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Follow the Money

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Follow the Money How Israel-Linked Billionaires Silenced US Campus Protests ALAN MACLEOD America’s universities are on fire. A protest movement against the violence in Gaza and U.S. colleges’ complicity in them has swept the nation, with encampments on college campuses in 45 of America’s 50 states. The crackdown has been swift; thousands of students have been arrested, charged, fined, lost their degrees, or even deported. Amid corporate media  demanding  a “ Kent State  2.0”, riot police, armored vehicles and snipers have been deployed across the country to terrify those campaigning for justice into silence. Why have overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against a foreign power’s actions been met with such a heavy-handed response? A MintPress News investigation finds that those same elite institutions have deep financial and ideological ties to the state of Israel, are funded by pro-Israel billionaires who have demanded they take action to crush the student movement, are partially fun

Beyond a naive economics to a political economy of how things actually are

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  Beyond a naive economics to a political economy of how things actually are Violence has been the basis of our economy for 500 years TOBY ROGERS MAY 19, 2024   It seems to me that we’ve been doing political economy wrong for the last two hundred and fifty years. Any honest political economy of how things actually are would start by focusing on the following aspects of society: 1. The disproportionate impact of violence . A single bullet changes the course of history for hundreds of years, dynamite can move mountains, and now a single bomb can erase a city. 2. The willingness to use violence . This is a small subset of the population. 3. The ability to organize people to commit violence on a mass scale through the use of persuasion, fear, and legitimation.   This is an even smaller subset of the population. 4. The stuff that you can get with the mastery of 1, 2, and 3   — oil fields that power the world economy, literal gold (silver, copper, platinum, and cobalt) mines, and control of