US radicals came up a century ago with sound proposals for a maximum income, enforced through progressive taxation, to ensure that the rich couldn’t so easily buy political influence, as well as to adjust inequality | by Sam Pizzigati | Le Monde diplomatique

If the state can expropriate wealth, why not rather expropriate the means of wealth production and place them under public ownership with workers’ control? The distribution of wealth is ultimately the result of the distribution of the ownership of social production. The wealthy are rich due to their ownership of capital; therefore abolish private property in the commanding heights of the economy.

By John Riddell interviews Felipe Stuart Cournoyer | Axis of Logic

Arizona’s suppression of Mexican American studies fits a pattern of making history serve an exclusionary nationalist mythology | Gary Younge | The Guardian

An Interview with Doug Henwood | by Sasha Lilley | MR Zine

By Conn Hallinan | Foreign Policy in Focus | “Why is the New York Times concealing the key role that the United States played in the 1965 coup in Indonesia that ended up killing somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people?”

by Gabriel Kolko | Counterpunch | “At no time has the U.S. based its foreign policies on facts — as opposed to its conceptions reliant on sheer wishes, interests, or pretensions, (its ambitions are often a mixture of all of these). Nor has it had fears that are warranted by reality. It has needs, whether economic or geopolitical.”

Links | “This work will help put to bed the lies and distortions propagated by the powerful United States (US) propaganda machine: that the Cuban Revolution is undemocratic, homophobic and tyrannical. My visit to and study of Cuba finds that there is no basis to these claims.”

The Independent | Many Turks believe their country should own up to its history, however inglorious

Editorial by Mike Davis | New Left Review | Will a deepening economic crisis, now engulfing much of the world, necessarily speed a global renewal of the Left?

The Czech leader was a brave man, but the voices of those who lost out after communism’s demise are seldom heard | Neil Clark | The Guardian

“Lauding Havel is not only doing a disservice to the millions of ordinary people in eastern Europe who have not been served well by his politics, but to the innocent men, women and children killed by the western military adventures he supported. While Havel was a man of undoubted talent and intellect, it’s time we stopped eulogising people simply because they were anti-communist dissidents, and instead look at the bigger picture.”

CBC.ca | Failed colonial policies plague First Nations to this day and are the biggest obstacle to progress, National Chief Shawn Atleo said Tuesday as he called for a “reset” of their relationship with the federal government.

A Short History of Elite Responses To Political-Economic Crisis | By Alan Nasser | CounterPunch

By Anthony Dimaggio | Znet | The blatant hypocrisy of “democratic intervention” in Libya, coupled with U.S. support for brutal dictatorships throughout the rest of the world, is generally not considered a legitimate issue of discussion in U.S. political culture.

By Rick Salutin | Rabble.ca | The old Progressive Conservatives shared the zeitgeist of an earlier time. It involved a sense of the usefulness of government and the importance of some kind of social solidarity.

By Pepe Escobar | Escobar’s analyses are always pertinent.

Social-democracy promised an ever-better future for future generations, a sort of permanent rising level of national and family incomes. This was called the welfare state. It was an ideology that reflected the view that capitalism could be “reformed” and acquire a more human face. | An op-ed by Immanuel Wallerstein

America’s rise to economic and military supremacy was fueled in no small measure by its control over the world’s supply of oil.

Noam Chomsky: Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux | Boston Review

By Noam Chomsky | In These Times | The succession of horrors across the past decade leads to the question: Was there an alternative to the West’s response to the 9/11 attacks?

An RT interview.

July 28th, 2011 | by William Blum | www.killinghope.org

140 years on, we can see that although the Paris Commune was short-lived, it was a trailblazer for modern society | Agnès Poirier | The Guardian
From the MIA: The Civil War in France, a work about the Paris Commune by Karl Marx