Image by Chase Elliott Clark via Flickr
by John Pilger
John Pilger, Nov. 26, 2020
November 27, 2020
When I first reported on child poverty in Britain, I was struck by the faces of children I spoke to, especially the eyes. They were different: watchful, fearful.
Image by Udo Herzog via Flickr
by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Ireland
Crossposted from Sputnik
November 19, 2020
Britain’s sorry excuse for a leader, Boris Johnson, has proudly announced the biggest spending spree on the nation’s military in 30 years. This comes as the country is reeling from disease, a healthcare crisis and economic misery for millions of workers.
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goingundergroundRT on Oct 26, 2020
We speak to William Robinson, author of The Global Police State. He discusses how capitalism’s crises have fuelled the rise of the global police state, the drastic inequality and poverty that has become a theme of modern capitalism which necessitates the global police state, whether there is class warfare on the poor, the growing industry of militarism and oppression and much more!
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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Oct. 14, 2020
October 20, 2020
In 1937, the storyteller H.P. Lovecraft wrote this about the direction that capitalism was taking:
“Capitalism is dying from internal as well as external causes, and its own leaders and beneficiaries are less and less able to kid themselves…The only avenue of survival for plutocracy is a military and emotional fascism whereby millions of persons will be withdrawn from the industrial arena and placed on a dole or in concentration camps with high sounding patriotic names. That or socialism—take your choice. In the long run it won’t be the New Deal but the mere facts of existence which will be recognized as the real and inevitable slayer of Hooverism.”
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by Michael Parenti
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published February 18, 2014
October 8, 2020
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
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by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
August 26, 2020
In Mexico, the intensity of the Covid-19 pandemic is increasing. With more than 568,600 cases and 61,450 deaths (third largest number of Covid-19 deaths), the country is staggering under the Coronavirus pandemic. While the entire country is experiencing the impact, indigenous communities represent the hardest hit demographic. Data from Coneval, the national government’s social development agency, has shown that the Covid-19 fatality rate in Mexico’s poorest 427 municipalities is 14.1. On the other hand, the fatality rate in the country’s 54 wealthiest municipalities is 8.1, “meaning that people who live in impoverished parts of the country are almost twice as likely to die if they become sick with Covid-19 than those who live in affluent areas.”
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by Yanis Iqbal
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Aligarh, India
August 9, 2020
Latin America has surpassed more than 5 million Covid-19 cases to overtake North America, with 4.8 million Covid-19 cases, as the region worst-hit by the Coronavirus pandemic. This astronomic increase in Covid-19 cases has been accompanied by a corresponding economic catastrophe of great magnitude. According to a United Nations Policy Brief entitled “The Impact of COVID-19 on Latin America and the Caribbean”, “Parts of Latin America and the Caribbean have become hotspots of the coronavirus (COVID19) pandemic, exacerbated by weak social protection, fragmented health systems and profound inequalities. COVID-19 will result in the worst recession in the region in a century, causing a 9.1% contraction in regional GDP in 2020…This could push the number of poor up by 45 million (to a total of 230 million) and the number of extremely poor by 28 million (to 96 million in total), putting them at risk of undernutrition.” The Policy Brief further states that “The sharp drop in economic activity is expected to lift the unemployment rate from 8.1% in 2019 to 13.5% in 2020. The poverty rate is expected to rise by 7.0 percentage points in 2020, to 37.2%, while extreme poverty is expected to rise by 4.5 percentage points, from 11.0% to 15.5%, which represents an increase of 28 million people.”
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by Jim Kavanagh
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Polemicist
June 8, 2020
“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” — Aristotle
It has been an extraordinary week. On the heels of a pandemic and months-long lockdown, a nationwide uprising erupted in response to the brutal killing of George Floyd. In some 75 cities across at least 16 states, and around the world, militant, multiracial gatherings of thousands of rightfully-enraged people overwhelmed police forces, prevented arrests, forced the evacuation of, and burned, a police precinct, and damaged and burned dozens of buildings. Mainstream news reporters from around the world were arrested and fired upon with rubber bullets on live television. Police SUVs drove into crowds of people. It has been the most extensive, and the most threatening, explosion of popular rage against the machine since the uprisings of 1967-8.
Image by Wayne Hsieh via Flickr
by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, May 17, 2020
May 20, 2020
Consumer society has tried to legitimize itself by making people believe that it represents a sustainable way of living. For those in the First World, all the evidence that a meltdown is coming—the deterioration of the climate, the decline of the biosphere, the diminishing of available resources—has usually existed outside of immediate view. Commercialism and the mass media, which have gained an unprecedented presence in our lives through the digital revolution, have distracted us from these realities while the machine of global capital has continued to run.
Image by Minority Serving Institute Partnership Program via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Apr 18, 2020
On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Cornell University Professor, Noliwe Rooks about how America’s public education system, under successive administrations, continues to be segregated along racial lines, and what is taught often shaped by business goals and ideas.
Image by Russ Allison Loar via Flickr
with Abby Martin
Empire Files on Feb 9, 2020
Abby Martin meets with Nithya Raman, progressive candidate for LA City Council in District 4, about her campaign to end homelessness in the nation’s epicenter and how local politicians refuse to take easy actions to eradicate the phenomenon–but refuse to in the interests of big real estate developers.
Image by AK Rockefeller via Flickr
with Anya Parampil and Danny Haiphong
The Grayzone on Jan 22, 2020
Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with Danny Haiphong, a contributing editor at the Black Agenda Report, about his recent two week trip to China.
Image via Cocoabiscuit
Originally posted on Jan. 20, 2013
“One day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you’re raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” — “Where Do We Go From Here?” Martin Luther King, Jr., Aug. 16, 1967
Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below
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.
Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below
“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” — Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter to Coretta Scott, 1952
