capitalism 
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SOURCE: Boston Review
8/3/2022
The Internet is Lousy Because of Capitalism, Not Bad Apple CEOs
by Matthew Crain
"Surveillance advertising was created by marketers, technology start-ups, investors, and politicians, a coalition bound by the desire to commercialize the web as quickly as possible."
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SOURCE: Boston Review
7/20/2022
Can We Have International Cooperation Without Domination?
by Jamie Martin
There is no golden age of international relations free of the coercive power of capital. A different version of internationalism is needed.
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SOURCE: The Nation
6/13/2022
Reviewed: The Bio of Hippie Capitalism Pioneer and Technofuturist Stewart Brand
by Malcolm Harris
From LSD to the computer revolution, Stewart Brand appeared in some way in the biggest cultural trends to emerge from California in the late 20th century. A new authorized biography tells a version of his story, but is it the whole story?
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/27/2022
Palm Oil is Colonialism's Continuing Nightmare
by Max Haiven
The extraction and trade in palm oil in west Africa has been at the center of two centuries of exploitation and violence, which stands to get worse as the Ukraine war threatens the world supply of competing sunflower oil.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
4/4/2022
Your House Makes More Money than You Do
Rising real estate values are bringing more wealth to Americans than wages and salaries are. This is a big problem for economic equality.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
3/13/2022
How London Became the Oligarchical Cesspool of "Londongrad"
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
From football to real estate to politics, British institutions have been willing to welcome Russian cash for decades without regard for its potential moral taint.
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SOURCE: The Economist
3/4/2022
Russian Sanctions a "Watershed" Moment in Global Economic History
by Nicholas Mulder
"Sanctions are no longer scalpel-like instruments that exploit globalisation. At their current scale, they are a tempest that will change the nature of globalisation itself in major ways."
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SOURCE: Boston Review
2/14/2022
Selling Hope
by Wendy A. Woloson
After a cancer diagnosis, the author still couldn't escape a world of consumerism that relentlessly commodifies even the worst experiences.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
2/17/2022
The Revolt of the Super Employees
by Erik Baker
The business managerial ethos established in the 1980s destroyed the idea of solidarity and replaced it with a fantasy version of meritocracy. Now, upper-middle management is having the rug pulled out from under it, and they're mad. Are they mad enough to recognize the faults of the system?
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SOURCE: Dissent
2/9/2021
Focus on the Family? The Problems with Blaming GOP Radicalism on Family Business
by Paul Heideman
Is the rise of the privately-held megacorporation the root of the radical conservative movement, or has corporate America long had a right-wing fringe?
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/5/2021
Forget "Ghost Guns" and other Media Panics. Gun Capitalism is the Underlying Problem of a Violent Society
by Andrew C. McKevitt
A long series of moral panics over the dangers of specific guns (and their imagined users) has hidden the real danger to Americans: the profitability (and legality) of selling deadly weapons.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/2/2021
After 20 Years, Enron Still Haunts Us
by Gavin Benke
Despite Enron's bankruptcy and the resulting economic fallout, American business media is still dangerously credulous toward promises of "innovation" and "disruption" without asking whether the latest hot entrepreneur is using smoke and mirrors.
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SOURCE: NPR
11/29/2021
Lizabeth Cohen: Why Americans Buy So Much Stuff
As holiday shopping overlaps with historic supply chain disruptions, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Lizabeth Cohen on the economy's reliance on spending and the culture of consumerism in the U.S.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
11/15/2021
The Not-So-Hidden Purpose of the University of Austin
by Daniel Drezner
Anyone attracted to the promises of academic freedom and untrammeled inquiry at the University of Austin should be scared of the power it proposes to concentrate in its corporate governing board.
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SOURCE: TIME
11/1/2021
How Historians Helped Convince Big Business Trump Was Dangerous
Historian Timothy Snyder recounts his role in a November 2020 presentation to business leaders about the authoritarian danger reflected in Trump's lies about the "stolen" election. Did a potential coup fail because CEOs thought it was bad for business? Or is there a change afoot in corporate citizenship?
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/3/2021
The Customer is Always... Insufferable? The History of Today's Beleaguered Service Worker
Writer Amanda Mull checks with historians Susan Strasser and William Leach to explain why American diners, shoppers and passengers seem to be driven to torment servers, clerks and flight attendants.
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7/11/2021
Why Does Speculation Persist in the Age of Predictive Data?
by Gayle Rogers
"During this pandemic, all of us have studied many data points to assess our risks and predict how safe our futures will be under X or Y scenarios. Even when there has been no shortage of data, even when the data have overwhelmed us, the future has never been made certain and clear for us by them. Instead, we have had to become speculators to some degree."
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SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor
Capitalism American-Style: A Financial History of the United States
“Ages of American Capitalism" by Jonathan Levy sheds light on U.S. history as seen through a financial lens.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
6/14/2021
Our Insurance Dystopia
by Caley Horan
America's health insurance morass is a result of the replacement of the ideal of mutual, universal risk sharing with the privatization of risk in pursuit of profit.
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SOURCE: Public Seminar
4/2/2021
The World the Suez Canal Made
by Aaron Jakes
"The purpose of the Suez Canal, from the perspective of both the Egyptian state and its European investors, was not simply to render the world more interconnected and international transport more efficient, but to extract transit fees from the ships passing through it."
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