CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—What “woke” means depends on who you ask. According to the original AAVE definition, it means “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. If you ask Ron DeSantis’ lawyers when they were made to define the term in court, it means “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Both of which sound entirely reasonable…If you ask members of the rank-and-file right wing, though, the answers range from the incoherent to the insanely bigoted to the profoundly stupid. You’ll hear gibberish about “Cultural Marxism” (not a real thing), about communist conspiracies to give your child puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery, about a liberal plot to normalize child molestation and erase women as a gender, and about the agenda to deteriorate society and plunge western culture into chaos and disorder because it makes Satan happy.
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After what must have been particularly heated negotiations, House and Senate negotiators have – no doubt grudgingly – agreed to balloon the United States defense budget by an additional $45 billion beyond the $800+ billion the Biden administration had asked for. Politico calls the increase a “rebuke” of the President, which seems a curious way of describing politicians predictably delivering for their donors. Jimmy and America’s Comedian Kurt Metzger can only admire the sheer rapacity of the military-industrial complex and its complete capture of the United States government.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The subsequent finding that the Top 400 Donors give 29.86% of America’s political donations, and the Top .01% give 57.16% of America’s political donations, is entirely consistent with the proven fact that America is ruled by corruption: that DESPITE ITS HAVING A RATHER DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION, America is an aristocracy not a democracy.
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BRUCE LERRO—The use value of a house is contained in the cost of its production. This includes all the materials that went into building the house as well as the cost of labor to complete the house. The use value of the house is its protection from bad weather conditions, prowlers, a place of comfort, privacy and social reproduction, including sex and taking care of children. The use value of a commodity is relatively stable. But the exchange value of housing is not fixed. It is interdependent on surrounding houses. Property values can go down on my house if my neighbors’ houses are not kept up, even if my house has been kept up. On the other hand, a house that is not kept up can sell for a high price if it is located in a gentrifying neighborhood.
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JOHN GERASSI—Che Guevara had no illusions about what this will mean in Latin America. He wrote: “The present moment may or may not be the proper one for starting the struggle, but we cannot harbor any illusions, we have no right to do so, that freedom can be obtained without fighting. And these battles shall not be mere street fights with stones against tear-gas bombs, nor pacific general strikes; neither will they be those of a furious people destroying in two or three days the repressive superstructure of the ruling oligarchies. The struggle will be long, harsh, and its battlefronts will be the guerrilla’s refuge, the cities, the homes of the fighters–where the repressive forces will go seeking easy victims among their families–among the massacred rural populations, in the villages or in cities destroyed by the bombardments of the enemy.”
