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Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 15:42
How To Deal With Student Protest Camps (FDR Edition)

Students in America and increasingly across the world are demonstrating against the Gaza genocide. They’re right to do so, opposing a genocide is never the wrong thing to do.

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 12:11

During the past decade, it has become obvious that economic interconnectedness did not bring forth frictionless international relations as many liberal theorists had predicted. To the contrary, the fact that economic integration has been profoundly uneven has enabled the weaponisation of asymmetrical economic relations for the achievement of geopolitical and/or economic goals (Whyte 2022; Farrell 2023). The weaponisation of the unique international role of the US dollar is one of the most consequential examples of this trend. For instance, in the period since 2001, US sanctions designations have expanded by an extraordinary 933%. In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, dollar hegemony made it possible to freeze Russia’s foreign reserves and expel the country from the SWIFT payments system and US correspondent banking.

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 09:30
Are they the new soccer moms and NASCAR dads? Dan Pfeiffer looks at the latest (outlier) CNN poll that has the whole beltway gasping with excitement over the prospect that Biden is in the dirt with young people, Black and Hispanic voters. He noted that the polls shows that 25% of Trump voters are what he calls “conviction sensitive” voters who might be persuaded to abandon him if he’s convicted of a crime: Even more interesting, the topline numbers are the characteristics of these conviction-sensitive voters. According to CNN: In other words, these are the exact voters who propelled Trump to his very narrow lead in the polling average. Younger voters, independents, Black and Latino voters are groups Trump struggled with in 2020 but is doing better with now.
Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:39

Sitting on the banks of the River Trent, the market town of Rugeley in Staffordshire has a rich industrial history. In 1777, it benefited from the construction of the Trent and Mersey Canal, which enabled the smooth transportation of fragile pottery and created a thriving industry. Cooling water from the river later made it an […]

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:38

I wish to honour the miners and pay tribute to the families who, in 1984–5, fought the greatest workers’ fight seen in this country since the Chartists, the Diggers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the Suffragettes in the battle to save pits, jobs, and communities. I especially want to pay tribute to the young miners, who […]

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:37

In the battle of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to break the back of the British labour movement, international solidarity with the NUM remains, forty years on, one of the most inspiring dimensions of that titanic twelve-month dispute. As Seumas Milne, interviewed elsewhere in this issue, has written: ‘The 1984–85 […]

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:35

The noise and the thick black dust, shimmering and sparkling when hit by the light, were almost overwhelming. Just in front, a mighty mining machine continuously rotated along the thick face, its teeth ripping into the wall of coal, whereupon it then loaded great chunks of the black stuff onto a conveyor to take it […]

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:34

Over the past forty years, we have experienced a massive shift of wealth from working people to the tiny minority in whose interests our society is run. Between 1955 and 1980, the average share of income spent on wages was 68 percent; post-1980 the average share dropped to 58 percent. This was also reflected in […]

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:34

Forty years have passed, but the cruelty of Margaret Thatcher’s vendetta against the miners isn’t over. Today, tens of thousands of former pit workers are losing billions in pension entitlements in a deal imposed on them decades ago. Successive governments have taken £4.4 billion out of the miners’ pension fund. Retired workers, meanwhile, struggle on […]

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:33

Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, first published by Verso in 1994, remains an elementary text for socialists navigating the question of where established power truly resides in modern Britain. Reviewing the book at the time in the pages of Tribune, Tony Benn concluded: ‘Seumas Milne has written a major […]

Created
Tue, 30/04/2024 - 06:33

The miners’ strike is often heralded as the beginning of the end for Britain’s once fearsome trade unions, the moment at which the backbone of workers’ organisation within industry was broken. Much less referenced (yet no less significant) was the manner in which the breaking of the miners, and subsequently the destruction of much of […]