The world’s chocolate economy is built on an uncomfortable neocolonial paradox: Africa produces most of the cocoa beans, but the Global North captures most of the value through processing, branding, marketing, and retail gatekeeping. This is a classic case of neocolonial extraction from the Global South. Let’s start with the core fact that rarely makes it into “ethical chocolate” campaigns: cocoa is overwhelmingly an African commodity. Cacao is a non-native colonial crop that was introduced to Africa by European empires in the 19th century.
On this episode of After America, Elizabeth Pancotti from Washington DC-based think tank Groundwork Collaborative joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the State of the Union, Trump’s vile attack on Somali-Americans, and how tariffs are driving up prices in a deeply unequal American economy.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 27 February.
While the official White House X account posts video montages featuring video games and Hollywood movies spliced with real footage of their attacks on Iran, the situation on the ground could not be more different than an American propaganda blockbuster.
To pierce the fog of war and offer a concrete analysis of what is taking place across the Middle East, author and former British diplomat Alastair Crooke of the Substack Conflicts Forum joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
In 1989, terrorist rabbi Meir Kahane made a promise.
“A horrible world war is coming,” Kahane told journalist Robert I. Friedman. “Tens of millions will die. It will be the Apocalypse. God will punish us for forsaking him. But we must have faith. The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead: all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated. The amount of suffering we endure will depend upon what we do between now and the end.”
Kahane did not live to see his vision realized. In 1990, the year Friedman published The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, the 58-year-old Kahane was shot to death while giving a speech imploring American Jews to move to Israel. The alleged assailant, Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair, was acquitted by a jury but sentenced by the judge. In death as in life, the circumstances surrounding Kahane are murky and violent.
Friedman had an eye for figures of the 20th century who would define the 21st. Ten years after The False Prophet, he published Red Mafiya: his investigation of a transnational crime syndicate whose members came from the USSR and spent the 1990s infiltrating governments and corporations worldwide. The head of that syndicate, Semyon Mogilevich, put a contract on Friedman’s life.
The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.
The story has been told so many times in conservative circles that retelling it risks being a bore: William F. Buckley warned us in 1951 about the free fall that had already begun in higher education. Allan Bloom sounded the alarm in 1987. Ross Douthat offered his critique in 2005. A generation of conservatives has poured time, treasure, and talent into reforming higher ed. We’ve funded centers, endowed chairs, launched institutes, filed lawsuits, and written enough op-eds to fill the Library of Alexandria. Yet still—still—the average graduate of an American university is more likely to be able to explain the nuances of “systemic oppression” than to tell you who wrote The FederalistPapers.
That should be a sign that the old approach, whatever its merits, was fundamentally wrong—not because the diagnosis was wrong, but because the strategy was. As Aristotle says, we should deliberate about means, not ends. Conservatives have been trying to reform the university from within a system that is designed, at every level, to resist exactly the kind of reformation we seek. It is time to stop playing a rigged game and build our own system.
It began with the bombing of a school in southern Iran. According to Iranian authorities, the death toll from that strike now sits at 168. Many of the victims were children.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump have normalised the sight of little coffins.
Emerging evidence now suggests the school was struck more than once – perhaps three times. A “double-tap” strike is when a first strike is followed up by a second in order to target those still sheltering, those running away, and first responders. Double-tap strikes are prohibited by the laws of war.
Wilhelm Röpke once observed, in a sentence that ought to unsettle every free market romanticist in our time, that the market economy “presupposes and requires a moral and social framework which it cannot itself create.” This line is often quoted as a caveat to free enterprise, but it is more properly read as its foundation. Markets are not self-sustaining organisms, nor do they generate the conditions that make them legitimate. They depend upon a prior architecture of norms, institutions, and habits that provide coherence and legitimacy.
In our republic, one of the most concrete expressions of that framework is homeownership.
Röpke’s defense of markets was inseparable from his insistence on the diffusion of property. He did not associate capitalism with mass consumption or asset appreciation. He equated it with rooted ownership, with households that possess something tangible, something inherited and stewarded. Without that diffusion, he feared the slow advance of what he called “proletarianization”: the condition of citizens who participate in markets, yet own nothing substantial.
“The proletarian,” Röpke wrote in The Social Crisis of Our Time, “is the man who has no property…who is without roots.” His concern was the gradual transformation of citizens into rootless wage earners whose livelihoods depend upon systems too vast to influence and too distant to anchor them.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Skye discuss the economic impact of the illegal US-Israel war on Iran, the latest Australian GDP data, and why the Reserve Bank seems to want more Australians to be unemployed.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 5 March 2026.
In a special episode of The Chris Hedges Report live from Rome, Italy, Palestinian Emmy-nominated journalist, producer, and actor Ahmed Eldin joins host Chris Hedges following their involvement in the dockworkers strike and large demonstrations to halt arms shipments to Israel.
Eldin, who has worked in journalism for almost 20 years, explains how crucial storytelling is in a time where Palestinian voices are being killed off in Gaza and silenced elsewhere. “It’s a betrayal of our profession. It’s a betrayal of our human values,” Eldin says of the methods in which mainstream outlets attempt to obscure the realities on the ground of Palestine now and throughout history.
I’ve spent thirty years worried that our media environment would either create a civil war or a fascist overthrow of democracy. In the midst of the pro-Iraq invasion demagoguery I was researching pro-slavery demagoguery, and I realized in both cases, the problem wasn’t demagogues. The problem was a culture of demagoguery.
At first glance, it seems that the Western establishment should welcome Operation Epic Fury. As Joshua Lisec and I document in our upcoming book, Unelected, the entire post-World War II order has been built on the premise that global security depends on the spread of democracy (or the downfall of tyrants at the very least). As United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a 2001 speech, there is “a need for more democracy on the global level, which is what the United Nations has been about from the very beginning.”
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
On this episode of Follow the Money, author and economist Gary Stevenson joins Ebony Bennett to discuss wealth inequality, the global issue of housing unaffordability, why Australia should tax gas properly, and how many far-right parties have become the Steven Bradburys of global politics.
This episode was recorded on Thursday 26 February.
While many of us are currently monitoring the situation in the Iranian fog of war, other pressing questions at home remain. What sort of victory against foreign enemies will we have if we end up losing our country to internal threats?
I am speaking, of course, of the migration crisis, which has thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt. After decades of treating citizenship like some ethereal idea, theoretically extendable to anyone who wants it, Americans have finally woken up to the fact that citizenship must be more than a piece of paper. New questions, as well as new battle lines, have emerged not only around illegal and legal immigration—but even the idea of birthright citizenship is now up for legal reexamination.
It’s against this larger background, then, that we should view Trump v. Barbara, a case the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing on April 1. At stake is whether our laws permit Americans to have a country or not. The Court will hear the government defend the proposition that birthright citizenship does not include children born to parents who are “unlawfully present,” or who have only “temporary” status. Such conditions on citizenship are very common among many nations, including numerous historically Christian nations.
Harvard Law School Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law Christine Desan, University of New Hampshire Professor Michael Swack, Don Morgan, President and CEO of the Bank of North Ontario
Our rights are not guaranteed. They are protected by laws — and laws can be weakened if politicians rollback our rights. In recent years, politicians have attempted to dilute or replace the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998. Conservative governments weakened and removed parts of the Equality Act, left key duties uncommenced, […]
The Mellon Foundation and its peers have recently come under sustained attack for their role in radicalizing higher education. Headlines like “Mellon Foundation Awards Morgan State University $500,000 Grant to Cultivate the Next Generation of Black, LGBTQ+ Scholar-Activists” are now a dime a dozen. Notable contributors to this wave of critiques include Tao Tan, who put together data-driven analysis for the American Enterprise Institute on the effect of grants from private foundations, and Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote a withering profile of the Mellon Foundation for The Atlantic. These and other writers provide chapter and verse on how the financial incentives provided by Mellon and its lesser brethren have transformed America’s humanities and social science professors into leftist activists.
To revive higher education, tradition-minded philanthropists must play an essential role in reforming what radical philanthropists have tried their best to wreck. They should not attempt to create counter-Mellons, but instead provide professors with financial incentives to move away from radical activism. Mellon’s task was to radicalize a liberal establishment willing to be radicalized. Because it worked with the philosophical grain of the academy, its task was easier than what tradition-minded education reformers currently face.
If you drink beer, congratulations, you’re the backbone of the Australian economy! After all, that’s how politicians and the media describe the gas industry. But the truth is the federal government collects more money from the beer excise than from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax, as Independent ACT Senator David Pocock pointed out in Parliament, in an exchange that went viral.
When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked why Australian beer drinkers pay more tax than gas export companies, the PM dodged the issue by accusing Senator Pocock of “promot[ing] grievance”.
If, like most Australians, you think Australia shouldn’t be giving away its gas for free, or that the gas industry should contribute more from its super profits tax than the beer excise, the Prime Minister seems to think you should stop whingeing about it. The real question is – why isn’t the Prime Minister aggrieved by this gas rip-off?
This past weekend, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, a coordinated campaign with Israel that sent a wave of airstrikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran, targeting its military and infrastructure after decades of refusing to halt its nuclear program. In this effort to break the spine of a regime that has ruled through terror at home and violence abroad for nearly 50 years, a significant number of the regime’s top political and military leaders were killed, including the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It matters that the ayatollah did not simply expire naturally but was taken out by the United States. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s evil project of repression is well known across the West, along with its killing of Americans and regular chants of “death to America.” For decades, it has brutally crushed its own citizens and wreaked havoc worldwide through its proxies while Western countermeasures were marginally effective at best and enabled these actions at worst.
On this episode of After America, Allan Behm and Dr Emma Shortis discuss the US-Israeli attacks on Iran and the assassination of its leader, Trump and Netanyahu’s cynical messages for the Iranian people, what this war means for nuclear proliferation, and the Australian government’s “deeply disappointing” response.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 2 March 2026.
In Quarterly Essay 100, Sean Kelly considers the enigma of the Albanese government. With wide yet shallow support, will it change the country? Does it have big ideas, or is it content just to become “the natural party of government”? Kelly gives a definitive account of Albanese’s political style and asks what lies behind it. In speaking to a fragmented, disengaged electorate, the Prime Minister places a high value on moderation. Often that means ducking fights with entrenched interests. But this runs the risk of embedding an ever more unequal nation, led by a government that can seem gutless. In this subtle and brilliant essay, Kelly explores whether Labor is still up for the good fight.
Sean joined Per Capita at our February 2026 John Cain Lunch. Watch the recording below.
The Trump II administration’s trade wars and framing of the dollar’s reserve status have accelerated concerns about the sustainability of the current monetary and trade system. Against a backdrop of various disintegrative tendencies, our new book Deweaponizing Interdependence: Bringing the Idea of International Clearing Union into the Twenty-First Century (available open access) reintroduces the concept of an International Clearing Union (ICU) and offers an important overview of critical approaches to the prevailing monetary system.
Because this is a blog post, not a law review article, I’ve refrained from formally footnoting it. At the end of the post there is an "Appendix", for those seeking further discussion of and citations to relevant judicial materials.
In New Mexico and the United States more generally, we the people are guaranteed rights to assemble and to express our views, free from government restraint. On March 28, when millions of people across the country will participate in No Kings events, they will live these rights. The medium will be a significant measure of the message: in America no government official may violate people’s civil rights, including their rights to assemble and express their views about democracy, rule of law, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Kenneth Rogoff Is (almost) right about the importance of inflation -but entirely wrong about its management Susan Borden America’s debt problem is not what Foreign…
A post-Keynesian discussion of US economic hegemony: resilience or decline? (Part 2) Alan Prout In Part 1 we listed some long-term factors that contribute to…
The recent interest rate hike to address inflation drifting above the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) target band has reignited debate about the Albanese Government’s economic management. Critics argue excessive government spending and the RBA’s initially slow response are to blame for rising prices and slower economic growth, despite the International Monetary Fund noting Australia is successfully managing a “soft” landing. New Liberal Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has blamed increased government spending for inflation, stating there is ‘no ambiguity’ that the Coalition’s solution would be to cut spending growth and the public service by at least 36,000.
But what if the RBA had lifted interest rates far more aggressively and what if the Albanese Government had implemented deep spending cuts as some commentators and the Coalition advocate?
Wealth taxes don’t go far enough: Let’s transform our economy with public money Sheridan Kates Wealth taxes are crucial to build an economy that works for…
Empathy, morality, civilisation and resisting tyrants Geoff Davies Are we just selfish brutes who need to be civilised into social, moral behaviour? If not, where…
