Recent ZMagazine

Sexual assault is not a women’s issue; it’s a community issue, and men, ready or not, we have to break our silence

do we want a feminism for the 99 percent? Or a feminism of the 99 percent? And how can we know Clearly what we need now is a very big and powerful women’s movement, a united front of women, with room for different interests and organizations and politics.

The U.S. Government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global order, but the only rule Untitled-1daviesWashington seems to follow is “might makes right”—

  Events NUCLEAR – The conference: Dismantling the Nuclear Beast: Connecting Local Work to the National Movement, December 1-3, is a symposium organized by the Nuclear Issues Study Group at the University of New Mexico’s Hibben Center in Albuquerque, NM. Contact: 879-8547; protectnewmexico@gmail.com; https://nuclearnewmexico.com/.  JUSTICE – The 7th Annual Conference of The Historical Dialogues, Justice Read more…

Until Trump moved into the White House, however, senior military officers in the Pentagon were speaking openly of the threats posed to American security by climate change and how that phenomenon might alter the very nature of their work.

There is enormous public support for drug pricing reform, with national polls showing that 77 percent of Americans consider drug prices to be unreasonable.

Take the very nature of corporations. They’re based on what’s called “limit liability,” meaning if you’re a partner in a corporation and the corporation carries out mass murder, the participants aren’t guilty of it. So corporate mass slaughter is a huge phenomenon

More than four decades past the end of that imperialist adventure, having a serious discussion about it remains taboo.

The facts of the case portray a misogynist environment at West Point, a Hudson Valley institution that trains future military officers

Trump has introduced his long-awaited tax cut, estimated between $2.0 to $2.4 trillion. Like so many other distortions of the truth, Trump claimed his plan would benefit the middle class, not the rich—the latest in a long litany of lies by this president. Contradicting Trump, the independent Tax Policy Center has estimated that in just Read more…

Mindless obedience has long been a goal of self-appointed patriots, wrapping themselves in the flag to defend indefensible domestic injustice or criminal wars (both of which we have more than our share these days). There is no meaning in the demand to “respect” any abstract symbol, much less one as drenched in horrifying contradiction as the American flag

In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, as in the wake of all the high-profile mass shootings that preceded it, the big question looms: Why?

The “dreamers,” young recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, more than anyone are the true children of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) —they have paid the price for the agreement. Yet they are the ones punished by the administration of President Trump

Since last November many of us in many places in the U.S. have heightened dreams of secession, of new nation-states, new sovereignty.

Beneath highly visible mobilizations, grassroots and municipal forms of opposition to Trump are also taking shape. Under the banner of “sanctuary cities,” community-based organizations, faith groups, legal advocates, workers’ centers and engaged citizens have been setting up crisis networks to support immigrant families

Hundreds of residents gathered in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in Saint Paul for a rally to “Hold the Line” against a pipeline project called Line 3.

Afghanistan is evidence of the never-ending policy of full spectrum dominance sought by the U.S. empire

The most reliable guide to understanding neoliberalism is Jack Rasmus’s book, Central Bankers on the Ropes, which examines the fundamental role of central banks in our current savage global economy.

The vicious assault on counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia by a volatile amalgam of Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Alt-Right and other white nationalist forces was one of the most horrific acts of domestic terrorism in American history

Trump’s administration is contributing to social calm and order by setting out to give local police more military weapons, from armored troop carriers to grenade launchers.

Studies have shown that doctors who have received payments from pharmaceutical companies are more likely to prescribe those companies’ medications. But pharmaceutical companies go far beyond wining and dining doctors, or paying them speaking fees. They organize “patient advocacy” groups that pretend to be grassroots organizations

PepsiCo is the world’s second-largest snacks producer. It makes Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, Gatorade and Tropicana products in more than 200 countries, and holds at 84 on Forbes’s World’s Largest Public Companies, right behind Amazon. In 2016, it had a market value of $159.4 billion and employed an estimated 264,000 workers. It should come as no surprise that when PepsiCo shut down on June 20, the workers held an assembly and voted to resist.

Leaders of the United States know that they bear significant responsibility for the violence in Mexico

The alt-right is self-named. The alt-right also invented the term “alt-left” as a term with no specific meaning other than to label whoever the alt-right considers an enemy

The fact is that the U.S. Government has borrowed some $3 Trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund, money now owed by Uncle Sam to millions of working Americans. Social Security is only broke if Uncle Sam defaults on its debts to us. The debt to Social Security is less than 20 percent of the total U.S. Government’s debt.

If we truly want to challenge racism, oppression, and inequality, we should turn our attention away from the few hundred marchers in Charlottesville and towards the real sources and enforcers of our unjust global order. They are not hard to find.

In a recent New York Times survey only 36 percent of U.S. adults could correctly locate North Korea on an unlabelled map. Yet according to a recent poll (Chicago Council on Global Affairs) 75 percent of Americans believe that North Korea’s nuclear program is a critical threat to the United States.

As early as 1998, Cedice Libertad, Atlas’s flagship think tank in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, received regular financial support from the Center for International Private Enterprise. In one grant letter, NED funds marked for Cedice are listed to help advocate ‘a change in government.’

A blatant double standard can be seen when we compare coverage of Kagame and leaders who have been defiant of the West such as the late Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Several years back, I led a team of authors drafting articles of impeachment against then-President George W. Bush for then-Congressperson Dennis Kucinich. We drafted over 60 and settled on the best 35. Had Congress moved forward, it would not have passed all 35 or convicted on them. But we felt it was important to establish the record and present the options

Effectively, this “executive order” served-up a wish list that would have been compiled by any real estate mogul who doesn’t want any government agency or public group to come between him, his building, and his bottom line. In the name of building more useful infrastructure executive order is designed to let developers skirt environmental regulations, and most likely, labor, health, and safety regulations as well. The Executive Order will make it a lot easier to build more Trump towers in flood plains, but do little or nothing for the country’s true infrastructure needs.

Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, has been reduced to rubble. It has been finally conquered, snatched back from the notorious group, Daesh, after months of merciless bombardment by the U.S.-led war coalition, and a massive ground war. But “victory” can hardly be the term assigned to this moment. Mosul, once Iraq’s cultural jewel and model of co-existence, is now a “city of corpses

Five years ago, my wife and I moved to Richmond, CA and soon learned about the local emergency response protocol known as “shelter in place.” When large fires break out in Bay Area refineries, like the century old Chevron facility near our house, first a siren sounds. Then public officials direct everyone nearby to take Read more…

Events and other items of interest to progressives

FILM FESTIVAL – The Seattle Social Justice Film Festival will be held November 16-21 in venues around Seattle.

What happened in 1967 was that the police attacking an after-hours place encapsulated what was happening in the city every night. State power was pushing hard on a Black community—but that community wasn’t passive, but dynamic, full of ideas and energy.

Contrary to many critiques of rising debt levels since 2009, it is not the level of debt itself that is the problem and the harbinger of the next financial crash. It is the inability to pay for the debt, the principal and interest on it, when the next recession occurs

So far at least 10 states (as well as Puerto Rico) and more than 200 cities have committed themselves to work toward the environmental goals of the Paris Accord, just as the United States as a nation had promised to do before Trump trashed the deal

The Sanders campaign showed that a candidate with mildly progressive (basically New Deal) programs could win the nomination, maybe the election,

The United States outclasses Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, in both the number, and frequency of resort to violence, in their interventions in foreign elections.

The Pentagon’s new playbook to recruit soldiers from high schools across the country. In brief, the military has been engaged in a robust lobbying campaign to lower academic standards to make it easier to recruit youth.

Civil asset forfeiture is tantamount to policing for profit, generating millions of dollars annually that the agencies get to keep

In the last five years alone, corporate CEOs received percentage pay increases nearly double that of the U.S. workforce. This enormous and rapidly growing economic inequality between bosses and workers can certainly be challenged on the basis of social justice.

Today’s GOP is devoting itself to overthrowing the U.S. government and wants corporations to have more control—long a dream of the party that became known as “the party of big business.”

What’s appalling, Mr. President, is that the moves you envision diminish us as a nation, remove all traces of grace and charity, play to the basest instincts and demean the high office you hold.

Not only does North Korea pose no serious threat now, its hypothetical future threat is largely imaginary. Whatever military might North Korea has is unlikely to be used outside its own country unless the U.S. or someone else attacks it first.

Although the American Health Care Act (AHCA) of 2017 is rife with problems, one of the most disturbing is its shocking gender bias. But why should we be shocked that the AHCA, or “Trumpcare,” privileges males, as it was crafted by a group of privileged males

A basic problem of housing is that housing is a commodity instead of a human right. We’re not accustomed to seeing housing as a basic right for everybody, but why isn’t it?

As if he has, overnight, been transformed into a master politician, Donald Trump’s 27-hour trip to Israel has left many analysts mystified.

The one barrier to the threat of destruction is an engaged public, an informed, engaged public acting together to develop means to confront the threat and respond to it. That’s been systematically weakened, consciously.