An incredibly interesting read

https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/marx-and-slavery/

"Since the economy writ large structures social relations and relations of power, we should also seek to expand the democratic economy more broadly through things like participatory budgeting, public banking, and democratic public ownership that disperse control as broadly as possible throughout the population.

Our individual lives and well-being are profoundly intertwined with the well-being of others. Our shared history, contemporary society, and the natural world provide the conditions that enable us to become who we are, and ultimately allow us to transform ourselves. Our technological and economic inheritance and shared fate underscore how substantive liberty has both material and social preconditions."

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/abandoning-myth-independence/

"At the Kansas City Fed Jackson Hole symposium, the annual jamboree ‘think-tank’ for international central bankers, US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell announced the end of monetary policy as a tool to control inflation. His speech of just a few minutes completely dropped the monetarist theory of inflation as proposed by Chicago free market economist Milton Friedman and pursued by his disciple and former Fed chief, Ben Bernanke."

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/08/28/the-fed-in-a-hole/

"In the United States, conservative and extremist media have flourished on Facebook. Kevin Roose [...] tweets lists of the most popular posts on Facebook each day. Most of them are conservative outlets like Fox News and The Daily Wire, which, according to one report, was the most popular publisher on Facebook in July. As independent journalist Judd Legum has shown, The Daily Wire, until recently the home of Ben Shapiro, operates a network of coordinated pages that push the company’s material to vast audiences in contravention of Facebook rules. Facebook has done little stop them."

https://thebaffler.com/the-future-sucked/a-most-violent-platform-silverman

"Overall, Japanese workers are spending an average of 11 percent more time to earn the same salary they were bringing home about 20 years ago, and some are working unpaid overtime on top of that. Many workers are having to do two or more jobs to make ends meet. Some people are working 70-hour weeks out of multiple jobs. According to Lancers research, some 4.5 million full-time workers in Japan have second jobs, where they work, on average, between six and 14 additional hours each week, on top of any overtime hours they clock at their primary job; a small number of them work up to 30 or 40 hours per week at their second jobs. Under Abe, average annual working hours per employee fell, but only because many of the new workers were part-time or temporary – and Japan’s annual working hours remain one of the highest in the world."

"[...] the real purpose of Abenomics was to raise the profitability of Japanese capitalism, at the expense of labour. That was the third arrow of Abenomics: the so-called ‘structural reforms’ ie reducing the cost of production by deregulating the labour market, privatising and cutting taxes on profits etc. These measures aimed to help boost the rate of exploitation and the profitability of capital in Japan. Abe cut corporate profit taxes sharply – Trump-style and he hiked employee social security contributions to reduce the burden for employers."

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/08/31/abenomics-a-review/

A great read

https://newrepublic.com/article/159210/unemployment-numbers-coronavirus-stock-market

"I like to think this is what a fem­i­nist city might look like, where food, chores, safe­ty and clean­li­ness become even­ly dis­trib­uted pri­or­i­ties, where the well-being of every­one — espe­cial­ly the most mar­gin­al­ized — becomes a col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­i­ty."

https://inthesetimes.com/article/feminist-city-leslie-kern-new-york-city-abolition-park

"The vision of bureaucracy from the perspective of those who are subjects of bureaucracy is simply: paperwork. There is a thing I need, and I cannot get it unless I fill out a million incomprehensible forms. There is something I have done wrong, in the eyes of the state, and in order to correct it, I must perform a series of bizarre tasks, like a rat in an experiment. Miniscule irregularities in my compliance with these administrative rituals confer immense power on the bureaucrat tasked with evaluating me: such an error gives that bureaucrat untrammeled license to reject my request if they so choose. If the fictional face of the bureaucrat is Leslie Knope, the fictional face of the bureaucratic subject is Josef K., the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial, who finds himself trapped between a nebulous court and a shadowy Committee of Affairs as he struggles to navigate something he knows only as “the process.”"

currentaffairs.org/2020/09/enduring-the-bureaucracy/

"It doesn’t seem that long ago that young people were being lectured to ‘stop being so disengaged’ and ‘start getting involved.’ Now they get told ‘no, not like that.’ Discussions in newspapers and news studios, whether about Black Lives Matter, essential workers striking over poor safety and low pay, or young climate justice campaigners, involve ‘friendly advice’ to activists to ‘tone it down’ and ‘be less demanding’ - to be less in the way. Such complaints often include references to history: ‘why can’t they be more like the protestors of yesteryear - you know, the uncontroversial ones?’"

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/history-gives-us-reason-hope-inequality-can-be-beaten/