The Man Who Knows No Boundaries
Featured translation: investigative reporter Hannes Grassegger’s 2022 longform profile of “the Swiss man who built the global passport industry and turned citizenship into a commodity.”
Palaces & Vaults
The Earthquakes: A Gift to Assad
The Assad regime is finding the earthquakes quite useful: they came to help with the destruction. And on a political level, the Syrian regime is weaponizing the aftermath to get out of international isolation.
Dimensions of the Global Police State
The global police state involves a convergence of global capitalism’s need for social control and its economic need to perpetuate profit-making in the face of stagnation.
Ending Inequality, Ending Police
As we rolled back the welfare state, policing became a primary way of controlling dispossessed populations while at the same time shoring up the interests of the middle class.
Covid and Capital
Climate change and pandemics are not just functionally integrated in the sense that the planet warms and it changes the geography of pathogens. They are integrated through the ideological totalitarianism of neoliberal capitalism that has been imposed on the planet. Not only are we as humans alienated from our work, but from nature itself.
Decoalonize!
History does not demonstrate that we have left anything in our past. We are only accumulating.
Now is the time to pull the emergency brake.
Markets, Morals, and the Neoliberal Assault on Democracy
Neoliberals were not only clueless about the extent to which markets never really worked the way they described in their ideal. They were also clueless about the political, social, cultural, and theological ramifications of a radically marketized world in which we have not justice, not democracy, but only winners and losers.
“Between me and you is the blood of five hundred thousand poor Syrians.”
I refuse to belong to a family with a thousand faces, which doesn’t know right from wrong, which doesn’t know God and conscience, and which God and conscience don’t know.
The Grassroots Insurgency in Moscow City Politics
In several districts, local councilors practically took on the role of city councilors while current deputies either hid from their voters or openly stood with the Moscow city government, as in the case of the planned property development at the enormous Bitsa park.
Transnational Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity
We’re up against the new global capitalism. We need to link resistance movements across borders. We can’t confront this system just in our own countries. We need to link up around the world.