In June 2020, founders of the ride-request app Lyft announced that they had launched “allyship dialogues“ and were committed to fighting “systemic racism” which they said is “deeply rooted in our society.” The same month, an Uber marketing campaign proudly recommended to “racists” that they should “delete Uber,” as they were unwelcome customers. At the same time, the food delivery service app DoorDash announced a series of initiatives to “support Black-owned restaurants.”

Everywhere we turned, as popular uprisings against police violence and white supremacy filled the streets, Silicon Valley gig app companies that rely on and profit from the labor of predominantly Black and brown workers, insisted they too were committed to fighting racial injustice.

But something curious was unfolding at the same time these multi-billion dollar companies paid lip service and made token donations to bail funds and civil rights groups: they were simultaneously pumping tens of millions more on pushing support for Proposition 22 –– a ballot initiative in California — that would exempt app-based transportation and delivery companies from a state law that required them to classify drivers as employees, permitting those companies to not provide essential benefits like healthcare, paid time off, and unemployment insurance.

With 78% of ride-hail app drivers in San Francisco being people of color and 55% of Uber drivers in California identifying as such, the law would overwhelmingly impact nonwhite, disproportionately immigrant communities.

Knowing this, and compelled by the broader corporate efforts to exploit the George Floyd uprisings as a branding opportunity, companies like DoorDash, Uber, Lyft and other app-based employers rushed to present the diminishment of worker protections not as manifestly anti-Black and anti-brown anti-labor laws, but actually empowering to drivers of colors.

Spending millions on advertising, a patchwork of large donations to community groups planting op-eds in Black and Hispanic press, and focus-grouped language about employee “freedom,” “independence,” “being your own boss,” “flexibility” and general rise-and-grind framing, Super PACs alongside Bay Area and LA-based marketing firms aggressively targeted minority communities to back Prop 22, despite all independent analysis and labor organizations insisting it would be bad for workers of color.

On this Season 5 Premiere of Citations Needed, we detail how this plan played out –– and ultimately won, how corporations buy off organizations and adapt nonprofit speak to harm communities of color, and how the idea of “third worker categories” –– like the ones pushed by Uber and Lyft are suspiciously similar to Jim Crow-era efforts to strip black and immigrant workers of the rights white workers were winning under the then-New Deal.

Our guest is Veena Dubal, Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

Global methane emissions are increasing, but we are not sure why. Positive feedbacks of CH4 emissions from wetlands to climate change may be contributing to the increase. Ma et al. [2021] combine biogeochemical models and satellite-derived CH4 concentration observations to examine climatic feedbacks to emissions from wetlands, from the equator to the poles. Tropical wetlands emit the 72% of global wetland emissions of CH4, and those emissions are shown to be most sensitive to changes in precipitation. In contrast, higher latitude wetlands emit much less overall, but their emissions are highly sensitive to temperature. In a companion Viewpoint, Thompson [2021] describes the novel way that Ma et al. [2021]  compare bottom-up estimates based on land surface models to those derived from a top-down atmospheric inversion model. She also notes that positive feedbacks of wetland CH4 emissions to climate change will require still stronger mitigation efforts in other sectors to avoid exceeding 1.5°C or even 2.0°C global warming.

Citation: Ma, S., Worden, J., Zhang, Y., Poulter, B., Cusworth, D. et al. [2021]. Satellite constraints on the latitudinal distribution and temperature sensitivity of wetland methane emissions. AGU Advances, 2, e2021AV000408.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000408

—Eric Davidson, Editor, AGU Advances

As you all know—at least if you’ve been around Irreal for a while—I like reading through other peoples Emacs configurations. It’s not just a matter of voyeurism; I almost always learn something from seeing how others use Emacs. The latest example is this post from Supratim Samanta.

It’s in the form of an Org file so there’s a bit of explanation included. Samanta has all the usual use cases

• Coding
• Documentation with Org-mode
• Elfeed
• Magit
• Evil for the Vim experience

It’s a fairly extensive configuration so there may be ideas lurking in it that you’ll find useful. Take a look and see.

Matt lost his voice this week, so we’re unpaywalling this extended interview with Adolph Reed. We’ll be back next week with Monday Mourning and a new UI episode. Subscribers can still get their UI fix with Katie’s attempt at the Taibbi dating app, also out today.

“But if that doesn’t happen, then that’s gonna be the end of American democracy in the next year.” Does he mean Republicans taking the senate? The creation of a new religion of Wokery in deference to Robin DiAngelo? Duke winning March Madness in 2022?

You’ll have to watch to find out. Professor Reed has big statements and important messages for you in this informative and irreverent extended interview.

He shares with Matt and Katie his perspective on the changing progression of civil-rights activism from policy-oriented protest to squabbling over abstract moral superiority. The pre-eminent scholar on this new ideology of course being Robin DiAngelo and her new book Nice Racism, which Professor Reed awards Matt the purple heart for finishing.

It’s in this “book” (apologies to Norm Finkelstein for using the term) that DiAngelo calls for such BIPOC-infantilizing ideas as moral reparations, seeing white people collectively while seeing BIPOC as individuals. And this new teaching is quickly becoming the dominant theology. This, according to Professor Reed, is dangerous.

“What we need,” he argues, “is having frank conversations with actual people in society, not mediated through mass media, about the problems and policies in their lives that confront them.”

And he’s planning to do just that. In a Useful Idiots Breaking News Alert, Reed announced his upcoming podcast Class Matters, in which he and other scholars will discuss what society would look like if it were governed by and for the concerns of the working class.

Listen to the interview now. Learn something, laugh, but please, whatever you do, stop telling Adolph Reed he doesn’t understand the depths and intensity of racism in America. Because we’re pretty sure he does.

Plus, Matt and Katie break their silence on the Aaron Maté vs The Young Turks feud, and yes, they have some demands.

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Want a UI for your application? Python has had GUI choices for decades. But what if your UI is in a terminal? And not just a command-line interface, but a full-screen application with a text UI? What does a “Text UI” even mean?

Enter…Textual from the prolific Will McGugan, joining us for a webinar showing Textual and some of its implementation.

• September 21, 2021
• 6PM CEST, 5PM BST, 12PM EDT
• Audience: beginners (first half) and intermediate (second half)

REGISTER

Agenda

This is actually two webinars rolled into one. In the first half, we’ll explain Textual and show some demo applications, taking questions and comments as we go. In the second half, we’ll take a peek inside the code to show how it is implemented, getting commentary from Will about decisions he made (and future work.)

We’ll also discuss his new job arrangement. On September 1, Will announced he is pausing his commercial work to focus on his open source projects such as Rich, PyFilesystem, and Textual. He’s hoping to show that sponsorship can prove viable. We would like to use this webinar to round up some contributors.

Speaking To You

Will is a freelance software engineer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Will has worked with Python for more than 15 years, building web applications and cloud services. He is the author of Beginning Games Development with Python and Pygame, and has created a number of popular Python packages. In his spare time, Will enjoys photographing wildlife, from bears to komodo dragons.

I was just introduced to a tool called Delta which is a pager you can use with Git to give you Github-esque diffs.

Tiny bit of elisp to configure:

(use-package magit-delta
  :ensure t
  :hook (magit-mode . magit-delta-mode))

Delta itself is incredibly configurable and from the command line has some nice features such as side-by-side diffs.

Guest: Matthew Hoh. Hosts: Joanne Leon and Dan Wright. A wide ranging discussion about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the response to losing the war, the media coverage over the past 20 years and the bad actors we were allied with throughout the war but now upon leaving, the outrage and sudden concern for the Afghan people. Over the years, so many lies were told that the whole war seems like a big lie. We also talk about why the evacuation went so badly, the national security council, the British freak out and more. In a bonus segment we talk about the opium trade in Afghanistan and the Taliban pledge to shut it down.

Matthew Hoh is a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC and a member of the Eisenhower Network. He’s a disabled veteran, a former US Marine Corps officer and Department of Defense and State Department official. Matthew was in the Iraq War with the Marines and in both Afghanistan and Iraq with State Department teams. He is on the Boards and Advisory Boards of a number of organizations including Expose Facts, Institute for Public Accuracy and Veterans For Peace. He writes and speaks regularly on issues of war and peace, has appeared on numerous media networks and his work has been published by a wide array of online and print media

FOLLOW Matthew on Twitter @MatthewPHoh and Facebook. Find his recent writings at CounterPunch, antiwar.com and on his website https://matthewhoh.com

Around the Empire aroundtheempire.com is listener supported, independent media.

SUBSCRIBE/FOLLOW on Rokfin rokfin.com/aroundtheempire, Patreon patreon.com/aroundtheempire, Paypal paypal.me/aroundtheempirepod, YouTube youtube.com/aroundtheempire, Spotify, iTunes, iHeart, Google Podcasts

FOLLOW @aroundtheempire and @joanneleon and @DanSWright.  Join us on TELEGRAM https://t.me/AroundtheEmpire

Find everything on http://aroundtheempire.com  and linktr.ee/aroundtheempire

Recorded on August 26, 2021. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

1. What critics of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan get wrong, Matthew Hoh, CNN
2. “I Was Living Like Scarface”: The Ludicrous Costs of the War in Afghanistan Revealed in New Documents, Testimonies, MintPress News, Alan MacLeod
3. Around the Empire: Ep 154 Afghanistan Papers and the Culture of Lying feat Matthew Hoh

Over the years I've been a consistent[1] user of Thinkpads; early on because I liked the keyboards, but then later just because I wanted hardware that would last a long time rather than a machine with a soldered-in battery that's designed to be more disposable.

My most recent device was a Thinkpad X301 built in 2008 which I started using in 2016. While it's no speed demon, using Firefox with uBlock Origin configured to block 3rd-party scripts by default left it feeling quite usable for my purposes, and the physical design of the device was perfect. They used a rubberized coating for the chassis in the X301 that I haven't seen in any other model that feels really nice on the palm rest. Unfortunately while nearly every component of that machine has withstood the test of time, the battery has not. The original battery's charge is down to around 90 minutes, and while it's swappable, working new batteries in this form factor simply cannot be purchased for any amount of money. I bought from two separate vendors claiming to have original batteries, but both of them sold me a battery which ballooned up and became unusable after a month or two.

When I started to look for replacements I was dismayed. So many of the newer models had fallen into the Appleization trap—everything must be made as thin and as glossy as possible at the expense of every other concern. I don't want a thin laptop! I want a laptop where I can look at it and see what's displayed on the screen instead of my own face staring back at me. It seemed it was still possible to find a model with a replaceable battery, but even this basic feature was becoming increasingly rare.

A couple years ago I became aware of the MNT Reform laptop, and it seems like the perfect antidote to the mistakes the entire industry seems dead-set on repeating. It's a laptop that's focused on open design with schematics freely available and all parts easily serviceable by the end user. Finding this was like a breath of fresh air; it's like someone was finally listening to my frustrations.

The MNT Reform has been described as "the anti-macbook" which I think is fitting, but ironically I prefer to think of it as the Apple ][ of laptops (in a good way). If you're like me and you're fed up with thin laptops, you will be pleased to see that this machine is chonky. It has to be in order to have room for its three most unique features: a mechanical keyboard, a trackball, and a standardized 18650-cell battery bay. Originally the batteries were what caught my attention after all the trouble I'd had buying replacements for my Thinkpad, but when I saw the mechanical keyboard I knew I had to have one. (But also: can we talk for a second about the audacity of producing a laptop with a trackball? Much respect.)

Part of having an open design is having everything documented. While you can get the schematics for everything from the motherboard PCB to the 3D printed trackball buttons, the part that nearly everyone will benefit from is the excellent Operator Handbook which describes the usage of the system in detail.

Other than the thick size, perhaps the most eye-catching feature of the Reform is its transparent bottom plate, which is laser cut from acrylic. Similar to the open lid of the Apple ][, it invites you to take a look inside and reminds you that this machine isn't magic: it's wires and capacitors and screws and connectors. It's physical parts you can understand and control.

This machine isn't perfect though; there are trade-offs. The four ARM Cortex A53 cores in the CPU do not perform any out-of-order or speculative execution, which means they are not vulnerable to attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, but at the cost of speed. (I'm using it mostly for chat, email, and developing the Fennel compiler, and it's plenty fast for that.) The lid closes with a satisfying magnetic snap, but it doesn't have a lid sensor, so you'll have to turn off the screen yourself. The stock wifi antenna's range is quite limited. (But you can easily replace it!) Suspend is currently not super reliable, but there are ongoing efforts to improve that.

The keyboard is ... well, it's head-and-shoulders above any other laptop keyboard I've tried. Instead of a comically huge space bar, the bottom row is broken up into a reasonably-sized space bar plus several other useful keys. But it's still frustrating in a few ways. (Note that I'm a major keyboard nerd who has spent a lot of time getting my keyboard setup just right and I am far more picky about this kind of thing than most people!) While you can reprogram the keybord firmware to reassign keys with ease, the physical layout is very awkward. It has a conventional row-stagger which is not great but also not unusual. The problem is that in most row-staggered boards each row is offset from the one above it by 1.25 key widths or so, and on the Reform it's 1.5. Even 1.25 is too much (zero would be ideal), but 1.5 makes it so you have to contort your hand even more to hit keys on the "ZXCV" row.

Of course, it's a hackable laptop! Reprogramming the firmware to rearrange the keys can't fix problems with the physical arrangement, but I've built hundreds of keyboards by hand, so I planned to do design and construct one from scratch for my Reform when I got it. Unfortunately it's a little more complicated than I anticipated; the stock keyboard is integrated with the system controller which is involved with powering on the entire system and controls the OLED display containing the battery indicator, etc. I couldn't just adapt my existing design for a new form factor.

Luckily the folks at OLKB announced they were developing a kit for an improved keyboard with no row-staggering. I'd prefer an ergonomic design, but this is still a big improvement over the stock board, which is itself light years beyond anything I've ever used in a laptop before. I'm looking forward to building one out.

Overall I'm thrilled with this laptop. It's available both as a DIY set which needs some assembly (just screwing things together and plugging connectors; no soldering) and as a prebuilt laptop, but honestly if you're anywhere near the target market for the Reform, you're probably going to enjoy the assembly process and are best off skipping the pre-assembled option. In the end the Reform is a powerful antidote to the user-hostile trends which have prevailed in computing over the past decade or so, and if you're anything like me and you don't mind a little tinkering, I can't recommend it enough.

[1] Starting with a T60p in 2007 followed by an X61, then an X200s, and finally a X301. I took a brief detour with a Samsung ultrabook but the keyboard was so unpleasant that it didn't last long before I sold it.

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Jupyter notebooks are hard to diff and merge since they contain both code and output, but tools and practices can make version control easier.

The post Version control for Jupyter notebooks appeared first on wrighters.io.

“That was what the unity after 9/11 really concealed: who it was aimed against.”

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. And as usual, Obama’s apology-free drone strikes, the domestic racism, the enhanced government surveillance, and curtailed civil liberties will be downplayed, if not completely ignored.

“The longer this war on terror circumstance goes on,” says Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the new book Reign of Terror, “the more and more it's going to be indistinguishable from domestic American politics. And the more the tools of the war on terror are going to be used against Americans.”

Will the corporate media outlets discuss liberal complacency and hawkishness in their 20-year-anniversary-paloozas? Will they discuss the fear felt by Americans who were racially profiled not just by other citizens, but by the FBI?

Ackerman, whose book lays out how Trump capitalized on the disguised racism in the violent policies of the Obama and Bush admins, worries they won’t.

So listen here for the darker side of American unity, and read Spencer’s Substack “Forever Wars” here.

Plus, Texas Republicans try to strip our rights away with their restrictive abortion and voting laws, and new Useful Idiots hero Charles Jaco mocks right-wing teabaggers.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out now.

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Thomas Hobbes is best known as author of Leviathan which is usually read today for its theory of political authority. Here Arash Abizadeh discusses Hobbes' ethics, the theory of what we are and what are obligations are to each.

After 9/11, the US government jumped into war in Afghanistan, giving shells of reasons for their aggression. But at least they still gave reasons.

However, after Bin Laden was killed in 2011, even the illusion of a reason for this war was gone. It’s been time to come home for a while.

In an April interview with Matt, Adrian Bonenberger, author and veteran, predicted that Biden would execute the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And like Biden, he didn’t expect the immediate collapse in the region.

But still, says Bonenberger, Biden made the right decision. This was a pointless effort wasting time, money, and lives, and after two tours of duty and much reporting in the area, it became clear to him that US presence was doing nothing productive.

Ok, so it’s time to leave. But why is it going so poorly?

This, he continues, is more of a problem with the State Department than with Biden: “The system is not set up to get people from Afghanistan or Russia or Mexico or China to America. There needs to be some type of capability that we can switch on, some emergency act.”

And without that, this extraction was doomed. But Bonenberger, and your Useful Idiots, believe it’s a necessary move.

So hear us say it today, because who knows when we’ll say it again: “Good job, Joe.”

Plus, we don’t forget Biden’s terrible side in his nomination of Rahm Emanuel, we watch Newsmax’s racist coverage of “Afghani” men, and we side with the woman who’s deep in an affair with a chimp.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

To buy Adrian’s new book The Disappointed Soldier, call or email here.

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Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley Law explains the California recall procedure and argues that the rules of the recall violate constitutional principles, making the September 14 Recall election unconstitutional. This is an incredibly consequential election, and a lawsuit has been filed compelling the Courts to intervene and either prohibit the election or change the rules to allow Governor Newsom’s name to appear on the replacement candidate list. Chemerinsky argues that because the procedures specified by the California Constitution violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the recall should be stopped now. Otherwise voters risk allowing a candidate preferred by a small minority of Californians to be the next governor.

Anthropologists Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale did fieldwork in Afghanistan and have just published "Afghanistan: the End of the Occupation." The 20 year intervention ended in defeat for the US: 2448 American soldiers, 4000 US contractors and somewhere between 48,000 and 100,000 Afghans were killed. Many more were wounded, and one trillion dollars was spent on the war. Nancy and Jonathan help us understand the evolution of the Taliban from 2001 to 2021, unraveling stereotypes and confusion about the nature of the population’s support for them. They explain that support is the wrong word – Afghans had to choose sides and they chose the Taliban rather than the cruel and corrupt American occupiers, because the Taliban are the only force fighting the American occupation. We also ask about the challenges ahead for Afghans, especially women, the Hazara and other ethnicities, as well as the looming refugee crisis.

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Nitrogen use efficiency, an indicator that describes how much fertilizer reaches a harvested crop, has decreased by 22% since 1961, according to new findings by an international group of researchers who compared and averaged global data sets.“If we don’t deal with our nitrogen challenge, then dealing with pretty much any other environmental or human health challenge becomes significantly harder.”

Excess nitrogen from fertilizer and manure pollutes water and air, eats away ozone in the atmosphere, and harms plants and animals. Excess nitrogen can also react to become nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Significant disagreements remain about the exact value of nitrogen use efficiency, but current estimates are used by governments and in international negotiations to regulate agricultural pollution.

“If we don’t deal with our nitrogen challenge, then dealing with pretty much any other environmental or human health challenge becomes significantly harder,” David Kanter, an environmental scientist at New York University and vice-chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, told New Scientist in May. Sri Lanka and the United Nations Environment Programme called for countries to halve nitrogen waste by 2030 in the Colombo Declaration.

Whereas the global average shows a decline, nitrogen fertilizing has become more efficient in developed economies thanks to technologies and regulations, and new results out last month from the University of Minnesota as well as field trials by the International Fertilizer Development Center are just two examples of ongoing research to limit nitrogen pollution without jeopardizing yield.

Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plant growth: It is a vital aspect of amino acids for proteins, chlorophyll for photosynthesis, DNA, and adenosine triphosphate, a compound that releases energy.

Chemist Fritz Haber invented an industrial process to create nitrogen fertilizer in 1918, and the practice spread. Since the 1960s, nitrogen inputs on crops have quadrupled. In 2008, food production from nitrogen fed half the world’s population.

“One of the things that is evident in nitrogen management, generally, is that there seems to be a tendency to avoid the risk of too low an application rate.”Yet nitrogen applied to crops often ends up elsewhere. Fertilizer placed away from a plant’s roots means that some nitrogen gets washed away or converts into a gas before the plant can use it. Fertilizer applied at an inopportune moment in a plant’s growth cycle goes to waste. At a certain point, adding more fertilizer won’t boost yield: There’s a limit to how much a plant can produce based on nitrogen alone.

“One of the things that is evident in nitrogen management, generally, is that there seems to be a tendency to avoid the risk of too low an application rate,” said Tony Vyn, an agronomist at Purdue University.

In many parts of the world, cheap subsidized fertilizer is critical for producing enough food. But gone unchecked, subsidies incentivize farmers to apply more than they need. And according to plant scientist Rajiv Khosla at Colorado State University, who studies precision agriculture, farmers struggle to apply just the right amount of fertilizer probably 90% of the time.

According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July.

Globally, nitrogen use efficiency is 46%, but the ratio should be much closer to 100%, said environmental scientist Xin Zhang at the University of Maryland, who led the latest study. The crops with the lowest nitrogen efficiency are fruits and vegetables, at around 14%, said Zhang. In contrast, soybeans, which are natural nitrogen fixers, have a high efficiency of 80%.

The European Union Nitrogen Expert Panel recommended a nitrogen use efficiency of around 90% as an upper limit. The EU has reduced nitrogen waste over the past several decades, though progress has stagnated.

The United States has similarly cut losses by improving management and technology. For instance, even though the amount of nitrogen fertilizer per acre applied to cornfields was stable from 1980 to 2010 in the United States, the average crop grain yields increased by 60% in that period, said Vyn. Those gains can be hidden in broad-stroke indices like global nitrogen use efficiency.

“The most urgent places will be in China and India because they are two of the top five fertilizer users around the world,” Zhang said. China set a target for a zero increase in fertilizer use in 2015, which showed promising early results.

New research from the University of Minnesota using machine learning–based metamodels suggested that fertilizer amount can be decreased without hurting the bottom line.Just a 10% decrease in nitrogen fertilizer led to only a 0.6% yield reduction.

Just a 10% decrease in nitrogen fertilizer led to only a 0.6% yield reduction and cut nitrous oxide emissions and nitrogen leaching. “Our analysis revealed hot spots where excessive nitrogen fertilizer can be cut without yield penalty,” said bioproducts and biosystems engineer Zhenong Jin at the University of Minnesota.

Applying fertilizer right at the source could help too: A technique developed by the International Fertilizer Development Center achieved an efficiency as high as 80% in field studies around the world using urea deep placement. The method buries cheap nitrogen fertilizer into the soil, which feeds nitrogen directly into a plant and reduces losses.

Many other initiatives and technologies, from giving farmers better data to nitrogen-fixing bacteria, also show promise. Even practices as simple as installing roadside ditches can help.

Meanwhile, Vyn said researchers must focus on sharpening scientific tools to measure nitrogen capture. The differences in nitrogen inputs in the databases analyzed by the latest study were as high as 33% between the median values and the outliers.

“The nitrogen surplus story is sometimes too easily captured in a simple argument of nitrogen in and nitrogen off the field,” Vyn said. “It’s more complex.” His research aims to improve nitrogen recovery efficiency by understanding plant genotypes and management factors.

One of Zhang’s next research steps is to refine the quantification of nitrogen levels in a crop, which is currently based on simplistic measurements. “There has been some scattered evidence that as we’re increasing the yield, the nitrogen content is actually declining. And that also has a lot of implications in terms of our calculated efficiency,” Zhang said.

—Jenessa Duncombe (@jrdscience), Staff Writer

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How Israel lobby tried to manufacture a wave of anti-Semitism.

This week, Grace speaks with Ashok Kumar, senior lecturer of political economy at Birkbeck and author of Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age.

They discuss how global value chains have been reshaped under monopsony capitalism, how these changes have affected the power of workers all over the world, and how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact these trends.

You can support our work on the show by becoming a Patron. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.

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Democracy Now! 2021-08-20 Friday

• Headlines for August 20, 2021
• Spencer Ackerman: Today's Crisis in Kabul Is Direct Result of Decades of U.S. War & Destabilization
• Spencer Ackerman on How the U.S. War on Terror Fueled and Excused Right-Wing Extremism at Home

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