable and unchanging throughout time
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An account like “Today in White History” is obviously racist. Its use of Greco-Roman antiquity is obviously racist. And yet the assumptions behind its racialized narrative of history — however much this narrative is patently the product of colonial powers’ need to justify conquest, however much this narrative erases the indebtedness of so-called “Western Civilization” to other civilizations — are commonly accepted and have been for a long time. The feed has tweeted something almost every day since 2012. It has 8,000 followers and counting. Eurocentrism is alive and well and accounts like this are its fruits.
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