Articles

BY FORREST HYLTON Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair Tariq Ali and Jon Wiener, comrades of his generation, have written concise and moving tributes to Mike Davis, whose work reached my generation of radical readers in the 1990s, in the context of the fall of the USSR, the rise of Clintonist-Third Way triage, the EZLN in Chiapas, and the inter-penetration of capitals across the Pacific. I caught onto Mike in Portland, Oregon, in 1996, I think, in the midst of campaigns to beat back xenophobia, racism, and the exploitation of labor at Nike, the sleazy practices of billionaire Paul Allen, on street corners, and in the strawberry fields. In addition to the writing itself, especially about California, reaching the level of art, there was something–which the attention to form may have ...

BY NANCY SNYDER Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The erasure of race conscious admissions used in public and private universities began to its certain erasure today, October 31, 2022. For five hours, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments on the matter of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.  Given the questions and significant concerns asked by the Justices of this Supreme Court, and, by the public comments made by the six conservative Supreme Court Justices and their loathing of affirmative action, it has been a common agreement amongst academics, civil rights and educational activists that these two cases before the Supreme Court are the cases that will dism...

BY THOMAS KNAPP Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair An “experienced analyst” at the National Security Agency ran an illegal surveillance project that involved “unauthorized targeting and collection of private communications of people or organizations in the US.” The agency’s inspector general concluded that the analyst “acted with reckless disregard”  for “numerous rules and possibly the law.” This happened ten years ago. The inspector general’s report was issued six years ago. But the public is just now learning about it, courtesy of Bloomberg. After some intrepid Freedom of Information Act work, we can now see a highly redacted version of the IG report. The NSA’s investigation of the analyst began about a month before American hero Edward Snowden’s public disclosures ...

BY DEAN BAKER Photograph Source: John Loo – CC BY 2.0 We got a lot of new data on the economy last week and we will get more this week. Most of what we saw was pretty good from the standpoint of stable growth and slowing inflation, but there is still much ambiguity and serious grounds for concerns about the future. First, the most important release from last week was the third quarter GDP data. It showed the economy growing at a 2.6 percent annual rate. This is a very healthy rate of growth and follows small declines reported in the prior two quarters. The growth also should mean that we are again seeing positive productivity growth after seeing a record pace of decline reported in the first half of 2022. Productivity data are always erratic, and the numbers from the ...

BY LINDA PENTZ GUNTER Chooz nuclear power plant in France by Raimond Spekking/Wikimedia Commons. The annual goldmine of empirical data on nuclear power that is the World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) was duly rolled out on October 5th, this year in Berlin. The 2022 edition is available for download here and is an indispensable reference source, updated each year. While delivering an in-depth overview, as its title suggests, of the status of nuclear power worldwide, the report also provides sections focused on particular areas of the technology or on certain countries or regions of the world. As its principal author, Mycle Schneider, pointed out during the rollout, the report’s authors are big fans of empirical data. Indeed, many of the fin...