Recent ZMagazine

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.

The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.

Globally, movements of movements are working together and this is crucial because it takes everyone to change everything, and we must fight oppression in all its forms, at all times

Now the Trump administration wants to further expand the use of vouchers by creating a $20 billion school choice program. According to The Century Foundation, a think tank dedicated to reducing inequality, Trump’s plan would increase segregation in public schools

U.S historians have no doubt been having a field day with Trump’s reported clueless comments on U.S. history earlier this year. The president’s moronic take on the nation’s past was front-page news in liberals’ and academics’ favorite newspaper, the New York Times

Events SOCIALISM – The Socialism Conference is scheduled for July 6-9 in Chicago, featuring talks and panel discussions. Contact: info@socialismconference.org; http://www.socialismconference.org. LA RAZA – The annual National Council of La Raza (NCLR) Conference is scheduled for July 8-11 in Phoenix, AZ, with workshops, presentations and panel discussions. Contact: NCLR Headquarters Office, Raul Yzaguirre Building, 1126 Read more…

President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement brings greater clarity to the inability of the U.S. government to confront the climate crisis and clarifies the tasks of people seeking smart climate policy.

Instead of something resembling reality, the U.S. is now basing its policy on the mad view of Saudi King Salman

Although the American Health Care Act (AHCA) of 2017 is rife with problems, one of the most disturbing is its shocking gender bias.

It is fitting that while President Trump traveled the world, sealing a weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, he would drop his own kind of bomb on the American people: his budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, titled, of course, “The New Foundation for American Greatness.”

We have seen, in recent days, the very unusual sight of a U.S. President saying nice things about authoritarian leaders while, at the same time, disparaging our democratic allies and friends

while once preaching isolationism, Trump has already expanded hectic, albeit low-profile, Africa Command interventions from the Maghreb across the Sahel to the Horn

From January 2012 to February 2013, those drone attacks in northeast Afghanistan killed more than 200 people, but only about one-sixth of them were the intended targets

No, you can’t really make this stuff up: orthodox economists continue to tell us that the reason for ongoing economic stagnation is that wages and unemployment benefits are too high. Yes, that’s right. You haven’t suffered enough

Witness to the Revolution repeatedly underscores how much vitriol some had to endure as elites attacked both the messengers and the message in the student, vet, Black Power and anti-war movements.

Is it a presidency where he makes his late night calls to his moneybag friends, like the billionaire Mercers and others, to find out “How am I doing guys’’? while the rest of the representatives of the economic and political elite run the show? Is this a Trump presidency or a government by Generals-Goldman Sachs-Pence, with son in law Kushner functioning as intermediary between them

What would happen if a social balance sheet, as well as financial one, had to be filed every year and companies continually in a deficit position would eventually disappear?

There are now 1.4 million children at risk of dying from famine. No one apparently has shown Donald Trump, or his daughter Ivanka, any photos of these at-risk children. So, the U.S. president is comfortably ignoring this statistic.

Israel has resorted to three main strategies to suppress Palestinian calls for justice and human rights, including the Right of Return for refugees. One is dedicated to rewriting history; another attempts to distract from present realities altogether; and a third aims at reclaiming the Palestinian narrative as essentially an Israeli one

Recently U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced that President Trump plans to issue an executive order expanding offshore drilling in areas now off limits, including the Atlantic Ocean and parts of the Arctic.

Young women are leading the most exciting and dynamic aspects of the 21st-century progressive movement, and they’ve been at this for a while now

Whenever there are obvious conflicts within the ruling class, the concept of a Deep State is brought out to explain why our government seems to be coming apart at the seams

Trump takes us for chumps. The Republic is nothing to him but a crap game. And he loads the dice.

The U.S., in the person of General Nicholson, chose to use the weapon with the media-friendly nickname “mother of all bombs,” which of course it isn’t at all, though it does serve very well as a good, shiny-object distraction for the media.

EVENT LISTING: ACTIVIST CAMP – Youth Empowered Action (YEA) Camp will have sessions in July and August in CA, OR, and NY. YEA Camp is designed for activists 12-17 years old who want to make a difference in the world.

Both PR and propaganda seek to change behaviors and ideas among the masses in support of the agendas of public and private institutions.

The incredible rate of recent warming is largely due not to the usual suspect, carbon dioxide, but to the build-up of super-potent methane, which traps 80 to 100 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

The U.S. continues to use DU weapons in the region, at least in attacks on ISIS. Tomahawk missiles, a Raytheon profit center, have long been suspected of delivering a DU payload. So President Trump’s loosing of 59 Tomahawk missiles on Al Shayrat Airfield was answering a chemical weapons attack with a chemical weapons attack. And an act of war against a sovereign nation