August 2019

DANNY HAIPHONG—There would be no Jay-Z/NFL collaboration without Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the hundreds of young, mostly Black men around the country whose lives have been taken prematurely by way of police murder. Disaster capitalism feeds off Black death.  And to protect the inevitability of Black death, the real billionaire capitalists such as Epstein who control the means of production (including fictitious finance) must operate in relative secrecy while Jay-Z and the rest of the Black misleadership class publicly shame and condemn any independent and politically left striving that emerges from the Black polity.

ANDRE VLTCHEK—Israel has been regularly attacking Syria and bombing Palestine for decades. But Lebanon is a totally different story: only its airspace has been habitually violated by the Israeli jets flying towards the Syrian targets. Bombing Iraq is also clearly an escalation of Israel’s bellicose strategy. A bizarre escalation, considering that Iraq is still de facto a state occupied by Israel’s closest ally – the United States.

PAUL STREET—Contrary to the president’s throwback protectionist rhetoric, it’s not about simple import substitution: our goods for their goods. The multinational corporations atop global capitalism developed an international division of labor geared largely to China’s vast reservoir of cheap labor power decades ago. At the same time, Trump’s tariffs are a significant tax on U.S. consumers, something that promises to restrict consumer demand and thereby help move up the date of the next big recession.