ROGER BOYD—As I have stated in previous posts, here, here, here and here, South American nations have been in a continuous contest between the landed oligarchs, financiers and foreign capitalists on one side and the modernizing nationalist bourgeoisie on the other since their independence from Spain and Portugal; and the former keep winning. There have been periods of success for the latter, as with the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model of the post-WW2 period, but every time these have been crushed by the latter and the nations plundered and de-industrialized back to the status of agricultural product and natural resource exporters dominated by foreign interests.
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EDITOR—Interested in an “unapologetic Black, leftist, working-class” perspective on current sociopolitical events? If so, join us as we speak with Nick Cruse, citizen journalist and co-founder of Revolutionary Blackout Network (@RevBlackNetwork on Twitter and “Revolutionary Blackout” here on YouTube). We discuss a variety of topics, including the importance of independent Black, working-class commentary in an age of corporatized journalism, the leftist failures of electoral politics in the US, the absence of an established leftist perspective in mainstream media, the challenges of social media activism (particularly the “BreadTube” effect), as well as the potential to change the current status quo through ground-up, working class solidarity.
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EDITOR—There’s a tremendous amount of disinformation and number of outright lies being spread by Israeli officials and their apologists about the assault on Gaza. Journalist and political commentator Caitlin Johnstone has compiled what she believes are the ten biggest lies currently circulating as a means of spreading pro-Israeli propaganda. Jimmy and his guests Russell Dobular and Keaton Weiss from Due Dissidence discuss these lies one at a time and comment on each.
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BRUCE LERRO—People’s identity can be made sense of as existing in the cross-fire between our biological, psychological and social lives. This helps us to understand the differences between someone’s temperament, personality and self. Among social psychologists such as George Herbert Mead, the species homo sapiens is not fully human until we have been socialized. What are the skills necessary to build this social identity? Why is it that some skills have to be built before others? As adults we assume that our inner psychology and the objective world are separate. But research shows that it probably takes the child seven or eight years to develop both a subjective and objective self.
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EDITOR—The Wiki forgets to mention that Jean Pierre, besides being an overqualified WOKE specimen given her racial and LGBTQ creds, is also an accomplished red-baiter. This makes Jean Pierre something of a traitor to the political faith of her parents, reputedly members of Haiti’s Lavalas party. For those with no knowledge of Lavalas, or the alarmingly tragic political history of Haiti, all of it underwritten by French and later US imperialism, suffice it to say that Lavalas was led by the genuinely progressive Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a socialist / liberation theology priest who in 1990 became the first democratically-elected president of Haiti.
