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with Chris Hedges and Howard Zinn
RT America on Jan 25, 2020
On the show this week Chris Hedges discusses the importance of historian, Howard Zinn, for a fuller understanding of American history, with author and journalist, Ray Suarez.
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with Caleb Maupin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published Jan. 17, 2019
January 18, 2020
Caleb Maupin on Jun 2, 2010
Your history textbooks may have you convinced he was a blind patriot and arch conservative. They were wrong. Martin Luther King was a socialist, and the following clips show him talking extensively about the need to redistribute wealth and “economic power”, the right to a job, and the dignity of the working class.
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with Chris Hedges
by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese
Clearing the FOG
Popular Resistance
Dec. 30, 2019
As 2019 comes to a close and we enter a new decade, we look back at the major events and issues that shaped the year with Chris Hedges. We discuss the rise of the Right, in part due to the weaknesses of the Left, what the Sanders campaign means for activism and achieving meaningful social change and whether or not the United States is ready for a massive uprising against neo-liberalism, as is happening around the world. The next decade will be a time when major crises such as the climate, wealth inequality and militarism are devastating. At some point, a spark will be lit in the US, but in the current environment, that is likely to result in greater movement to the right unless we prepare now to build power on the left.
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“The dictionary definition of socialism is “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.””
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The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published December 1, 2013
December 8, 2019
The holidays are at hand. Boycott Season is in effect. As the snow starts to fall, the commercial war of the season asserts its dominance. Our identities as citizens are quickly buried in a blizzard of advertising that defines us as consumers.
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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
Originally published November 21, 2018
November 28, 2019
“Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings… are… a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” – Frederick Douglass, July 4th, 1852
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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Nov. 21, 2019
November 26, 2019
The capitalist class doesn’t hate communism out of concern for mass murder. The accounts of the mass deaths that communism has supposedly caused are exaggerated or fabricated, and capitalist governments have caused hundreds of times more deaths than can be attributed to communist ones. Anti-communism isn’t about human rights, at least not human rights as a socialist would define them. Capitalists and imperialists vilify countries like China because they don’t like that these countries have challenged the “rights” to exploit and oppress.
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with Chris Hedges
RT America on Nov 23, 2019
Chris Hedges talks to author Amitav Ghosh about the natural world and sacred forces that sustain life and the conflict when treated by the human species as an inert commodity to exploit. In his novel Gun Island, Ghosh explores how these ecosystems have turned with a vengeance on the hubris and collective lunacy of modern industrialized society.
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by Howard Zinn
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published March 21, 2011
November 21, 2019
Chapter 2 from A People’s History of the United States.
A black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describes the arrival of a ship in North America in the year 1619:
Sails furled, flag drooping at her rounded stern, she rode the tide in from the sea. She was a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery. Whether she was trader, privateer, or man-of-war no one knows. Through her bulwarks black-mouthed cannon yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a motley. Her port of call, an English settlement, Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone. Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves.
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“Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.” — Adam Smith
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with Chris Hedges
RT America on Nov 2, 2019
Journalist Chris Hedges talks to Joshua Freeman, Professor of History at City University of New York, about his book Behemoth: The History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.
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by Andrew Henderson
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
November 1, 2019
Many of the most pressing problems all nations face are a result of failing to adequately tackle our increasing level of global interdependence.
Mobilized capital can play the tax-regime of one country off against another with ease, such that there is a race to the bottom with respect to the corporate tax revenues which might be expected from even the wealthiest transnational corporations. Such economic arbitrage is possible precisely due to the propagation of widespread variations in the distribution of social justice across the planet. There are no national solutions to such problems, which ultimately require the more equitable distribution of social justice on a global scale.
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[DS reposted the introduction to these interviews.]
by Will Griffin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Peace Report, Oct. 21, 2019
October 31, 2019
I recently interviewed an Afghanistan veteran about his transition from US Army soldier to Revolutionary Communist. Mason Bliss deployed twice to Afghanistan, in 2011 and in 2013. Since separating from the US Army in 2015, he has been organizing as a communist, raising the consciousness of the masses and fighting back against the system he once defended, US imperialism.
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goingundergroundRT on Oct 30, 2019
On this episode of Going Underground, ahead of a UK General Election in December, we speak to BAFTA-award winning director Ken Loach and BAFTA-award winning writer Paul Laverty on their new film “Sorry We Missed You”, highlighting the struggles of a family living facing an uphill struggle since the 2008 financial crash in the neoliberal gig economy. They discuss the film, the illusion of choice in the free market and how it damages workers’ rights, the hardship of workers in gig economy jobs, the rise of Amazon and how companies like Amazon show capitalism can’t be regulated, the culture of shaming the poor and lauding entrepreneurs, the ignoring of corporate fraud and the continuous focus on welfare fraud, why the ideology of socialism still faces difficulty after the collapse of the Soviet Union and more!
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by Ellen Brown
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Web of Debt Blog
October 25, 2019
This 10-page paper was written for the Economics of Happiness Conference co-sponsored by Local Futures, held in Jeonju, Korea, on October 16-17, where I was the keynote speaker — a wonderful city and great experience!
Satisfaction in the workplace is a major component of the “happiness” index; but it is a satisfaction that young people joining the workforce today are not feeling. In a 2017 book titled Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris asks why the millennial generation – those born between 1981 and 1996 – are so burned out. His answer is, “the economy.” Millennials are bearing the brunt of the economic damage wrought by late 20thcentury capitalism, with economic insecurities throwing them into a state of perpetual panic. Harris argues that if they want to meaningfully improve their lives and the lives of future generations, they will have to overthrow the system and rewrite the social contract.
