Recent ZMagazine
Petras The signing of a peace accord between the guerrilla commanders and the right-wing government in 1992 promised a period of freedom, prosperity, and peace. Overseas donors would contribute funds for reconstruction, reinsertion of combatants, and social reform. The regime would dismantle the repressive apparatuses including the paramilitary death squads and encourage popular participation Read more…
Rapping When Gil Scott-Heron famously sang, back in the 1960s, that "the revolution [would] not be televised," we all knew what he was talking about. Yet, of all the now legendary "errors" we of the generation of 1960s activism made in those zanily hopeful and idealistic days, one of the most trenchant may well Read more…

Sargent Welcome to Hotel Satire, People and you Gals. Its summer and you know what that means. Its time for my semi-traditional article on summer as a dick thing. By the way, I did not come up with this concept, so men out there, dont get all worked up, if you catch my drift. It Read more…

R. Shalom Nineteen ninety-seven is an off-year for mainstream electoral politics in the United Statesthere are no House or Senate races and only two states are holding gubernatorial contestsso considerable national attention will be focused on the New Jersey governors election. The implications of this election may go well beyond the Garden State. Christine Read more…

Holly Sklar Imagine a country where one out of four children is born into poverty, and wealth is being redistributed upward. Since the 1970s, the top 1 percent of families have doubled their share of the nations wealthwhile the percentage of children living in extreme poverty has also doubled. Highlighting growing wage inequality, the Read more…

similar stories many times: A scrappy innovator took on the business establishment and made a fortune. An engineer battled myopic bosses to develop a great new product. A brilliant computer nerd overcame entrenched foes and now heads the firm. Today’s news reports seem to be more focused on mutiny than conformity in corporate suites. Read more…
David Adelson As a member of the Local Advisory Board (LAB) of Pacifica’s KPFK (90.7 FM Los Angeles) I am charged with mediating effective communication between the station and the public. Long-standing rules impede discussion of internal policy over the air, now apparently including a prohibition on announcing events organized to discuss such policy. Read more…
George Wright As this article is being written in early May, the 32-year regime of Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko is coming to an end. A guerrilla offensive carried out by the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire-Congo (ADFL), led by Laurent Kabila, has control of 75 percent of the country, Read more…
Corey Dolgon On April 16, over 100 people gathered to support the Coalition for Justice (CFJ), a group formed by Southampton College (SC) custodians who were recently "contracted out" to a private management company. The coalition is demanding that College administrators cancel the contract and restore custodians as college employees. Over two months ago, Read more…

In any event, at the recent LAAMN meeting there was apparently a lively and productive discussion of the upcoming Congress and how it might be most effective. To start, LAAMN proposes panels on the labor movement, environment, racism and multiculturalism, youth, campuses, etc. In each instance these panels would address how alternative media have been Read more…
Wayne Grytting Advertisers Becoming Literate Major advertisers are "changing the rules of magazine publishing," reports the Wall Street Journal, by breaking down the walls separating ads from editorial content. Now a number of corporations are demanding written summaries of articles before submitting their ads. Recently, Chrysler sent a letter to Esquire, and 100 other Read more…
Bob Harris In the first breath of fresh air a tobacco company has ever provided, Liggett has finally admitted that "cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart and vascular disease, and emphysema." Let’s not stop there. Maybe Liggett will also concede that the only reason they confessed was for the money–limiting their own liability via Read more…

Edward S. Herman The mainstream media carry out their propaganda service on behalf of the corporate and political establishment in many ways: by choice of topics addressed (government rather than corporate abuses, welfare rather than Pentagon waste, Kadaffi rather than Guatemalan state terrorism), by their framing of issues (GDP growth rather than distribution, Fed Read more…
Clara James On April 6, Haiti held elections to fill one-third of the Senate seats and positions on over 500 communal and town councils. The only problem was, most Haitians did not go to the polls. Only about 5 percent of those eligible to vote even bothered. Almost before local commentators could react, Washington Read more…
In January 1997, the international human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, released its seventh annual report on the worldwide condition of human rights. The report, overall, finds human rights conditions bleak and deteriorating. However, the organization, financed by individuals and foundations throughout the world, also finds reasons for hope. According to the report, "…the Read more…

Joel Kovel The linkage between Castro’s Cuba and Mandela’s South Africa runs deep. Cuban slave society was less efficient in demolishing ties to Africa than its North American counterpart, allowing Cuba to retain a strong sense of their parent culture. Accordingly, revolutionary Cuba has held, amidst its many allegiances, to a special affiliation Read more…
Steve Macek Like most cities around the country, Minneapolis and St. Paul used to hand out millions of dollars in public subsidies to local businesses with virtually no strings attached. Companies were free to take taxpayers’ money without hiring a single central city resident. The jobs they generated using that money often paid well Read more…

Christian Parenti In 1964 a tsunami swept over Crescent City, California completely destroying the downtown. Only nine people died, but the townnestled just below the Oregon bordernever recovered. It was rebuilt as a shabby imitation of Southern Californias worst planning examples; empty parking spaces and box-like buildings dominate the landscape. In 1989 another tsunami Read more…
John Potash and Laurel Carpenter Cheri Honkala is a welfare recipient who is co-chair of the National Welfare Rights Union, as well as the leader of Philadelphias Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), a grassroots organization of welfare recipients who have been leading practice civil disobedience with street protests, abandoned housing take-overs, and forming "tent cities." Read more…

Lydia Sargent Gals, there is a controversy raging here at Hotel Satire. Its terrible. Mom gals arent speaking to daughter gals and vice verse. Gals who have been friends for years now wont visit or even phone. What, you ask, has caused such dissension? Im so upset over the whole thing that Im hesitant Read more…
Jenna E. Ziman In cities throughout the world, a silent "war against the poor" is brewing, and control over food distribution is one of its most effective weapons. Food Not Bombs, a non-violent activist organization, is fighting this war by providing free food to homeless people in over 130 cities around the world, and Read more…

Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney are two of the most important critics of the global media scene. A Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a contributor to Z Magazine since its founding in 1988, Edward Herman is the author of numerous books, including a number Read more…

For more than half a century, the United Nations has been the main forum for the United States to try to create a world in its image, maneuvering with its allies to forge global accords about human rights, nuclear tests or the environment that Washington insisted would mirror its own values." So runs postwar Read more…

Ward Churchill As the 20th century prepares to take its rightful place in the dustbin of history, the last vestiges of sovereignty among the more than 300 indigenous nations trapped inside the claimed boundaries of the United States are rapidly sliding into a kind of final oblivion. In one of official Americas supreme gestures Read more…
Rico Cleffi Certain segments of the business media have been buzzing lately over a "controversial" article entitled "The Capitalist Threat," written by billionaire investor George Soros. The article, which was the cover story of Februarys Atlantic Monthly, attacked the irreconcilability of laissez-faire capitalism and "open societies." Recently National Public Radios "Marketplace" (2/23) ran a Read more…
Great news recently from your favorite financial news network: Several U.S. manufacturers have recently announced their intentions to decrease the number of discount coupons they circulate to consumers. Some promised to lower prices as well. Cheaper goods and no more time with scissors. A good deal, right? In her essay "Revaluing Economics," Gloria Steinem Read more…

Picture a beautiful city which has a small neighborhood with nice little pubs and restaurants only five minutes walking distance from the downtown district. Imagine sitting in a chic bistro in that neighborhood, sipping cool draft beer while soft music plays in the background. You are with friends, talking about work, sports, or politics. Read more…
I just saw "Star Wars" again. It’s big fun. But don’t take the kids just yet. You know by now that George Lucas’s stock for this stew was Joseph Campbell puree, which photon torpedoed into our collective unconscious by drawing on cultural archetypes and recycling every old story we’ve ever loved. However, Lucas also Read more…
Genevieve Howe Henri Lara Gutierrez was born in Esteli, Nicaragua in October 1979, three months after the July 19, 1979 triumph of the Sandinista revolution. This year, Henri, like the revolution, will turn 18 years old. In 1989, at the age of ten, Henri was a slender, curly-haired boy who went to school daily Read more…
There is a sinister trend emerging in the area of welfare reform that has gone largely unnoticed by non-poor people: the role of CSD (Childrens Services Department). While CSD is supposed to help children by removing them from abusive and/or neglectful parents, what they have ended up doing in many cases is to define Read more…
On January 14, 1997, representatives from 171 medical, environmental, and activist organizations in the United States and 18 other countriesincluding every major nuclear power except China and Israelsent a letter to President Bill Clinton asking him to overrule a decision by former Energy Secretary Hazel OLeary to process plutonium from nuclear warheads and "burn" Read more…
Ann Pettifer In the grip of yet another spasm of millenarian distemper, the Vatican decided to celebrate the New Year with an excommunication. Excluded from the community of believers for his heretical views was an elderly Sri Lankan priest, Fr. Tissa Balasuriya. Not well known in the west, Fr. Balasuriya has won plaudits in Read more…
Daniel B. Schirmer The Philippine post-Marcos constitution prohibits Fidel Ramos from running for re-election in 1998 when the next presidential vote is scheduled. But leaders of his party, the ruling Lakas-NUCD, are campaigning for a constitutional amendment to extend his term of office for several years. These leaders claim to have secured more signatures Read more…
Something was upthat was the word around campus. Returning from winter break at the end of January, the talk was of some kind of student protest that would wake people up. At least one dean had warned his charges to be prepared for Teaching Assistant work stoppages as the Grad Employees Organization entered it Read more…

Michael Albert I remember debating the potential of the environment as a radical focus back when it was first becoming visible. Most early 1970s radicals felt environmentalism would be the next big spur to activism. Being fried by ozone depletion or gassed by industrial pollutants could certainly yield important activism. But there were skeptical. Elites Read more…

On March 17, after seven years of rebuilding their union, Service Employees Local 399, Los Angeles janitors are leaving it. Together with janitors from Silicon Valley, Oakland, and Sacramento, they are joining to create one of the largest building service unions in the countryLocal 1877. Rosa Ayala, whos been through LAs labor wars as Read more…
The most recent attack on abortion rights is focused on late term abortions. As people debate over the actual number of abortions performed and the different meanings of "late term abortions," "D & X procedure," "third trimester abortions," and "intact D & E procedures," the real issue, the realities of womens lives has been Read more…
Elizabeth A. Hodges On December 4, 1996 Harvard lawyer Laurence Tribe argued to the U.S. Supreme Court that anti-fusion laws are unconstitutional. The ruling is expected late this spring. If he wins, which many expect him to, it will re-landscape third party politics in the United States. Fusion means nominating the same candidate for Read more…

pages South End Press, 1996; $18.00 Reviewed by Christian Parenti Incarceration is becoming one of the defining institutions of American society. Even the half-way politically literate are familiar with the harrowing statistics: more black men in net of prison/jail/probation than in four year colleges; 80 percent of all new federal convictions are for non-violent Read more…

David Peterson Since the Department of Housing and Urban development engineered a federal takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority in late May 1995, CHA tenants have expressed a great many fears about what HUDs role in "reinventing" public housing in Chicago will turn out to be. "The national system of public housing is on Read more…
On January 15 President Clinton announced that Mexico had repaid all of the $12.5 billion it borrowed from Washington to stave off financial collapse and bail out Wall Street speculators. The New York Times (January 16, 1997) reported that "The repayment of the loanthree years ahead of schedulewas marked by a celebration at the Read more…

I was chatting with a feminist in the street the other day. How did I know she was a feminist, you ask? Because she was talking to me without the aid of a male, which was obnoxious, totalitarian, a turn off, and therefore lesbian behavior. Whenever one encounters these man-less gals, the first question Read more…

Seven years ago in these pages, we launched an in-depth investigation of the mainstream environmental movement. The occasion was the widely publicized 20th anniversary of the original Earth Day, an event which in many ways helped institutionalize the widespread corporate co-optation of environmental themes. The year 1990 was an auspicious one for environmental activists in Read more…
A. S. Zaidi I feel a sense of closure," said Energy Secretary Hazel OLeary as she announced a recent settlement awarding $4.8 million to the families of 12 patients injected with radioactive substances in experiments sponsored by the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The legal agreement absolves the federal government of blame. In Read more…

Falling in love with a movie can happen now and then, but how often does a dazzling film like Follow Me Home come along? A film whose politics make the revolution seem possible after all, whose aesthetics are brilliantly unpredictable and whose acting is superb? A film that not only confronts the nightmare of today’s Read more…

David Bacon Since January 14, pitched battles have raged in the streets of Seoul. Outside the Myongdong Cathedral, union leaders have been directing the general strike paralyzing South Korea, and phalanxes of police have tried to disperse thousands of demonstrators. The strike has become, not just a movement of workers, but a pro-democracy movement Read more…
During a state visit to Canada several years ago, President Clinton was asked about the long overtime hours many U.S. and Canadian auto workers are frequently forced to work. He responded fliply: “Where I come from, they call that a high class problem” and went on to suggest that workers should be grateful for Read more…
Workers were a hot item in 1996. Born-again populists of both parties jostled for votes from the anxious and the downsized. Labor was Big again, elevating workers issuesat least ones that contrasted Democrats from Republicansback onto the electoral stage. But the AFL-CIOs $35 million pro-Democrat gambit did nothing to illuminate a massive legal crisis Read more…

Donohue It was a slow news day, just before a major holiday—a good time to release politically sensitive or potentially embarrassing news. Buried in the innards of the December 30 national edition of the New York Times (p. A-9), was a report by Leslie Wayne entitled "Interest Groups Prepare for Huge Fight on Read more…
Deirdre Guthrie In 1994, when I first arrived in Montana to work for Red Thunder Incorporated (RTI), now known as Spirit Mountain Cultural Clan, on the Fort Belknap Native American reservation, environmental racism was a fairly new term. Organ cancer rates among Navajo teenagers living near uranium spills were reported to be 17 times Read more…