rachelstrohm.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

the good folks at @haymarketbooks.org are releasing a paperback version of Reconsidering Reparations, April 1st, with a beautiful new cover courtesy of Steve Leard. some dismal parts of the latter chapters have aged unfortunately well - but look forward to discussions about it in today's context

submitted 13 hours ago • 9 comments

TLDR: The paper I'm teaching tomorrow finds that the shadow of enslavement is SO LONG that there's NO level of saving, education, capital gains, wealth tax, or income redistribution that closes the racial wealth gap. Only one thing closes the gap: REPARATIONS. academic.oup.com/qje/article-...

submitted 1 day ago • 12 comments

🌍 "The series 'African Revolutions and Decolonization' on the Guerrilla History podcast ... combines case studies of revolutionary struggles as well as thematic and theoretical explorations of political and economic processes across the continent" roape.net/2025/01/15/a...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

🇰🇪 "Lured into a meeting at an apartment block in the upscale Riverside suburb in Nairobi [in November 2024], Dr Besigye was put into a car by Ugandan intelligence forces and driven to the Busia border and taken into military custody." www.theelephant.info/analysis/202...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Everyone should read Stephanie Nolen's list of shame: some of the confirmed 5,809 USAID contracts canceled to see the sheer scope of suffering caused by cruel policy changes. U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/h...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Breaking: Hours after Elon Musk reassured Cabinet that efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in Uganda had only been “accidentally canceled very briefly,” the Trump administration terminated at least four of the five contracts for Ebola-related work in that country. nyti.ms/4ikHi1Q

submitted 4 days ago • 35 comments

Show Workshops4Sudan some love!!! Sign up and donate immediately to their first two incredible-sounding workshops that support people and orgs doing life-saving work on the ground in Sudan ❤️❤️❤️

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

This is one of the many reasons we need universal healthcare (and universal social safety net programs more generally). When access to support is means-tested, that support becomes stigmatized. And that stigma reinforces the idea that only some people are deserving of dignity.

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

This is a longshot, but does anyone know where I can access Hansards from Zimbabwe, Namibia, or Botswana for March-December of 2020?

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

"Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature, but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent." Enter the Cybourgeoisie Era slate.com/technology/2...

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

Elon Musk said DOGE made a mistake by cutting USAID’s Ebola prevention but it had been “restored.” That’s not true, current and former officials told me and @johnphudson.bsky.social. “There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’” Ebola prevention, said Nidhi Bouri, who oversaw team until January.

submitted 5 days ago • 253 comments

A lot of Americans don't actually care much about policy, because they don't trust government to solve their problems. Instead, they just want someone to blame when they're struggling. And the GOP gives them scapegoats in spades.

submitted 8 days ago • 4 comments

open.substack.com/pub/thisweek...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Prior to the passage of the Social Security Act, 85% of elderly Americans had no pension. Fifty-percent died in poverty. Without Social Security, the Center on Budget and policy Priorities estimates 40% of all elderly Americans would die in poverty.

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

good morning from this food not bombs south philly ig caption i like “the things you do together will change you both”

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

nysfocus.com/2025/02/22/p...

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

"[W]hat is happening is an attempt to destroy all the pipelines for Black influence and advancement at the federal level, the corporate level, and at the academic level, so that a Black leader will never rise to rule white people ever again, whether it's in the workplace or the White House." 👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿

submitted 9 days ago • 3 comments

Parents in Kenya whose children are believed to have tuberculosis cannot get them tested. There is no clean drinking water in camps in Nigeria or Bangladesh for people who fled civil conflict. A therapeutic food program cannot treat acutely malnourished children in South Sudan.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

🇬🇭 Some very good news from #Ghana: visa free travel for all African passport holders! www.theafricareport.com/372886/ghana...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

🇬🇭 This was an interesting set of reflections on the broken process of business formalisation in #Ghana via the lens of the "point and kill" catfish industry brightsimons.com/2025/01/poin...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Feel like you know nothing about Sudan? I sat down with the team at Prospect Magazine to talk about the conflict, and why it’s NOT a forgotten war, but an invisibilised one: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/pro...

submitted 12 days ago • 7 comments

"Affordable housing — which typically involves giving tax breaks to real estate developers — isn’t working so well." As @leftiecowboy.bsky.social explains, social housing offers a permanently affordable solution for working people.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Good news story of the day.

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Not to detract in any way from the appalling situation occurring now, but the San Vicente camp has been around for a number of years. Here’s a photo of Mayorkas in Panama in 2022 looking at a model of it after getting a tour. It’s the main processing station after migrants leave the Darién Gap.

submitted 12 days ago • 6 comments

This is a concentration camp. They are describing a concentration camp.

submitted 12 days ago • 501 comments

Is the #socialprotection system in #Kenya well-designed to respond to conflict? Key finding from a recent paper: "Conflict is treated as a discrete shock, rather than the chronic condition that has long characterised parts of the north in particular." opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/rep...

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

@thecontinent.org is doing such great work these days. Really just an essential outlet, kudos to them continent.substack.com/p/green-gems...

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

The Rift Valley Institute annual courses on the Great Lakes, Horn of Africa, and Sahel are now accepting applications! Highly recommended for anyone hoping to build or deepen expertise in the region. riftvalley.net/courses/grea...

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

In the DRC, M23 has entered Bukavu. Really changes the game in terms of their territorial control www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/news/eas...

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

Very timely research from Siri Gloppen & Lise Rakner on the courts as venues of resistance to autocratic rule in Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

Is anyone even denying that this is genocide / ethnic cleansing anymore?

submitted 15 days ago • 28 comments

a lot america's problems come back to the basic fact that we 1) have barely had united government for the last 30 years and 2) it has been basically impossible to pass normal legislation for the last 20

submitted 16 days ago • 28 comments

when people argue for giving in to fascism it's generally because they find fascism appealing. 1

submitted 16 days ago • 10 comments

truthout.org/articles/rub...

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

I'll also post this piece by Val Bunce and Sharon Wolchik The TL;DR is that it takes years of investment in mobilization (messaging isn't nearly enough!) by the opposition to overcome competitive authoritarianism. The Democratic Party needs to get a move on it. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state... This is by far the best, clearest and most realistic analysis of what we're in for that I've seen.

submitted 20 days ago • 52 comments

At this point I genuinely don't think it's hyperbole to say that Elon Musk is functionally in charge of the US government. Perhaps not in specific policy areas - two bills or one on the hill, policy in the mideast. But certainly functional control of the state apparatus.

submitted 20 days ago • 141 comments

We think of ruins as ancient, but the ruins of the welfare state in Egypt and Sudan are both more recent and more ubiquitous. Great special issue from one of my favorite journals. journals.openedition.org/esma/3297

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

in what meaningful way can we say that the constitution is in effect when an unelected and unaccountable billionaire is wielding state power to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations?

submitted 21 days ago • 490 comments

"police defund everything else" really is the status quo ante here & everywhere in the USA

submitted 21 days ago • 3 comments

Migrants being sent to Gitmo are not being provide access to legal counsel, something which even alleged Al Qaeda member have been granted www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

submitted 23 days ago • 35 comments

For decades, the right has been obsessed with apartheid South Africa as a way to mourn the end of formal segregation in the US. With neo-segregationists now in power, it’s no wonder they’re opening the doors to white South Africans, using racist conspiracy theories to justify their actions.

submitted 24 days ago • 19 comments

Canceling govt affinity groups. Running govt HR from the White House. Emailing employees directly. Installing yourself as arts chairman. All of these things are consistent with removing intermediaries between the party and the individual, limiting expression outside the govt ideology. 1930s vibes.

submitted 24 days ago • 11 comments