THURSDAY 10AM: The roots of the USPS crisis | Sarah Anderson
Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
New interviews throughout the week

There's been a very real slide towards authoritarian rule in Latin America. The neoliberal project is back on the cards, but it's authoritarian in nature because people don't want it. When people have a chance to vote in favor or against the neoliberal project - they've clearly voted against it... In order to counter that, the right with this neoliberal project has tried to subvert the course of democracy - in Brazil they barred Lula from running, in Bolivia they're trying to block the most popular party from running, and in Ecuador you're seeing a similar situation.

Policy analyst Guillaume Long examines the political exile of former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, and current president Lenin Moreno's broader of disarming of progressive popular will, democratic rule and national sovereignty in Ecuador - in service of maintaining neoliberal hegemony and global financial institutions.


Jun 24
Posted by Alexander Jerri


Throughout the 400 years since it emerged, capitalism has believed it cannot exist without maintaining deadly domination of black bodies. And it’s been molding social discussion to promote this belief. Capitalist power derives from the mistrust of nature and has used black bodies as the anthropomorphic depiction of nature’s wild untrustworthiness. First, we had to make the Africans into our slaves because otherwise they wouldn’t become Christian. Clearly, if left in their own land, worshiping terrifying animistic spirits, or some crazy thing called “Allah,” they would eventually be overwhelmed by disease, poverty, and the pests of the natural world, a world which was itself not to be trusted. It was for their own protection.

Slavery in the United States was eventually outlawed, except when imposed on criminals, so black people were shaped in the propaganda story into basic, natural criminals. To prevent them from enjoying the opportunities of freedom, the dominant society criminalized their presence among white citizens, even to the point of policing the flow of their genes through Jim Crow laws. Eventually the Jim Crow system was defeated by appeals to society’s conscience, rather than its fear. Losing battle after subsequent battle of conscience, white cruelty has finally settled on police as the main lethal army, and prisons as the main segregating tool, safeguarding society against scary nature in the form of the black person.

For centuries before the advent of capitalism, most of civilization was convinced by rulers that it couldn’t survive without dominating women and the poor. In many similar ways to how black people came to be used, women, poor people, and nomadic peoples were seen as the main reflections of untrustworthy nature, until capitalism moved the imposition of its harshest propaganda of social mistrust onto the black body.

What has never changed during this multi-millennial propaganda blitz is that it’s always been best for the elite if we fear each other. It’s great, especially for men, if we buy into the fear of nature by distrusting woman. It’s great, especially for those who have an obscene amount of wealth, if we buy into the fear of nature in the guise of poor people. It’s great for those who profit, or believe they do, from the ownership of private property if... read more