Humans, alone among the mammals and other life-forms on the planet Earth, invented “no.” The power of negation lies at the root of conceptual thought, and hence of abstract thinking. And with it comes the power of deception. Deception applied to oneself is basically illusion. Error and deception make...
Destroying miners’ health National Public Radio (NPR) and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) teamed up to produce a special investigative report on the increased incidence of black lung disease in coal miners. The results of their combined investigations were released on the NPR’s radio stations on July 9–10,...
If politics and policy were synonymous, the voters who loyally backed the Bush administration over eight years might as well support Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election. His first four years in office have demonstrated that he can deliver the same basic policies as the Bush years (the...
Personal website of Stephen Shenfield (Stefan)
Many people imagine that a country run on the lines of the American republic is a democratic state, that the institutions of America are democratic institutions, that the spirit of such a state is the democratic spirit, and that the philosophy of such a state – the “Rights of...
This April will witness the 100th anniversary of the sinking of theRMS Titanic. Many words will be written in the capitalist media about the disaster, but what of the class aspects of the tragedy and has anything really changed in the last century? The Titanic came into being purely for...
When European Central Bank president Mario Draghi recently told German tabloid Bild ”The worst is over,” he was talking about government budgets and European banks’ balance sheets. It is a completely different story for workers through-out Europe who are finding their trade union rights undermined, their wages squeezed, their retirement age raised and...
The recent visit of the Pope to Cuba has again focussed upon the island and the economic and political changes it is under-going. Ahead of his visit, Pope Benedict had suggested Cuba’s “Marxist” structure ”no longer corresponds to reality” and called for the adoption of a ”new model”. Pope Benedict XVI has...
Water has always been an issue in the American west. For 90 years, Nevada and six other south-western states have shared the waters of the once-mighty Colorado river, according to an established formula. It became clear, however, that the allocations of water decided in 1922 were overly optimistic about...
Reflections on Hurricane Sandy
It’s now a week since Hurricane Sandy hit large coastal areas of the northeastern United States. At least a million homes were still without heat and power when a snowstorm followed a few days later. Relief has yet to reach some of the areas affected, such as the Far Rockaways, where survivors are fending for themselves as best they can. Workers held captive True, some manage to fend much better than others. Holed up for the duration in a first-class hotel on the island of Manhattan, the business and cultural centre of New York City, David Rohde in The...
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