Recent ZMagazine

In the late 1940s, Morton Biskind, a Westport Connecticut physician, began noticing new ailments and new variations on old ailments in both humans he was treating as well as animals in the area.

In 1916, Congress established the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), which today flourishes in some 3,500 American high schools

Events EDUCATION – The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) will host its 25th annual conference in New Orleans, October 1-4. Contact: http://nameorg.org. LGBTQ – The 27th annual Out On Film Festival will take place October 1-8, in Atlanta. Contact: [email protected]; http://outonfilm.org/. IROQUOIS – The 2015 Conference on Iroquois Research will be held October 2-5, Read more…

An old question: is there a vital “workerism,” self-guided and instinctively radical, apart from socialist, communist or other left-wing political groups and can it make great reforms, even hold power in a workplace or city or national state?

America’s illusory two-party system is so badly corrupted and perverted with such lowly debauchery, undermining any semblance of democracy, it is like a reign of terror that has emerged underneath people’s noses. There is no election when both parties are one. It’s Purple Politics buttoned up. Deep down, people understand this rigged system only too well.

John Malkin interviews Chris Hedges about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Occupy movement, Hedges recent book and more.

Jimmy Carter’s illness has prompted an array of retrospectives of the man and his presidency both positive and negative. Missing from many of these commentaries is the fact that his presidency was crucial to the revival of American militarism after Vietnam, even though Carter wants to be remembered as a peace president and spoke out Read more…

On the Saturday before the Sunday of the Pride Parade, the Pride Celebration happened in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza and the surrounding grid of streets. From a stage in front of city hall live music blasted out over rows and rows of canopied booths where it appeared everything was for sale but washers and dryers. Booths purveyed savory ethnic dishes and ballpark food, healthy and not so healthy beverages, clothes, crafts, trinkets, sunglasses, hats, books, posters and miniature icons from India and little pipes

It is a few months short of three years since Hurricane Sandy barreled down on NYC. The flooded subways have new barriers. The submerged hospital generators are back in order. The boardwalks along the shore are up and trod by beachgoers once again. But what of the thousands of poor renters, most on public assistance, who lost their homes that day? I don’t know all their stories. I only know one intimately, and it is not a happy story.

In April 2009, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report leaked to the public entitled “Right Wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” was released within months of President Obama’s inauguration, sketching the broad strokes of a nascent white nationalist backlash

What is yet to enter the public discourse is Western complicity for the circumstances that generate refugees. The contributions of the U.S.-British “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq and the U.S.-British-French “Mission Accomplished” in Libya to the refugee exodus is rarely acknowledged.

When I was a teenager I used to skip class, nestle under a desk in my high school’s library where the school administrators wouldn’t find me and open up a tattered copy of Leaves of Grass. The way Walt Whitman wrote about America was so blithe and idealistic, operatic, and direct that I had to read the words aloud, which I did in a low voice so no one would overhear me

This little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it shine! This past summer, collaborating with Wisconsin activists, we decided to feature this refrain on signs and announcements for a 90-mile walk campaigning to end targeted drone assassinations abroad, and the similarly racist impunity granted to an increasingly militarized police force

we know making money often means subverting the general good as in displacing thousands of poor seniors and moderate-income families from their homes. And that, we must insist, makes it our business.

These nuclear war theme parks are part of a deliberate attempt to trivialize nuclear weapons and to dumb down popular understanding of their environmental and human health legacy

any sensible person should recognize that a U.S. leadership that stands firmly with Saudi Arabia, and had earlier supported Saddam Hussein when he was attacking Iran, couldn’t be expending resources for any democratic objective

What’s behind Obama’s supposed late-presidency epiphany on the evil of racially biased mass imprisonment? What drove the president’s “sudden desire to look like the Great Emancipator” (Margaret Kimberly)—this even while he offers close to nothing in the way of actual liberation

It all began in 1835 when the British Empire sent a German-born naturalist and explorer to conduct geographical research in the South American territory it had colonized and named British Guiana. In the course of his explorations, a map was drawn that well-exceeded the original western boundary first occupied by the Dutch and later passed to British control.

Introducing Big Food: giant corporations that steal land from the world’s poor to profit from current massive corrupt farming subsidies and future global drought

Libya is currently split, politically, between two governments and, geographically, among many armies, militias, tribes and mercenaries. It is a failed state par excellence, although such a designation does not do justice to the complexity of the Libyan case, together with the root causes of that failure.

The presidential campaign season is well underway in the United States, and never in human history will more money be spent to say less. And only 16 more months to go. A perennial favorite of the worst electoral system money can buy is the race among the candidates to be the most in favor of motherhood and apple pie

Jeremy Kuzmarov reviews Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn: “Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine, provides a chilling history of American high-tech-warfare and assassination missions and their pitfalls exemplified in this incident dating to the Vietnam War.”

Mike Reizman reviews Lentil Underground: “if lentils are grown as part of a diverse sequence of crops that keep weed pressure at bay farmers don’t need to use any chemicals.”

Events and book/films of interest to progressives and others

They just wanted to take a bat to them,” said former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, referring to the attitude of European leaders towards debt-laden Greece in February 2010, three months before the country’s first bailout. Geithner, Treasury Secretary from 2009 until 2013, was attending a meeting of the finance ministers and central bankers of Read more…

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015, the Bernie Sanders campaign organized house party meetings across the U.S. One estimate placed the number of meetings at 3,300, with over 100,000 people attending.

These are exciting days in Washington, as the government directs its energies to the demanding task of containing Iran in what Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, joining others, calls “Cold War II. During Cold War I, the task was to contain two awesome forces. The lesser and more moderate force was “an implacable enemy whose Read more…

In 2001, I was hired to help open the Center School, a small school in Seattle Public Schools, and I began teaching the Race Unit in 2002. Drawing in part from a district-wide training on racism called Courageous Conversations, the Race Unit established safe norms for racial dialogue

in the Nicholas Cage film Windtalkers, the Marine Corps strong-armed producers into deleting a scene where a Marine pries gold teeth from a dead Japanese soldier, which was a historically accurate detail

The U.S. military offices usually ask to see the entire script, not just the parts that relate to military involvement and, based on the entire script and the portrayal of the troops, will move it forward in the approval process.

The term “femicidio,” which encompasses the murder of women by domestic violence, in honor killings and in other categories of hate crime, has now entered our everyday language in Argentina. “The cause is our country’s macho culture,”

Earlier this year, the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research (PIPR) interviewed the recently released peace activist, Kathy Kelly

This interview takes place in the aftermath of the South African government release of the investigation into the Marikina massacre in which 34 platinum mine workers, protesting low wages and environmentally unsafe conditions were killed by police.

Serious debates over what the minimum wage should be in various U.S. locales and jurisdictions should start with information on what it actually costs to live in the different places where Americans live.

Despite the saber rattling, the fiery speeches, and all the chest-thumping that has lasted for many years, Israel had lost its battle to lead another regional war against a formidable enemy in the Middle East.

The current situation in Greece resembles the debt peonage that many African countries have been subjected to for decades. They suffered the consequences of the so-called structural adjustment under the supervision of the international finance institutions and the result was economic and social devastation.

It was amusing to see Peter Baker refer to the Democratic Party legislators’ threat to President Obama’s possible “legacy” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), often described in the media as a “free trade” agreement, although Baker here makes it only a “trade deal” (“A Trade Deal And a Legacy,” New York Times, June 15, 2015). Read more…

Given the West’s strategy of co-opting sectarian militias as proxy armies for its coming wars against Libya and Syria at this time, it was clear which of these men would be best suited for resurrecting the old “jihadi”-imperialist alliance. It is no coincidence, then, that just as these wars began to get underway, Bin Laden was taken out and his organization effectively handed over to Zawahiri

Georgia has been illegally and unnecessarily segregating thousands of students with behavioral issues and disabilities, isolating them in run-down facilities and providing them with subpar education, according to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Puerto Rico’s governor may have said the commonwealth’s debt is not payable, but that doesn’t mean Puerto Ricans aren’t going to pay for it. Vulture capitalists are circling the island, ready to extract still more wealth. You may already know the drill: capital is sucked out by corporate interests that pay little in taxes, and speculators swoop in

American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century By Leilah Danielson Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 Review by Staughton Lynd and Andy Piascik American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century is the most comprehensive and thoroughly- researched account of the life of A.J. Read more…

The New York Times is a very good newspaper, except where ideology and party line demands intrude. Unfortunately these intrusions occur often and are of great importance.

The increasingly militarized attacks on rebellious neighborhoods in the U.S. seem more and more like armed forces brought to bear on Palestinians in the Middle East.

Two terrific books have arrived at the same time and serve as complementary entry points to a similar topic. Feminism Unfinished…

Ask 50 people when the capitalist era began, and you’ll probably get close to 50 different answers, ranging from Italy in the 15th century to England in the 18th.

More than 800 migrants died on April 19 this year when their overcrowded boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast. The tragedy sent soaring this year’s Mediterranean death toll which was by then around 1,500

Getting cars off the roads would help combat climate change and improve air quality. Government policy could make this happen. From Acela to Alaska, U.S. train travel offers a practical, affordable, and green alternative to travel by car and plane.

If you were airdropped blindfolded into a strange town and given nothing but a bus ticket, to where would you ride that bus? You might be surprised to learn that there’s only one good answer, and that’s the public library

For several decades, state and local governments have been showering private businesses with tax breaks and direct subsidies based on the theory that this practice fosters economic development and, therefore, job growth. But does it?

Despite the nearly 24-hour-a-day national television coverage of the situation in Baltimore, there was much the media didn’t cover. Some of these omissions, or facts only mentioned once and never repeated, appeared against the media owners’ more right-wing political agenda.