I work at a school called Passages in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. Our school has one of the highest percentages of refugee students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), 70 percent of which are low-income, over half black or brown, and four in ten with limited English skills. It has a history of great students [...]
This Sunday’s election promises a landslide for Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) Party, bolstered by four years of popular welfare measures and nationalist-conservative rhetoric. Polls indicate that the right-populist party will take between 40 and 45 percent of the vote — up from 37.5 percent in 2015. Like in Hungary and Italy, Poland’s right-populists [...]
As October 31 approaches, yet another deadline for Britain’s departure from the European Union is upon us. Yet this time around, it’s quite possible that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will end up losing his legal and diplomatic battles yet winning the electoral war. If Johnson does have ask for another extension to Article 50, and thus [...]
When I was working with the Teamster reform movement forty years ago, truck drivers concerned about union corruption had to proceed warily. In the late 1970s, too many affiliates of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) were run by grifters or autocrats of the usual business union sort. If you crossed them, the result might [...]
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I make a living teaching students how to construct arguments and analyze arguments made by others. I wrote a book about logic. I love this stuff. So when I see a New York Times opinion piece titled “This Is the Strongest Argument Against Medicare for All,” my ears perk up. The author, Reason magazine features [...]
The climate and ecological crisis is dire and there’s little time to address it. In just over a generation (since 1988), we have emitted half of all historic emissions. In this same period the carbon load in the atmosphere has risen from around 350 parts per million to over 410 — the highest level in 800,000 years (the historic preindustrial [...]
In September 2014, Michelle and Barack Obama invited Narendra Modi, the then–newly elected prime minister of India, to a lavish private dinner at the White House. The presidential fête reversed a prior travel ban on Modi, who had been barred from entering the United States for complicity in genocidal violence against Muslims in 2002. An [...]
The biggest problem with the U.S. withdrawal of forces from the Syrian border with Turkey is that they were there in the first place.
Trump’s decision hands over the Kurdish-run region of northern Syria to Turkey, a NATO ally with whom the U.S. has been conducting joint operations at the border. The move gave Turkey the green light to attack Kurdish [...]
Last week, a video made by independent producer Matt Orfalea unexpectedly went viral thanks to its evocative juxtaposing of the elite media’s depiction of Bernie Sanders — as a perpetually angry curmudgeon and scold — with an altogether more earnest and unfiltered portrait of a politician who continues to inspire millions in spite of what [...]
Class struggle has always had a soundtrack. A hundred years ago, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had Joe Hill, author of popular labor folk songs like “The Preacher and the Slave” and “There’s Power in a Union.” American Communists of the 1930s had baritone Paul Robeson, and the activists of the 1960s and [...]
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez burst into Congress, a twenty-nine-year-old bartender and socialist defeating a fifty-seven-year-old white male, beneficiary of longtime voter quiescence, a narrative was born: insurgency! And she wasn’t the only one that year. That same year, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also joined Congress. In New York State and around the country, young challengers [...]
Uber’s history isn’t a great one: a sexist workplace culture, evasion of regulations (and regulators), and denial of fair pay, benefits, and rights to workers. But in 2017, the company’s top brass promised it would change. Travis Kalanick was replaced as CEO by Dara Khosrowshahi with a pledge to clean up the culture, be more [...]
The Conservative Party conference felt muted this year: fewer ministerial speeches and announcements, fewer excited young activists — and far fewer attendees than Labour ever managed to muster. Boris Johnson’s speech was shorter than usual, came with almost no new announcements (aside from “faster broadband”), and wasn’t followed by the usual press huddle with his [...]
“Fake news” has become a household term in contemporary discourse. A review of the Nexis Uni database shows that, in any given week, it appears in dozens of news stories in elite newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, and in hundreds of segments across American television media. In the first 10 days following Nancy Pelosi’s announced impeachment [...]
I started working for Alexander Cockburn 22 years ago. I was hired to convert his hunt-and-pecked type-written articles into digital format. It was a complicated exchange involving a range of technologies, his archaic fountain pen corrections (inkblots included), lots of whiteout and typing paper and my old "vintage" Mac - a suit-cased sized beast and an old, low-resolution monitor.
Consciousness of time passing seldom accords with what clocks and calendars tell us. The discord is especially acute in these days of Trump-induced, ever changing “breaking news.” Thus, it seems to me and I suspect to every other sentient being paying attention, that it was centuries ago that Donald Trump was still making an effort More
Then came the dark years. Booze, drugs, cavorting and bankruptcy in dreary west Texas. There he also met Laura Welch, the steamy librarian who had slain her own ex-boyfriend, by speeding through a stop sign and plowing broadside into his car with a lethal fury. (Rep. Bill Janklow got 100 days in the pen for a similar crime; Laura wasn’t [...]
In a field beside a disused railway station on the plain just south of the Syrian-Turkish frontier, a brigade of Syrian Kurdish soldiers were retraining in order to resist an invasion by the Turkish army. “We acted like a regular army when we were fighting Daesh [Isis],” Rojvan, a veteran Kurdish commander of the YPG More
No political “Left” can or should exist that: + cannot or will not walk and chew gum at the same time. + fails to forthrightly and unambiguously oppose the United States’ current fascist, racist, eco-cidal, and sexist presidency and its noxious white Amerikaner base. + reflexively and constantly responds to every liberal and Left criticism More
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is attacking President Trump for pulling US troops out of Syria, where they’ve been engaging in an illegal and bloody war against the Syrian government and its military for at least five years, not counting the three prior years when the US was providing arms and training to Syrian rebels, More
Establishment efforts to isolate ‘corruption’ narrowly in the persons of Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, rely on a conception of it that makes sense only within political economy that ceased to function for the rest of us some decades ago. Understood outside of Washington and New York is that the exchange of campaign More
What do the folks at the U.S. Census Bureau do between the census they run every 10 years? All sorts of annual surveys, on everything from housing costs to retail sales. The most depressing of these — at least this century — may be the sampling that looks at the incomes average Americans are earning. More
My campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is in an uproar over a video to promote the school’s homecoming that features no students of color. We are one of the whitest schools in the country, but we are not unique in having a race problem. In that regard, we’re as American as apple pie. Or, rather, More
“Trump Crashes Wedding and Kisses Bride” – 850 WFTL News Talk “Will he really come?” she worried. Nearly 4:00 a.m., and Kaitlyn had suddenly awakened beside her husband of less than a day. Jason had drifted into a deep sleep following a tear-the-sheets night, consummating their marriage vows in the grand bed in the Seigneur More
Global warming is on speed, especially in northern latitudes where an international team of scientists led by Igor Semiletov of Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia’s oldest technical institution, recently made a startling discovery aboard the Academic Mstislav Keldysh (see photo above), the kind of discovery that sends chills down the spine, i.e., “methane bubbles boiling in More
It turns out that President Donald Trump has a “top religion advisor.” This is surprising because there is no evidence that President Trump has a “top religion,” or any religion at all. The only regular activities to occupy this president’s church-going Sundays are rounds of golf and the composing of malicious Twitter messages. To understand just More
For the Pentagon, happy days are here again (if they ever left). With a budget totaling more than $1.4 trillion for the next two years, the department is riding high, even as it attempts to set the stage for yet more spending increases in the years to come. With such enormous sums now locked in, More
American Exceptionalism remains one of the innermost ideas shaping our national identity and still lies behind all of the war stories used to justify US foreign policy. Exceptionalism has been a part of American culture since the very first European settlers landed. At its core, exceptionalism places America outside of normal history into a category More
“The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE…..” Tweet, Donald J. Trump, October 9, 2019. Granted Trump More
On 23 February 2016 Admiral Harry Harris, then Commander US Forces Pacific, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked how the construction of the Futenma Replacement Facility was progressing. This refers to the super airbase the Japanese Defense Ministry is building at Henoko in northern Okinawa to house the units of the First More
On August 20, Heba Ahmed al-Labadi fell into the dark hole of the Israeli legal system, joining 413 Palestinian prisoners who are currently held in so-called administrative detention. On September 26, Heba and seven other prisoners declared a hunger strike to protest their unlawful detention and horrific conditions in Israeli prisons. Among the prisoners is More
Ginger Baker, one of our greatest drummers, is dead. They say he died last Sunday, at the age of 80. On the drums he was my teacher in spirit, a sensei from afar. My habit these days is to go out to the barn around 3 am and talk with my drums until dawn, and More
Bolivian President Evo Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera are presently campaigning for their fourth terms in office. In elections set for October 20, Morales, candidate of the Movement to Socialism Party (MAS), is polling 15 points ahead of ex-President Carlos Mesa of the Citizen Community Party. Seven other presidential candidates are competing. The More
In the summer of 1967, I was edging closer to joining the Trotskyist movement. In June, Israel had claimed victory in the Six-Day War. This left it with the occupied territories that have continued to galvanize Palestinian resistance for more than a half-century. By this time, I had given up on the myth of “socialist More
Six years have passed but the memory of the great general’s death and funeral are still fresh in my mind. While thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese waited patiently under the still potent autumn sun to bid a final farewell to their national hero, General Vo Nguyen Giap, who lay in state at the National Funeral More
In February 2005, the body of 73-year-old Sister Dorothy Stang was found on the side of a remote dirt road 33 miles from Anapu, Pará, in Brazil’s AmazonBasin. Seven bullets pierced her body. The first hit her in the abdomen, then after she fell face down, the killers fired bullets to the back and four More
Awareness of climate change and the interconnected environmental crisis is growing throughout the world. Protest movements led by Extinction Rebellion and School Strike for Climate increase in number and scope, demands for action are repeated, louder and louder, anger and anxiety mounts. And yet politicians and corporations, complacent, trapped by outdated ideology and motivated by More
Under President Trump’s watch, the last remaining mountain caribou in the Lower 48 states went extinct just a few months ago. Like the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear in Northwest Montana and the Selkirk grizzlies in Northern Idaho, the mountain caribou lived primarily on National Forest lands in the Northern Rockies, had a population of fewer than More
Our crippled political system has produced a president who is clearly mentally ill and unfit for the office he holds. His narcissistic self-love only allows him to embrace people who are unstintingly loyal to him, indifferent to his cruelty and barbarity. His inner circle comprises family members and political cronies like Mike Pence willing to More
I was struck by a New York Times article on the disruptions within the corporate hierarchy at Nissan, the huge Japanese automaker. The article begins: “An outside law firm investigating problems at Nissan, the troubled Japanese automaker, this summer discovered some potentially explosive information. “Hari Nada, a powerful Nissan insider who was behind the ouster More
Our beloved Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the fiery advocate for gender equality, is a current Justice in the US Supreme Court. Even before joining the Court, in 1973 Ginsburg argued the case of a female Air Force Officer who was denied a housing allowance because of her gender, Ginsburg quietly quoted another female Abolitionist, “All I ask of More
Last year TechCrunch ran a piece postulating “What If Google unionized?” after over 20,000 Google workers walked out of their offices in protest of how the tech giant has handled harassment and discrimination cases in recent years. Google’s response to this walkout and internal protests related to the layoff of 34 contract programmers was to More
“When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, women, indigenous peoples, and slaves were treated as property, without rights.” This isn’t over yet. In the same vein of exploitative ignorance, we’re still treating a living, life-sustaining, crucial being as property: the ecosystem. And in the process, we’re choking our own habitat — that is to say, ourselves More
MCKITTRICK, California Do you still think of California as the nation’s “green” leader? You might take another view of this image propagated by state officials and the media after you look at recent reports revealing that oil waste fluid is polluting so-called “protected” aquifers in California as the Gavin Newsom administration continues the expansion of oil More
If Trump were to finally shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, Nancy Pelosi and Jerrold Nadler and company would not declare it acceptable, absolutely not. But what they would do would be to open a months-long investigation into the history of the victim, what Trump had said earlier in the day, who had manufactured the gun, More
Warning: this article contains spoilers Many parts of the liberal press don’t much seem to like Joker; not a few of them appear to have made up their mind about the movie before having even seen it. Some surmise that Joker is ‘aligned with so-called “incel” culture (involuntarily celibate men who are angry and misogynistic).’ More
California has taken a major step towards giving student-athletes the rights they deserve. On September 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Fair Pay to Play Act, which lets college athletes to make money off of their name and likeness. This would allow them to make money off of things like jersey sales, endorsements, and autographs. More
Are you a woman? Imagine if you were fired for wearing a skirt to work. Are you a man? Imagine getting fired for not wearing a skirt to work. This sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds unfair. But for many Americans, it’s a reality we must face every day. Take the case of Aimee Stephens, a More
To decipher President Donald Trump’s presidency, apply the basic rule of politics: Follow the money. Last month, for example, Trump performed at rallies in North Carolina and in New Mexico. He entertained adoring crowds, clad in Trump’s MAGA caps and T-shirts. The rallies got featured on Fox and other news stations. Then Trump flew to California and More
Remarks on October 4, 2019 at NoWar 2019 in Limerick, Ireland. I am very happy to be with you all at this conference. I would like to thank David Swanson and World Beyond War for organizing this important event and also all those attending for their work for peace. I have long been inspired by the American More
The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest is proposing to log the Lostine Wild and Scenic River corridor. The basic justification is to reduce the potential for large wildfires. Yet according to the Oregon Department of Forestry, in 2019 only 16,868 acres burned in the state, compared to 846,411 acres burned last year. Why the big difference? Is More
We caught a glimpse of humanity recently when Amber Guyger, a former Dallas police officer convicted of murdering Botham Jean, was embraced with compassion by the victim’s brother. Guyger shot Jean in his own apartment while he was sitting on his couch eating ice cream. Though Guyger lived on an entirely different floor, she thought More
The meaning of democratic socialism―a mixture of political and economic democracy―should be no mystery to Americans. After all, socialist programs have been adopted in most other democratic nations. And, in fact, Americans appear happy enough with a wide range of democratic socialist institutions in the United States, including public schools, public parks, minimum wage laws, More
Some Republicans see the Ukraine/Biden impeachment inquiry as a deep-state coup attempt against President Trump. Some progressives are beginning to scratch the surface of an alternative, but equally cynical, analysis that I think leftists ought to consider: The impeachment of Donald Trump is a DNC/centrist coup attempt against progressives inside the Democratic Party. Democrats could have More
It is October 2019, dearest motherfuckers, and we are living in a horror story. To say that these are apocalyptic times seems to be a gross understatement. The Biblical notion of Armageddon, what with the gnashing of teeth and pillars of salt, seems almost quaint in our age, like some new attraction at Disney World More
It will not be long before Trump is out of the White House and off the 2020 presidential ballot. In spite of what virtually all the mainstream media have been saying about impeachment going nowhere in the Senate, I am very confident that Trump will not be president and will not be on the ballot More
In 1928 my father, César Assad Chelala, emigrated from Lebanon to Argentina and made there his permanent home. The love for his country remained unaltered, and for the rest of his life he dreamt of going back. Although he never fulfilled his wish, he transmitted to us, his children, the love for his new country. More
It was an historic first of local, national and global scope. The Sacramento Kings NBA basketball team played an exhibition game against the Indian Pacers in Mumbai, India recently. Reporting in a flagship U.S. newspaper is instructive. Sopan Deb, a culture reporter for the New York Times, in his laudatory coverage of that game, deftly More
It’s Kink Month, and the U.S. Presidential Election is getting its kink-on. No, the Trumpus isn’t getting spanked by Ivanka or cuckolded by Melania (then again, maybe he is). But the other day, the goofball grifter team of Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman held a bizarre, quasi-kinky press conference on the front porch of somebody’s More
Not long after humans landed on the moon, Robert Moog’s synthesizers landed near the top of the charts. A month before Apollo’s lunar module had touched down at 41 degrees north and 26 degrees east on the Sea of Tranquility in July of 1969, Wendy Carlos piloted the many modules of Moog’s modular synthesizer to More
Taking Out Columbus Everyone wants to kill Hitler On the battlefield in Ypres via time machine Though, what do you think About going back further And taking out Captain Columbus Instead — landing, let’s say, On the Santa Maria — And aiding the mutineers back then? Maybe so much of the globe, Today — New York More
This is day twenty-five for the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) strike vs. General Motors (GM). A recent Detroit Free Press says at least three items have not been resolved: How long it takes “in-progression” workers (the second tier) to move up to their top level. It’s currently eight years to move from $17 an hour [...]
In the great writer’s novels, style is the consciousness of a revolutionary class in formation.
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Regardless of whether there’s a strike on October 17 as is currently promised, the current contract fight of Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), alongside the fight of over 5,000 CPS workers represented by SEIU Local 73, including special education classroom assistants, custodians, bus aides, and security officers, is a milestone for the CTU, teacher union reform, [...]
Dave Rubin is one of the great contemporary proponents of reasoned debate and free speech, ensuring every side of the argument, from libertarianism to the alt-right, has its day in the marketplace of ideas. On his popular YouTube show, you’ll hear topics ranging from why the Left hates free speech to why the Left hates [...]
Since coming into office, the Trump administration has launched unrelenting racist attacks on immigrants and refugees. He seems determined to build his wall by any means necessary and has unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to conduct raids, arrest people, throw them in concentration camps, and deport them. Facing [...]
Accursed Wealth! O’er bounding human laws, Of every evil thou remains’t the cause: Victims of want, those wretches such as me, Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee: Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed, And thine our loss of labour and of bread. Al Gore missed this memo, written at some time More
A caravan of buses, security vehicles, indigenous leaders, and backpackers with Che Guevara T-shirts wove their way down a muddy road through farmers’ fields to the precolonial city of Tiwanaku. Folk music played throughout the cool day of January 22, 2015, as indigenous priests conducted complex rituals to prepare Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, More
In March of 2018, US president Donald Trump promised "we'll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon." That December, he issued an order to begin withdrawing US troops. Apparently the order never got executed. Most of a year later, US forces remain. Now Trump and his opponents are arguing over his decision to move a few dozen of those [...]
There is blood in the water and frenzied sharks are closing in for the kill. Or so they think. From the time of Donald Trump’s election, American elites have hungered for this moment. At long last, they have the 45th president of the United States cornered. In typically ham-handed fashion, Trump has given his adversaries More
According to conventional wisdom, the Trump administration, as well as its regional allies in the Lima Group and the Venezuelan opposition, were set to intensify the diplomatic war on the Venezuelan government at the UN General Assembly. However, they only managed to demonstrate how far removed their coalition against President Maduro is from convincing the international community that deadly sanctions [...]
Alas, I have not written about Immanuel Wallerstein right after his death, as I should have. The electoral campaign for Moscow City Duma demanded all my time and attention, so I limited myself to a short post on social media and promised to write an article later. Now, after the election has come and gone, More
Big powers, as with the greatest of gangsters, have always had a certain, indulgent luxury; their prerogative is to make promises they can choose to abide by or ignore. A vision is assured, guarantees made. Then comes the betrayal. The small powers, often pimped in the process, can only deal with the violent consequences. The More
The globalised industrial food system that transnational agri-food conglomerates promote is failing to feed the world. It is responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises. Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina, localised, traditional methods of More
While the European family seems to be having its internal spats – populist sparks within threatening to light the powder keg – the marshals and deputies, for the most part, are attempting to contain the British contagion. Britain is still scheduled to leave on October 31 without a deal with the European Union. The divorce More
Pray you now, forget and forgive. – Shakespeare, King Lear One went up and one went down. Each enjoyed similar benefits as a result of their travels. I refer to Brett Kavanaugh and Maryanne Trump Barry. Brett ascended to the United States Supreme Court and Maryanne descended from the United States Court of Appeals for the More
I generally found all the hype around the movie Joker to be overblown on all sides. The claim that a movie could end civility reflected the general hyperbole and panic in the Trump era. But the whining about woke culture and the left that came from the director were even more pathetic. All the people whining about More
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is attacking President Trump for pulling US troops out of Syria, where they’ve been engaging in an illegal and bloody war against the Syrian government and its military for at least five years (not counting the three prior years when the US was providing arms and training to Syrian rebels, More
Abuse of power, corruption, violation of the social contract… If you’re an American Democrat, chances are Donald Trump’s disdain for all of those has been evident to you for quite a bit. The spectacle of the President using the power of his office to urge the leader of Ukraine, and now China, to investigate a More
In April, two weeks after announcing her primary campaign rematch against Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), Marie Newman was blindsided. The leadership of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had issued a directive that effectively put vendors who work with candidates challenging incumbents on a blacklist. Any consultant, polling firm, communications strategist or field operative that helped insurgent challengers would be [...]
The Supreme Court is hearing argument to rule on whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against workers on the basis of sex, ought to extend to sexual orientation and gender identity as well. The swing vote looks to be Neil Gorsuch, nominated to the court by [...]
The seventy-fifth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism ought to have been cause for celebration. Such was the thinking of the Russian cultural center in Sofia, as it announced an exhibition in the Bulgarian capital entitled “The Road to Victory.” Instead, the initiative sparked a storm of protest — and days before the planned opening [...]
In the weeks before Puerto Ricans rose up and took down governor Ricardo Rosselló this summer, educators on the island banded together to defeat a corrupt deal that would have destroyed their pensions. Now they’re organizing against a new version of the same rotten plan. The fight begs a basic question: Why is the American [...]
I know these people well, you wouldn’t believe it. I know them too well. I know them too well. They cost me a lot of money. (Laughter.) I spent a lot of money, but I love them, and they’re great, and their people are fantastic … And it’s time that we give you the level [...]
Last Friday night, a man named Daryl tweeted an image that read “FIGHT FOR FREEDOM/STAND WITH HONG KONG.” Daryl didn’t mention China, nor any specific objections or desired outcomes regarding the Hong Kong protests, a movement sparked by opposition to a Chinese extradition bill that’s grown to encompass demands for universal suffrage and an end [...]
Brexit would have (the non-EU) UK share a border with (the EU-member) Ireland, and the EU does not countenance a flexible border (tariff-free, free movement of peoples, etc.) between itself and non-EU countries-- unless the UK strikes an agreement with the EU similar to the one Norway has. But that would amount to a soft Brexit, which of course is [...]
Iraqi paramilitary groups close to Iran are suspected of joining attacks on protesters in Baghdad and other cities, leading to heavy loss of life among demonstrators. Some 107 people have been killed and over 6,000 wounded in the last six days, though hospital doctors say the government is understating the true number of fatalities. More
The post Iraq [...]
Donald Trump is bravely carrying on a trade war, not just with the bad guys with China, but with longtime allies like Canada and the European Union. Incredibly, the media just don’t seem that interested in reporting on the ongoing progress. Last week the Commerce Department released trade data for August, and it got almost More
The uniformity of the shades of dark and light blue clothing on the children fans out from the New York City street corner next to a charter school and seems to cover an entire city block. The uniformity is everywhere. Even the student backpacks are blue. Growing up in the late 1950s and early to More
“It looks like Zelensky has capitulated” reports MSNBC’ Matt Bradley in Kiev, to President Trump’s demand that he “play ball” and investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The investigation of Burisma Holdings has been reopened at U.S. mafiosa-like prodding. In other words, Trump’s threat to withhold aid pending an agreement to investigate a political foe worked. More
The citizenry has been pummeled with the panoply of controversy and corruption that marked the 2016 elections for four very long years now. But as the years passed, the very serious problems facing the nation and planet have only gotten worse. It’s time to leave the mud wallow of the 2016 elections behind and address More
I love all animals. I grew up in a Greek village where domesticated animals were part of my family. We had chickens, dogs, cats, sheep, goats, donkeys and mules. I rarely saw a horse because horses then, now, and in antiquity were and are possessions of rich people. However, while a teenager, I did have More
We are witnessing a battle for the rational soul of India. It has long been the conventional wisdom that the country’s historic and admirable diversity and tolerance would prevent the creation of a Hindu-first nation. But it seems increasingly likely that the narrative of India as a Hindu democratic state will prevail. There is a More
When the compromised speak of judgment, the voice of credibility vanishes. In its place, a certain niggling sense of hypocrisy and weakness prevails. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell is one of those of those compromised voices. He presided over a redundant State Department before the pressures of the Pentagon and Secretary of Defence More
Wars end with treaties. In the middle of the 20th century, the “class war” that finished off America’s original plutocracy ended with the “Treaty of Detroit.” Fortune, the business magazine, came up with that catchy turn of phrase back in 1950 to describe the landmark collective bargaining agreement that the United Auto Workers union had More
In 2010, Capitol Records released remastered versions of John Lennon’s entire catalog, the best of which remains the Phil Spector-produced Imagine. The title track has become an integral part of the world’s cultural fabric–the centerpiece of a ghetto high school halftime show at a basketball game in New York or a Ben and Jerry’s ice More
In September 2019, facing everyday dangers of the war and under constant pressure to view those from other tribes as enemies, young people from each of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces gathered for a three day “On the Road to Peace” conference in Kabul. 30th September 2019 / 8th Mezan 1398. Despite the violent crises which we More
Early twentieth century portraits of the future often envisioned a society of leisure where, thanks to the wonders of economic growth and the miracles of technology, people would be liberated from the toil of work and free to engage in their own pursuits. In the coming post-scarcity utopia, it was imagined, humanity as a whole [...]
The most important battle the American left has waged in generations is presently being fought on the Democratic primary stage. On one side stands Bernie Sanders, the first avowed socialist to come close to the presidency since Eugene V. Debs received 6 percent of the vote in the 1912 election. On the other side stands [...]
Seven years ago, we owned General Motors (GM). With 49,000 autoworkers walking pickets to finally end the concessions, two-tier, and plant closings train of the last three decades, it’s mind-boggling to remember that the US Treasury owned GM for three years — and managed to do virtually nothing to benefit the working class with it. [...]
In late September, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told the United Nations General Assembly: “Our intention is to establish a peace corridor with a depth of 30 kilometers and a length of 480 kilometers in Syria so that the international community can settle two million Syrians here.” On Monday, with Donald Trump’s announcement that the United [...]
Austria’s parliamentary election on September 29 was widely hailed as a defeat for “populists,” as Sebastian Kurz’s conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) swept to victory amidst the collapse of its former coalition partner, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). The election had been prompted by a government scandal in May, centered on the FPÖ’s deputy chancellor Heinz-Christian [...]
“Everybody is doing it. So we are too,” said Rupa Pirikaka, somewhat uncertainly. ‘It’ is genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton seeds, now easily bought at the local market, or even in one’s own village. ‘Everybody’ is countless other farmers like her in the village of and across the rest of south-western Odisha’s Rayagada district. “They are More
I sniffed something was wrong in Lebanon when the central bank governor Riad Salame announced to us all that there were plenty of dollars in the system. No shortages. No tightening of the purse strings. I still have the papers with his announcement on page one. Both before, during and after the 1975-1990 civil war, More
Morning Consult polling shows no change outside its stated 1% margin of error over the last few weeks of polling. Where Joe Biden stood at 31.8% in crosstabs kindly forwarded to me by Morning Consult’s press officer two weeks ago (field dates September 17-23), Biden has risen slightly to 32.7% as of yesterday’s release (field More
For many years, BLM had plotted a massive deforestation project aimed at destroying ancient juniper trees living on Juniper Mountain in the Owyhee Canyonlands. The mountain is a long high ridge cut by headwater drainages of the Middle and North Fork Owyhee Rivers and Red Canyon Creek. Its right by the Oregon border, and has More
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom More
All those wondering who is in charge in Venezuela, should stop reading the biased and confusing corporate media and should look at who represents the country at the United Nations. The UN is not a perfect institution but it is one that is clear on the issue of membership despite powerful attempts at obfuscating that More
In his recent piece “Geo-engineering is a Scam“, Josue De Luna Navarro points out a fact that has always been true of the engineering profession (and also most other highly refined professions) that its students, first seeking education, and then as graduates seeking employment and lengthy careers, are destined to serve monied patrons, the Golden More
Along with being where all blood goes, the heart is an enduring metaphor. As Bernie Sanders recovers from a heart attack, now might be a good time to consider some literal and symbolic meanings. Bernie immediately used his heart trouble to advance a central mission. From the hospital, he tweeted: “I’m fortunate to have good More
A recent report on Venezuela by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is a grim portrayal of a country in a severe crisis. Yet, given the extensive media coverage given to this report, it is important to contextualize what is going on in Venezuela in light of the situation More
October 10 is World Day Against the Death Penalty. That the U.S. continues to use this broken and antiquated system of (in)justice is reprehensive in so many ways, but among the most important is the issue of sentencing people to death row wrongfully and executing people who did not commit the offenses that resulted in More
Ridhima Pandey was just nine years old in 2017 when she filed a lawsuit against the Indian government for failing to take action against climate change. Pandey’s fierce, astounding passion for the environment is not accidental. Her mother is a forestry guard and her father an environmental activist; and the whole family was displaced by More
What is Greta Thunberg’s superpower? She obviously has one, if not more. Your average sixteen-year-old doesn’t start successful global activist movements, address UN Climate Action Summits, and have those addresses go viral as death metal videos. Critics slam Thunberg as everything from “mentally ill” (a claim which got one Fox News guest blacklisted), to naive More
As one of the 7.5 million who recently put their bodies where their mouth are to visibly say “NO” to an out-of-control global climate crisis, this writer continues to reflect upon what lies behind the futility of so many climate crises, anti-war, pro-human protests of the past, and the even more aggressive protests that will More
It Has Happened Here and Everywhere It seems like just yesterday that we were celebrating the democratic wave sweeping Europe in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. It seems like yesterday that we hailed the Arab Spring and its potential for democratization across the Middle East. It seems like yesterday that we scoffed at More
A few weeks ago, two Democratic Party officials toured K Street shops to explain how lobbyists can donate to the 2020 Democratic Party convention in Milwaukee. Politico obtained documents showing that, for example, $300,000 gets you VIP credentials and glitzy skyboxes towering above the convention floor. In 2016, seventeen donors ponied up three-quarters of the [...]
Theodor Bergmann, who passed away in 2017 at the age of 101, was the last of his kind. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1916, he gravitated to Germany’s explicitly socialist workers’ movement as a young boy and remained what he called a “critical Communist” for the rest of his life. Known [...]
In recent years, states around the country have passed numerous laws restricting the right to vote. But this effort to contract the franchise — a fundamental assault on political democracy — is not unprecedented. Since the founding of the United States, elites have used their power to disenfranchise and suppress the vote of those they’d [...]
The first English-language translation of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is no minor event. With the memory of World War II increasingly serving as a key battleground for Europe’s resurgent far right, the Soviet author’s long-dismissed prequel to Life and Fate has a clearly political charge. The stakes of this fight over memory were clearly brought into [...]
Smithfield Foods’ 2,000-employee bacon and sausage packaging plant in Smithfield, Va., sits a mile down the road from the company’s stately corporate headquarters and flagship restaurant, Taste of Smithfield, a tourist-friendly establishment known for its smoked pork brioche sandwich, Virginia craft beer and “piglets” menu for kids under 12.
Near the meatpacking plant on Church Street, the stench of bacon and [...]
Portugal held national elections on Sunday after four years of an unusual governmental solution known as the contraption (geringonça), drawn up in 2015 by the social-liberal Socialist Party (PS), the Left Bloc (BE), and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). To the surprise of many observers, this parliamentary agreement did prove able to sustain itself for [...]
One of the strengths of the protest movement is that it has no leaders but is almost entirely spontaneous, with a wide variety of slogans, but this means the government has nobody to talk to, not that it is trying very hard to negotiate its way out of trouble. Many Iraqis say that it is a mistake to get rid [...]
I have been to Kibera, arguably the world’s largest slum, a place where human shit runs in the streets.
But I’ve never seen poverty more severe than here. I’d come home. To my birthplace: Oakland. Homeless encampments cling beneath freeway overpasses like albatross, enlarging daily, fed in reverse by the excesses of tech-enabled hypercapitalism—our home-grown, capitalistic terrorism. More
Led by young people, climate strikers blocked traffic on two mornings at the end of last month in Washington, DC. On the first day, protestors chained themselves to a boat three blocks from the White House, and 32 activists were arrested. On the second day, activists targeted the EPA and Trump International Hotel. It was More
Canada recently seized and sold $30 million worth of Iranian properties in Ottawa and Toronto, a gross hypocrisy explains Yves Engler in light of oversights of more flagrant US and Israel terror victims. But the behaviour of Canada Foreign Affairs in joining the lawless US war of sanctions, embargos and military threats against Iran goes More
During the era of Sovietology, experts would pour over images of the gathered politburo in Red Square, gazing with grey monolithic interest upon the military hardware moving across the forum. An absent figure might suggest a potential coup; a new face, a sinister reshuffle. A wink, a smile, a glare, a compendium of bodily moves More
I went on CNBC’s Squawk Box this week to talk about a new proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders to put tax penalties on corporations with extreme gaps between their CEO and worker pay. This is an issue I’ve been working on for many years. In fact, a dozen years ago, in August 2007, I had More
During one week in late September, U.S.-led forces killed at least 70 civilians in two incidents in Afghanistan. A U.S. drone strike on September 19th killed at least 30 farmers harvesting pine nuts in Nangarhar province. Then on September 23rd, at least 40 civilians, including women and children, were reported killed in a combined U.S.-Afghan attack on a village in Taliban-controlled More
By telling all those small farmers at the town hall that there was no guarantee that small farms would survive, and saying, “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue was parroting Nixon’s ag secretary Earl Butz, who coined the phrase “get big or get out.” By doubling down on that mantra, which [...]
Mt. Shasta, CA The Siskiyou Superior Court, on August 29, 2019, issued a Statement of Decision on Writ in the case of We Advocate Thorough Environmental Review (W.A.T.E.R.) and the Winnemem Wintu Tribe (WWT) v. Siskiyou County and Crystal Geyser Water Company, denying the Petitioners’ challenge. The Petitioners, W.A.T.E.R. and WWT, had challenged the validity More
One of the neglected consequences of the recent wars and civilian conflicts in many parts of the world is their effect on people’s education, particularly children’s education. Because of the close connection between education and health, these events have had a severe effect on people’s health –particularly on children- and on the countries’ development. In More
Chariots of War Chariots of war Were known in Ancient Rome As cars And ducks’re called duck Because they duck And honcks are so-called for their call As foxes — who’ll stalk In stalks of phlox, in flux, And flax and scratch their backs And sit and crack Their nuts and snack Owe their name More
During the Obama era, MSNBC emerged as a liberal challenger to Fox News, in some ways succeeding where earlier efforts to duplicate the reach of right-wing media had failed. But the history and politics of the network are more complicated than those who first became aware of it during the mid-2000s probably realize. These themes [...]
Thanks to their bungled suspension of Parliament, the Tories were forced to hold their annual conference the other week while the Commons was sitting. This meant rationing the number of MPs and ministers allowed to travel to their events in Manchester. Tory MPs complained this was “unfair” with Conservative Party chair James Cleverly saying, “the bottom line [...]
On November 6, 1975, Portugal’s public broadcaster RTP hosted an unprecedented debate between the leaders of the two main parties of the Left, the Socialists (PS) and the Communists (PCP). Eighteen months into the revolutionary process that had begun on April 25, 1974, PS general secretary Mário Soares and his Marxist-Leninist counterpart Álvaro Cunhal spent [...]
D.D. Guttenplan, writing in the Nation, echoes what has become a recurring call for a “truce” between supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. For Sanders supporters, this truce — as far as I can tell — can mean one of two things: 1) It is okay to argue that Sanders is preferable to Warren, even [...]
Rachel Weber’s From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago examines speculation and overbuilding of commercial real estate, focusing on Chicago in the 2000s. The book is based on ethnographic research of key real estate actors, pairing interviews with an analysis of financial structures and public policies that power the building (and overbuilding) machine. Developers [...]
The differences are big, they’re ideological — and they have consequences. Here is Elizabeth Warren’s plan for international climate adaptation and mitigation: …even if we reduce America’s emissions so that they are net-zero by 2030, we will still fall far short of the reduction in global emissions needed to avert a climate crisis … Here’s my plan for that: [...]
For many on the European center-left, Portugal stands as proof that it is possible to break out of austerity without any need for a “populist” offensive against Brussels. For the Guardian, Portugal today stands as “Europe’s beacon of social democracy”; for the New Stateman, it is “Europe’s socialist success story.” Since 2015 the Socialist-led government [...]
Across the country, critics of NCAA exploitation are celebrating the fact that California governor Gavin Newsom just signed the state’s Fair Pay to Play Act into law, affording athletes at the state’s universities the right to profit off of their names, images, and likenesses beginning in 2023. The Golden State seems to have opened the [...]
Ever since his shock election to the Labour leadership in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn has been dogged by allegations of “antisemitism.” Both the media and hostile MPs claim he has failed to confront Jew-hate in party ranks — one Tory minister even said Corbyn would be “the first antisemitic Western leader since 1945.” Often bound up [...]
Having defied long-held assumptions about the nature of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, the Trump era has undoubtedly given birth to renewed discussions about the character of the American right in the political mainstream. Much of the ensuing discourse has, however, proven frustratingly inadequate and incomplete: treating Trumpism as an aberration from earlier [...]
During a speech yesterday at an upscale Florida retirement village, Donald Trump announced a new executive order aimed at expanding the Medicare Advantage program — which allows private insurers to compete with traditional Medicare plans — so as to ward off the program’s alleged demise via Medicare for All. “Standing in solidarity with our nation’s [...]
Many activists in Milwaukee know Alex Brower. He has been key to several recent organizing projects in the city, helping to start a credit union to increase access to financial services in Milwaukee’s poorest areas, organizing Milwaukee substitute teachers into a formidable union, and a visible supporter for many working-class causes and labor drives throughout [...]
In December 2018, the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, took a trip to the colonial-era Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands. The prison was a notorious institution under British rule and housed hundreds of anti-colonial activists. Modi, a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was there to pay tribute to one [...]
As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrates seventy years of rule this week, protests in the semiautonomous city of Hong Kong continue to intensify. On Tuesday, Hong Kong police shot a teenage protester in the chest with a live round, the first such incident since protests exploded in June. Originally directed at a single anti–civil [...]
School districts all over the country are experiencing teacher shortages. The main reason is obvious: teachers are seriously underpaid. The term coined to explain the phenomenon is the teacher weekly wage penalty, or “the percent by which public school teachers are paid less in wages and compensation than other college-educated workers.” This number reached a [...]
For the first time in half a century, the political left in the U.S. is ascendant. Bernie Sanders is holding his own in the primaries. A group of well-considered programs to save the environment and provide good jobs and health care for all is gaining political traction. And the need is dire. The climate is warming, the seas are polluted [...]
This past summer I was camping in rural Wisconsin with my partner and son when a huge thunderstorm forced us to seek out the closest local pub for dinner one evening. Our four-year old had been going through some kind of cranky asshole phase all summer and our options for feeding him in the middle More
Trump is fortunate in his enemies. Adam Schiff is one of the few politicians in DC whose hubris rivals Trump's own. Schiff will find a way to make the impeachment inquiry about himself and his own Inspector Javert-like rectitude--which may engender sympathy for a man (Trump) who deserves none. Schiff, who appears to have lied about his staff's contacts with [...]
Never underestimate the power of the United States’ American Exeptionalist and imperial doctrine. Look at the recent Washington Post revelation regarding wannabe fascist strongman Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Lavrov in the White House in 2017. Trump told Lavrov and another high-ranking Russian official that he wasn’t concerned about Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because [...]
Nancy Pelosi’s first stint as Speaker of the House came after Democratic victories in the 2006 midterm election. Before that, she had opposed Republican efforts to impeach Bill Clinton for lying to Congress about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, but it was not until she became Speaker that she first plainly manifested what I, facetiously More
Every big personality or corporation uses algorithmic robots (“bots”) to boost themselves and their products. Until recently, US President Donald Trump had a Twitter following of around 59 million. But nearly half of those “followers” were fake, spam, and/or dormant accounts. Twitter’s purge of “Trump supporters” was actually a purge of fake accounts. (The real More
In what country are labor rights fully respected? The sad answer is: none. Labor rights are routinely violated around the world, and the trend is only getting worse. The International Trade Union Confederation has again issued its annual Global Rights Index and the result is no better than in past years. It’s worse. For example, the number of More
