ZNet, January 26, 2015. Nobody who is familiar with the case of Milton Hall – shot to death by 8 police officers on July 1, 2012 in Saginaw, Michigan – should be surprised that the US Justice Department will not be bringing any charges against Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot Mike Brown, [...]
In the wake of the recent release of the powerful movie “Selma,” an intra-Democratic debate of sorts has emerged over the history of a key triumph of the Civil Rights Movement half a century ago –Voting Rights Act, which granted previously disenfranchised Black Americans the right to vote in the southern US states that had [...]
I am not one of those bookish and arrogant leftists or liberals who self-righteously denounces mass spectator sports as inherently authoritarian and proto-fascistic. I’m in the David Zirin camp, you might say – a relatively sports-friendly leftist (with the exception of US football) who sees nothing necessarily terrible about the barroom conversation turning from the [...]
TeleSur English/ZNet, January 14, 2015 Selective Sympathy and Scale The murder of seventeen French civilians including five cartoonists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris was a horrific crime. It must, of course, be condemned. At the same time, there are far bigger crimes than last week’s Paris killings, which elicited giant demonstrations [...]
In an important Occupy-inspired essay published on Tomdispatch.com in May of 2012, the leading US Left intellectual Noam Chomsky argued that if the global environmental catastrophe created by anthropogenic climate change “isn’t going to be averted” soon, then “in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter.” Chomsky was writing for leftists and progressives, a group [...]
Z Magazine, January 2015. Throughout its coverage of the dramas sparked by the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City—and by the Grand Jury non-indictments of their killers—U.S. corporate media has framed the racial issue at stake as about how police carry out their tasks, how they [...]
TeleSur English, January 3, 2014 The government isn't listening to your phone calls, except when it is Often it’s the “oh by the way” stories or sources buried at the end of a news article or report or in the endnotes or hyperlinks of an essay or book that knock you out – and help [...]
ZNet, January 4, 2015. Years ago I worked as a Research Director (I even had to wear a suit) for a fading corporate- and City Hall-captive urban non-profit social services and civil rights agency. The organization’s wealthy and long-term CEO was notorious for drunkenness and other forms of dissipation (including frequent agency-funded trips to elite [...]
ZNet, December 30, 2014 One of the more chilling accomplishments of “mainstream” United States (US) media and politics culture is the way it paints the US “homeland” and its agents of imperial “force projection” as the real and worthy victims of global violence – not the vast swath of anonymous and unworthy victims that Uncle [...]
ZNet, 12/21/2014. What a difference nine days can make in the life and death of a social movement. On the evening of Tuesday, November 25th, 2014, a racially diverse crowd of more than 200 mostly young adults met in the University of Iowa’s scenic Pentacrest to protest the terrible but unsurprising decision of a St. [...]