Green_Cycles

interplanetary revolutionary social activism because the sleep of reason produces monsters.

[Yvonne Kagondu @kagondu_yvonne]

My ex @DavidHundeyin made an East African documentary that I think every East African should watch simply because it's brilliant!

https://t.co/K6BbbsTWq5

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Grieve Chelwa @gchelwa]

*** NEW BOOK ALERT ***

Dear Friends, I am happy to share the cover of my forthcoming book co-written with the great and indefatigable @vijayprashad!!!

The book will be available later this month from @inkanibooks, the amazing independent Pan-African Press.

[Green_Cycles @Green_Cycles]

@DerekPLSA2018 @DanNeidle Capital flight to where ?

[The Spearhead @Spearhead_Af]

There Was Nothing Democratic About The Colonial System – Chinua Achebe

In this interview with American journalist Bill Moyers (1934 – 2025), aired on September 29, 1988, renowned Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013) aptly exposes a clear contradiction between the West’s criticisms of the state of democracy in Africa, and the notably undemocratic colonial system with which it ruled over the continent with an iron fist for over 400 years.

Achebe’s words remain relevant today, as the West continues to endlessly lecture Africans about “democracy” and “human rights”, while trampling on the human rights of its own citizens, and funding g*nocidal regimes across the globe.

[Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui @sabreenaGS]

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed white people from Ukraine were celebrated for making home-made Molotov cocktails to defend their land, but the brown Arab Muslim, the Iranian, the Afghan, is far too “uncivilised” to have the right to resist. Their resistance is “barbaric” because it comes from an inherently “violent” culture.

The selective application of international law and one’s right to defend themselves from illegal occupation and colonial violence has been revealed to be a complete contradiction in the west, and is no doubt infuriating.

But we need to also understand how these “resistance” narratives are processed in communities.

These narratives do not stay on our screens. They shape how entire communities see themselves.
When Indigenous, Black, and other racialised peoples repeatedly see their histories, struggles, cultures, and resistance framed as dangerous, irrational, or inherently violent, many begin to internalise those messages.

Some distance themselves from their own identities in search of safety, acceptance, or legitimacy.

Others carry a deep, unspoken rage born from exclusion, dispossession, and the constant demand to prove their humanity.

When people are disconnected from their roots, denied dignity, and taught to be ashamed of where they come from, they will still search for belonging. It’s a basic human need to feel a sense of community.

The question is whether we create spaces that nurture healing, identity, and justice, or leave them vulnerable to finding belonging in places that exploit their pain.

[Mariana Mazzucato @MazzucatoM]

The concept of public goods is not a theory of good. It is a theory of what the private sector is not doing. That is a negative, corrective framework — and it is why we keep filling gaps instead of shaping outcomes.
Spoke with @Peston and @StephMcGovern for @RestIsMoney about my new book, The Common Good Economy: a new compass. Link below.

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

This Hollywood actor is pretending that the United States was a self-correcting saint before Donald Trump came along.

As if it didn’t unleash Agent Orange in Vietnam and carpet-bombed Cambodia. Or that it didn’t supply Iraq with chemical weapons to use against Iran and then invade Iraq immediately after, just before bombing Libya, resulting in the migrant crisis destabilising Africa, West Asia and Europe. And there’s also that whole thing where they tested the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to see what would happen.

Trump was not there when they created AFRICOM to brew Forever Wars in Africa to keep resource-rich countries unstable. Or when they let Wall Street loose to cause financial crisis after financial crisis.

Even at home, the US put its own citizens in internment camps because they were Asian in 1942 and did the Tuskegee and Holmesburg Prison experiments because they were Black. And their Constitution still says slavery is legal if they can make it work, and so they make it work. There’s of course the time they dropped a bomb on an apartment building in 1985 against a Black liberation group advocating for racial and environmental justice.

Yet Richard Gere wants to present Trump as a fall from grace rather than a continuation of long- running patterns. He conveniently uses Trump’s emergence to paper over the reality that US foreign and domestic policy has been a “dictatorship of the monsters” in different forms for generations.

[Green_Cycles @Green_Cycles]

@DAaronovitch @NafeezAhmed Examples of two tier policing include Farage and Robinson not being investigated for incitement to racial hatred whilst the killers of Stephen Lawrence walk freely. Meanwhile, black men are subjected to excessive surveillance. Disparities abound.

[Politics Theory Other @poltheoryother]

The policies contained in the 2010 manifesto of the British National Party - once considered fringe and extreme - have now been mainstreamed by both Reform and the traditional British establishment argues @trillingual:

[Green_Cycles @Green_Cycles]

@Dplanet Two tier policing is The police not arresting Farage or Robinson for incitement to racial hatred whilst black lives are disproportionately affective by excessive surveillance. Steph Lawrence’s killers still walk free 30 years later.

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

Economist Mariana Mazzucato says Brexit led to businesses leaving the UK, shrank market opportunities and damaged investment.

She tells The Fourcast that Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have still not been held accountable for what she calls one of the country's biggest economic mistakes.

Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have both denied lying to the public.

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🦄🦄🦄 Brexiteers promised Brexit would deliver greater sovereignty and economic revival 🧵

10 years later:

• Immigration: record highs, just from different places
• Sovereignty: yes on paper, but thousands of EU laws copied over
• Trade: new tiny deals vs massive friction with Europe
• NHS: still underfunded, worse staff shortages

The average person is £3,000 poorer. Brexit delivered the opposite of what was promised.

[DonAza @DonAzag]

EXPOSED: The Secret Backdoor Between INEC and APC! The Lere Olayinka Mistake!

After accessing the secret INEC admin server, a ruling party apologist forgot to cover his tracks and exposed the restricted web link to the public. This video explains everything you need to know about this massive data breach and what it means for our democracy.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more analytical breakdowns: https://t.co/hdZWLmkAHf

[Jack @jackcoder0]

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.

Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.

The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."

An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.

Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.

The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.

No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.

Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.

Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

“The battle between oligarchic forces and democratic forces is the battle of the 21st century.”

On Downstream, French economist @Gabriel_Zucman explains that billionaires save almost 100% of their income – so their wealth grows faster than everyone else.

“If we don’t break that spiral, we’re going to see more wealth at the top and more concentration of power,” he explains.

A century ago, the world invented progressive income taxation. Now, Zucman argues, we need progressive wealth taxation.

Watch the full conversation between Zucman and @AaronBastani on our YouTube.

[Sai Ishaya @Sai_Ishaya_]

Every day, we're trapped in the paradox of the "Schrödinger’s immigrant", a mythical outsider who exists simultaneously as a lazy welfare dependent & an unstoppable machine taking all the jobs(both skilled & unskilled).

The immigrant remains a highly convenient shape shifting scapegoat designed to explain away ALL complex, systemic domestic failures.
Keeping this paradox alive ensures politicians never have to answer for a decade of chronic underinvestment, flatlining productivity, & broken infrastructure.

[The Receipts UK ♿ @david_hollas]

I've obtained the master contract between the Ministry of Defence and Palantir Technologies UK Ltd.
It covers 2026 to 2029. It was signed on 30 December 2025 — while Parliament was in recess. There was no competitive tender. Here's what's in it. And what they don't want you to see.
The contract is administered through Defence Digital at MoD Corsham, the nerve centre of UK military digital and intelligence infrastructure.
The contract number is redacted. Not the value. Not the scope. The contract number itself is classified.
The entire pricing section is gone. Redacted under Section 43 of the Freedom of Information Act, commercial interests. So is the IP clause. So are the key liability figures. So are all the contract schedules.
A US company is embedded into UK defence infrastructure for three years. The public cannot see what we are paying for it.
Now here's the clause that should be getting more attention.
Palantir staff working on classified MoD sites must hold Security Check clearance as a minimum, with Developed Vetting available when required. The contract says personnel should be UK nationals where site classification requires.
Should. Not must.
Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel. It grew out of a CIA seed investment. Its largest shareholder base is American. Its founders have direct relationships with US intelligence going back two decades.
The contract does not prohibit non-UK nationals from working on classified UK defence environments. It expresses a preference.
Condition 14. The media clause.
Palantir is contractually prohibited from communicating with press, television, radio or other media about anything in this contract without prior written MoD consent.
That is why Palantir UK has said nothing publicly about this deal. They are legally barred from doing so.
The contract was signed on 30 December 2025. Parliament was in recess. No tender process. No public announcement at signing. The contract number is a state secret. The price is hidden. And the contractor is gagged.
This is how £240 million of public money gets committed to a single American company with no scrutiny whatsoever.
Section 43, commercial interests, is a qualified exemption under FOIA. That means a public interest test applies.
The argument that Palantir's commercial sensitivity outweighs the public's right to know the cost of a no-tender three-year defence contract is not a strong one. I'll be filing for an internal review.
I'll be publishing the full analysis on Substack. If you think Parliament should be able to see what we're paying Palantir and why no other company was given the chance to bid, share this thread.
The document is real. The redactions are real. Draw your own conclusions.

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

New research: we have studied the wealth of the 200 Californian billionaires and what they effectively pay in tax.

From Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) to Sergei Brin and Larry Page (Alphabet), the results are edifying. 🧵

https://t.co/lW5UaGhYHY

[John ‘John’ Morrison @J_MoAGoGo]

You lot simply can’t handle the truth. Immigration is falling precipitously and has been since Sunak. You can’t come to terms with it because doing so would mean admitting that this hasn’t made anyone’s life better and you have no real solutions to society’s problems.