Recent ZMagazine
On Monday, December 5, close to 1,000 veterans marched to the front lines of the barricades in a symbolic protest. Without question, the gesture was visually striking and significant, but it wasn’t why most of the veterans came to Standing Rock
We should start organizing to make cities powerful bastions of noncooperation, resistance, and protection. Activists and organizations can start demanding in every city that city councils and mayors issue resolutions and statements
There have been nationwide coordinated protests of high school and college students leaving class for the streets; on the 17th, 80 colleges participated in a walkout, using the anti-Trump hashtag #sanctuary campus as their slogan. Mayors across the country have urged calm but more protests are planned.
In the most simplistic terms, the feminization of poverty refers to the fact that women represent a disproportionate share of the world’s poor. Further, the feminization of poverty is not only a consequence of lack of income, but is also the result of the deprivation of opportunities and gender biases
The Supreme Court will be in the hands of reactionaries for many years, with predictable consequences; there will be huge benefits for the very rich—estimated by the Tax Policy Center as a tax cut of over 14 percent for the top 0.1 percent and a substantial cut more generally at the upper end of the income scale, but with virtually no tax relief for others
On one hand, Trump appears to moving closer to traditional Republican party elite positions on big reductions of taxes on corporate-investor elites and on delivering longstanding elite demands to deregulate business; at the same time he appears to be moderating his position with regard to that third top priority of the U.S. neoliberal elite
The 2016 election was only the fourth time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate has lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, and thus the presidency. And Clinton’s winning margin of more than two million votes is by far the largest of any “losing” candidate.
Trump gives no sign of separating personal business dealings from his upcoming job as president. Far from it, he says “only the crooked media makes this a big deal.”
both Brexit and the Trump “victories” were financed and led by the elite: Brexit was bankrolled by hedge fund billionaires who wanted to free themselves from the regulatory shackles of Europe. Trump’s economic advisers include billionaires from Goldman Sachs and other financial institution
In 2005, Mattis declared, “It’s fun to shoot some people.” That was one year after he oversaw the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq, which began in April 2004,
Although I generally applaud the notion of a national conversation about rape and rape culture, the repeated coverage of the accusations against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and the responses he has given as well as those of his supporters, are deeply troubling. I fear they are reinforcing dangerous misconceptions about sexual assault, so I Read more…
In town halls and statehouses across the country, Democratic and Republican officials are doling out $80 billion worth of incentives to businesses every year. The federal government kicks in billions more.
On November 17, Portland’s city council voted on what is likely the strongest land use code language in the country prohibiting all new fossil fuel export infrastructure
Items of interest for progressives
A misogynistic, racist, narcissistic, profit maximizing capitalist slug—but not a moron—is now President of the United States. The world’s biggest bully now possesses the world’s biggest bully pulpit.
Had it not been for the Electoral College, at this moment we would be discussing the plans for the incoming Hillary Clinton administration. That’s right. She actually won the popular vote. Thus, once again, that institution created by the founding slave owners has risen from the grave and prevented our exit from the cemetery
With the recent insertion of Russian military power into Syria and the continued use of American air power in the region, the situation in Syria has gotten tenser than ever
So you joined law enforcement or the National Guard because you wanted to uphold the law, protect innocent civilians against the bad guys, and help your community in times of need. Instead, they’re having you blockade unarmed people who are trying to hold a prayer vigil, chasing them with armored vehicles and ATVs, raiding their Read more…
In short, in the 2016 presidential election the U.S. citizenry did not have an effective choice of a candidate who would turn away from the permanent war system and corporate welfare state; that is, one who had any chance of winning
Sometimes it’s not about discovering new stories but reinterpreting the history people think they know
The whole experiment, it is said, was a failure from the beginning. Adherents say the downward spiral will continue until the chavistas are removed from power, either through elections or through a coup—most pundits don’t seem to care which. The reality is somewhat more complicated.
the news and commentary one finds on PBS is in rich tune with the narrow capitalist parameters of acceptable coverage and debate that typify the more fully and explicitly for-profit and commercialized corporate media
the United States that has played the leading role in preventing the ICC from fulfilling the universal mandate for which it was formed, to hold officials of all countries accountable for the worst crimes in the world: genocide; crimes against humanity; and war crimes
It is fair to say that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 brought the United States into the 20th Century. That comprehensive law made it illegal to engage in racial, gender, and national origin discrimination in public accommodations–like hotels and restaurants–and employment. Yet, the law says very little about what exactly constitutes discrimination
Events and new releases of interest to progressives
How could American voters come to elect Trump? How could they vote for a candidate that they simultaneously were giving a negative rating of 60 to 80 percent? That fundamental question will haunt this election.
While President-elect Donald Trump has won a majority in the Electoral College, Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote and millions of Americans have loudly rejected the corrosive and hate-fueled politics that have been on display.
Events, demonstrations, new book releases
The only way Donald Trump does not become president of the United States is if Hillary Clinton does
Much like the Balkans before it, Syria is emerging as a metaphor for the fragmentation and chaos that the modern world barely contains
If the vote had gone the other way, Colombia might have shown the world that even intractable civil wars can come to an end. It would have been a message to Syria and the Congo, a message of the power of negotiation towards a new civil compact. But this did not come to pass.
Across Guatemala, indigenous communities are organizing to challenge logging in the country’s vast forests
There is good reason to believe that we have already entered the Sixth Extinction, a period of destruction of species on a massive scale
Judge Boasberg’s deference to law, to government agencies, to oil pipeline companies is all consistent with his membership in a ruling class club
Race riots have returned to the United States this election year, leading cable news talking heads to claim that urban violence provoked by police killings of Black men in places like Milwaukee and Charlotte, North Carolina has “discredited the cause” of racial justice
In early September 2016, Donald Trump announced his plan for a vast expansion of the U.S. military, including 90,000 new soldiers for the Army, nearly 75 new ships for the Navy, and dozens of new fighter aircraft for the Air Force. Although the cost of this increase would be substantial—about $90 billion per year. it would be covered, the GOP presidential candidate said, by cutting wasteful government spending
Instead, let’s look again at the vast, diverse majority of the protesters. This is what democracy looks like. We cannot let politicians use the protests as an excuse to back reactionary “law and order” measures. Instead, we must march and vote together for policies that will lift up the whole and ensure the justice that makes true peace possible.
Before the summit convened, it was already clear that rich governments would not be placing the needs of refugees and migrants above their narrow national self-interest.
In recent years, powerful alliances of Native American nations and their rural white neighbors have stopped major resource corporations from carrying out their plans, in a common defense of the same land and water they have historically fought over. Last year, tribes and white ranchers and farmers, who had joined forces in the Cowboy Indian Alliance, blocked the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline
Every year, violence in the home and the community devastates the lives of millions of women.” Even with the possibility of a female. president, the battle for full equality still isn’t over.
It seemed like an odd contrast, the work of a 19th-century socialist on a nuclear-powered submarine, and it led me to create “A Provisional Memorial to Nuclear Disarmament
The latest in a series of scientific reports detailing the disastrous course of global warming, “Explaining Ocean Warming: Causes, Effects and Consequences,” concludes that the mean global ocean temperature will increase by as much as 4 degrees Celsius by 2100
There are similarly devastating impacts of markets, including not only worsening economic meltdowns (e.g. 1998, 2000-01, 2008) but also the ideology now known as the financialization of nature, which is based on the view that a market problem, like the threat of extinction posed by poachers, can be treated best with a market solution
The uproar continues over San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to sit down, rather than stand, during the playing of the National Anthem. Kaepernick said his decision was intended to protest the continued injustices being inflicted on Black people, including police brutality and killings. Though the negative tide has turned somewhat, his protest was Read more…
To force the VA to use its drugs, Big Pharma set up dummy foundations and turned to existing veterans’ organizations for support
It’s easy to say, “Let’s strike back with violence”—police repression, carpet-bomb them to oblivion (Ted Cruz), etc.—very much what al-Qaeda and ISIS have hoped for, and very likely to intensify the problems,
It’s all to the good that Our Revolution is encouraging progressives around the country to plan far ahead for effective electoral races, whether for school board, city council, state legislature or Congress
The Obama Doctrine is Ravaging the Middle East



