"The €1.8 trillion pledged to ”save Europe” sounds like an ambitious promise. But €1.074 trillion of this is the normal EU budget framework for 2021 to 2027, representing 1.1 percent per year of the EU’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as of 2019. And this seven-year budget is based on austerity. Compared with the previous budget for 2014–2020, the funds for agricultural policy have been cut by €46 billion (but still remain the biggest item). There is also a 10 percent reduction for cohesion policy. Significantly less goes to the European Social Fund, the Erasmus program (education and training), for research, or for combating child poverty."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/european-union-coronavirus-recovery-program/

"Perhaps the pursuit of status and the feeling of importance, or the pleasure of exercising power over others, is just as important in determining the structure of the workplace as the pursuit of financial profit."

"Astra Taylor reports that, when she complimented his writing, he told her he believed in “being nice to the reader,” and said it was an “extension of politics.” Be nice to the reader is one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard."

"Oh, and she gave his signature method of dealing with cops: “Agree with anything they say, and then do what you’re going to do anyway.”"

currentaffairs.org/2020/09/what-david-graeber-noticed/

"Trump’s worldview allows for the unapologetic declaration of capitalist interests as correct, no longer constrained by the pretense that human life or human dignity have value. There are implications of carrying this pure Social Darwinism through to its conclusions. If a billion people die as a result of Trump’s policy, they are losers by definition. There is something undeniably fascist about the underlying ethic: strength is virtue, weakness is pathetic. It is no wonder Trump wants to eliminate any and all emissions standards, as well as protections on endangered wildlife."

currentaffairs.org/2020/09/trumps-corrosive-values-will-spread/

"In December 2001, after years of worsening economic crisis, the people of Argentina took to the streets with a cry of “¡Que se vayan todos!”, forcing the resignation of five governments in less than two weeks. During that revolt and in the days that followed, neighbors met together in those same streets to deliberate on their future. Mutual aid networks were organized, shuttered factories were occupied by their workers and transformed into cooperatives, empty banks were transformed into community centers. The egalitarian character of the relationships built in those neighborhood assemblies and occupations was described by those involved as horizontalidad, and the realization of their personal and collective power transformed their lives."

https://dsa-lsc.org/2020/09/10/horizontalism/

"the New York Times reports that Russian, Chinese, and Iranian (?) hackers are all trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine data from good, wholesome Western drug companies and research institutions."

"But leaving that aside, and courtesy of journalist Adam Johnson, I think you’ll appreciate how the NYT deals with the awkward question of whether US spies are similarly attempting to pilfer other countries’ vaccine data:

American officials insist their own spy services’ efforts are defensive and that intelligence agencies have not been ordered to steal coronavirus research. But other current and former intelligence officials said the reality was not nearly so black and white. As American intelligence agencies try to find out what Russia, China and Iran may have stolen, they could encounter information on those countries’ research and collect it.

So the US is, as it turns out, probably trying to steal other countries’ vaccine data. But it’s different. When the Bad Guys spy, you see, that’s Bad. But when Americans spy, that’s just a good faith accident that’s really caused by the Bad Guys, because we wouldn’t even be doing that kind of thing if they hadn’t started it first. It’s all very simple and believable."

https://fx.substack.com/p/world-update-september-6-2020

"The heroes of Frank’s book are the anti-monopoly, proto-socialist midwestern Populist Party of the 1890s. Their program was simple: nationalize the railroads, get rid of the gold standard, and root out political corruption. That was it"

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/populism-thomas-frank-the-people-no-review/

"The United States is no longer a model for other countries to envy, emulate, or admire. The pandemic, and the American government’s response to it, has laid bare a society marked by deep inequality and a state sapped of its basic capacity after decades of neoliberal reform."

"The prevailing views inside the United States and out are increasingly converging: this country is a failure. A decrepit private health care system, a pathetic social safety net, and enduring racialized class inequalities, it turns out, add up to disaster."

"For the right wing, the greater the distance between American promise and American existence, the more extreme the conspiratorial explanation must become."

jacobinmag.com/2020/09/joe-biden-imperialism-trump-america/

"It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependence of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed." - Kropotkin, Mutual Aid

https://truthout.org/articles/david-graeber-left-us-a-parting-gift-his-thoughts-on-kropotkins-mutual-aid/

"William F. Buckley bequeathed the right the ability to disguise cheap, fallacious talking points as reasonable arguments. He is best remembered as the creator of contemporary pseudo-intellectualism. His model is not one we should wish to see revived."

currentaffairs.org/2020/09/how-to-be-a-respectable-public-intellectual/