Category: History
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Debt.4: What’s good for General Motors and what’s good for America
Sometimes the mark of a good book is how it crops back up in your mind a few months or years or even many years after you first read it. I wrote 3 posts about the book Debt by David Graeber back in February & March. There have been several occasions since then when the…
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Other John Davises.1: My life as an 18th century batsman
It can be a bit strange having a ubiquitous name. But it can also be kinda fun. This post is the first in a series of characters I found on the net that have the same name as me. If you believe in previous lifetimes, you may even believe I could have lived some of…
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To the victor go the spoils…
The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio. When Boyd asked…
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Muffled in Miami.2
As a post script to my post on the censure of Ozzie Guilllen for his comments on Cuba, I’m posting today stories from The Real News Network and Democracy Now on the isolation of the US and Canada at the just-concluded Summit of the Americas because of their refusal to allow Cuba to participate. As…
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Muffled in Miami
previous My expectations fof the sports world when it comes to politics are pretty low. So I wasn’t surprised when a sports radio station I tuned into spent nearly the whole day bashing Ozzie Guillen over the comments he made about his “love” for Fidel Castro. I am not a Communist or a Castro…
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Debt.3: South Dakota
Ever wonder why you get so many credit card offers from banks in South Dakota? You know, those loud envelopes with low introductory APR’s that turn around and clobber you with 25% interest rates a few months later? Rates that bury folks in debt, just like the arid storms that buried much of South Dakota…
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Debt.2
“We’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but as the great French historian Fernand Braudel (at left in this post) pointed out, in many ways they could equally be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money…capitalism is first and foremost the art…
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Debt.1
Last week I finished a book I really liked called Debt by David Graeber, (Melville Press.) The author is an anthropologist and an activist who has been involved with the “anti-globalization” movement in general, and the Industrial Workers of the World and Occupy Wall Street in particular. He used to teach at Yale but moved…
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MLK Day: What I Didn’t Learn About Jim Crow in School
Today on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I would like to recommend two books that helped me view his work in a larger context. The first is Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, and the second is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The former taught me a lot about the…
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Who Really Wins on Super Bowl Sunday?
“America has succeeded in forcing other nations to pay for its wars on a systematic basis, something never before accomplished by any nation in history .” – Michael Hudson I’d like to recommend two books I just finished reading, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson and Super Imperialism: The Origins…
johnhdavis / inundation records 