Recent ZMagazine

One in six Americans say they would personally engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse. That’s about 40 million adults. The fate of the earth may depend on them—and others around the world —doing so.

The walk-in tactic was inspired by North Carolina teachers, who organized a series of these grassroots protests across the state in 2013 against education cuts. Other teacher unions soon picked up the idea

How’s this for bad choices? A recent study by a Harvard group contended with the position of U.S. intelligence agencies that tracking possible terrorists was becoming more difficult because there are too many “dark spots”—places where data can be encrypted to prevent tracking.

We can neither forgive nor ignore the way 400 years of white supremacy have been naively reduced to whether a candidate will disavow the support of a hate group leader. Racism lives on in policies that perpetuate racial disparities, with or without the KKK.

Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, who rose to prominence as a union leader among coca farmers and as a dissident congressperson, has won three general elections, including a 2014 victory with over 60 percent of the vote, and is now in his tenth year in power

The U.S. and Russia are now engaged in a new game of nuclear chicken in Europe and the Middle East, with the ever-present danger that one side or the other will miscalculate, or that an accident will trigger a nuclear exchange.

The horrific details of the injustice and torture visited upon Kalief Browder has brought a much-deserved spotlight on the system. In the spring of 2010, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Browder was arrested for a robbery he maintained he didn’t commit

Events, books, films

Lots of American industrialists have skeletons in the family closet. Charles and David Koch, however, are in a league of their own.

Far-right forces are on the move in and out of the U.S.

CIA destabilization operations have assumed many forms. First is the outright murder of political leaders. Second, and also familiar, are the direct conspiracies with terrorists, mercenaries or (usually) military factions within a country to disrupt or overthrow a government in disfavor

Indigenous communities have been disproportionately impacted as approximately 75 percent of AUMs are located on federal and tribal lands. A majority of AUMs are located in 15 western states with the potential to impact more than 50 million people.

Organized labor should develop its own plan for expanding jobs by meeting the Paris climate goals. Such a plan can take as its starting point the “Clean Energy Future” report and similar studies.

In the U.S., the shadow government represents the capitalist class—made up of extremely wealthy plutocratic families—its hierarchal values and vested interests, not rank and file Americans.

Pretty much all Republicans, and too many Democrats, buy into the notion that ISIS is a serious threat to the United States. Of course it’s not, as the President reminded us, before pretty much contradicting himself and arguing the need for the U.S. to wipe out ISIS. Why?

For the Bundys, then, nothing really happened before the 1870s. They do not mention Spanish explorers in 1532 or French Canadian trappers, or the British occupation after the war of 1812 or Oregon statehood in the 1850s.

At the core of the systemic fragility-global instability relationship, it was argued, is a fundamental and defining shift in global capitalism in the 21st century: a shift toward investing increasingly in financial assets and securities, which in turn has been responsible for growing financial instability

OK, carpet bombing is bombing an entire area, including homes, schools, and clinics. It is illegal under international law—that the U.S. has signed and ratified—making it the supreme law of the land, even recognized by—OMG—Fox News. Ted Cruz wants to be a war criminal. I wish him luck, but he needs to be questioned right Read more…

If Hillary Clinton was Queen of Chaos, Obama is surely King. Iraq, Libya, and Syria have been reduced to a chaotic state, and Obama has a heavy responsibility for these developments. There was also Obama’s widening use of drone warfare and declared right and intention to bomb any perceived threat to U.S. “national security” anyplace on earth.

More than anything, Flint and our whole nation desperately need a revitalized movement to ensure that public health decisions—and indeed all decisions of public concern—are made with full democratic scrutiny by those who will be affected

What if instead banks became a public utility with an end to speculation? Proposals are being floated in the U.S. to create state banks, perhaps on the model of the successful Bank of North Dakota

the B61 Model 12. This redesigned nuclear weapon is the country’s first precision-guided atomic bomb, with a computer brain and maneuverable fins that enable it to more accurately target sites for destruction. It also has a “dial-a-yield” feature that allows its handlers to adjust the level of its explosive power

Despite what you have heard, the cause of our current heroin epidemic is not as simple as doctors overprescribing narcotics

The U.S. invaders of Iraq in 2003 proudly announced a “shock and awe” purpose in their opening assault, clearly designed to instill fear; that is, to terrorize the victim population along with the target security forces

When the late Chalmers Johnson introduced the word “blowback” to the analysis of Washington’s relations with the rest of the world…he saw as the most dangerous blowback the destabilization of American democratic processes by the multiple consequences of Washington’s adventures abroad.

The world the diplomats inhabit couldn’t be farther removed from the places where the impacts of continuing climate chaos are felt the most. In that world, people are working harder year by year to grow food and sustain their lives in the face of an increasingly unstable global climate.

When I was stationed in Iraq with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines from 2003-2005, I didn’t know what the repercussions of the war would be, but I knew there would be a reckoning.

I have a number of interesting stories, but will just recount two here, the first involving a French student, and the second Dwight D. (“Ike”) Eisenhower, Allen Dulles and Harry S. Truman.

Vine’s book brings up to date the work of the late Chalmers Johnson, who exposed the extent of the military base network and its contribution to “blowback” in his trilogy on the American empire.

The story of how southerners flouted Brown v. Board of Education is familiar, but the disregard that white residents and community leaders in Prince Edward County had for black children is breathtaking

For advocates of women’s reproductive rights, 2015 was the definition of “annus horribilis”: marked by tough new limits on abortion, a debilitating Planned Parenthood scandal, and a shooting at a Colorado clinic that left three people dead.

Having absolute authority to take ameliorative steps on their own initiative, the plunderers swamp the credulous media with claims that an unwieldy conference with a track record of 23 years of failure is the only possible way to find a solution to the dangers of climate change.

Kevin Zeese has long amazed me because of the number of things he does to make a better world

Tens of thousands of young Americans were inspired by the lunch counter sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina and spread throughout the South. NSM Students at Yale University were no exception and some of them got together in the Fall of 1961 to form the NSM.

Street medic groups have been on the front line of many groundbreaking movements, from the Civil Rights and New Left movements, to modern day movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring

Republican candidates for president Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, as well as other bigots on the far right are nothing new in American history. Rather, they remind us of the worst and most shameful detours of the American Republic in the past.

A study released at the beginning of December by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) reported that America’s 20 wealthiest individuals own more wealth than roughly half the American population combined—152 million people.

Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, offers the solution of pouring “hundreds of millions in additional aid into Africa to try to discourage hundreds of thousands of people from heading to the EU.”

Items of interest to progressives

Just as police violence is epidemic, so is the cover up of such violence. It took more than a year for a video to surface showing how Chicago police brutally murdered African-American 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, shooting him 16 times

We should mention that neo-Nazi organizations have spread in some parts of Europe. The biggest of them is Golden Dawn, which has become the third political force in Greece.

The Big Short provides the narrative for how Wall Street keeps that growth going, with little increase in real value, but lots of high salaries and high living that all count towards GDP.

Celebrate Z’s January 2016 Birthday with a donation; whatever you can afford.

The African People’s Socialist Party USA Plenary will be held January 9-10, in St. Petersburg, FL.

Taylor argues that, yes, America can be racist despite Black leaders, and, in fact, such superficial gains for Blacks mask far-reaching structural discrimination in housing, education, employment, and policing.

An important feature of Weisbrot’s analysis is his recognition of the extent to which policy failures have flowed from biased analyses that serve a small elite and punish the majority, and that policy successes have often followed the loss of power by those serving elite interests

Ness’s analysis of the changing composition of class relations between workers and capital is exclusively concentrated on industrial workers in order to contest myopic claims of the declining relevance of the working class.

Suffragette is the first film to depict a women’s movement with major Hollywood stars. And Gavron’s introduction, Skyped in at the preview, was superb, emphasizing global women’s struggles and class and race inequality as well as the historical fight for suffrage

By 1912, the Socialist Party, with Debs as its presidential candidate, was a force to be reckoned with. In speech after speech, Debs set crowds ablaze.

The terrorist attacks in Paris are a chronicle foretold, an expected blowback of French militarism and adventurism in the Middle East and France’s too long inability to integrate its Islamic young population, the largest one in Europe