Recent ZMagazine
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The global war on terror sledgehammer strategy has spread jihadi terror from a tiny corner of Afghanistan to much of the world, from Africa through the Levant and South Asia to Southeast Asia. It has also incited attacks in Europe and the United States. The invasion of Iraq made a substantial contribution to this process, much as intelligence agencies had predicted
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The United States has been intervening and fighting wars abroad almost continuously since World War II. This has involved frequent aggressions, using standard definitions of the word, with many of them extremely destructive. But these cannot be designated “aggression” in our well-honed propaganda system
The “woman card.” It’s so much nonsense. Donald Trump is merely the latest to accuse a woman of playing identity politics because she, well, actually discussed the fact that the U.S. still has much to improve in terms of gender equality.
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The recent 0.5 percent growth rate is the latest in a steady declining U.S. GDP growth trend over the past year.
There’s only one way to make sure no more young girls are body-slammed by uniformed officers
What are the systemic challenges to democratic and equitable control over public space? What kind of popular mobilizations can build towards systemic alternatives guaranteeing the human right to housing?
WHISTLEBLOWING – June 1-7 is International Week to Support Whistleblowing. Events and actions are planned all over the world. Contact: Stand Up For Truth, c/o Institute for Public Accuracy, 980 National Press Building, Washington, DC 20045; 202-347-0020’ [email protected]; http://standupfortruth.org. JUSTICE – The Justice Conference will be held in Chicago, June 3-4. The Justice Conference is Read more…
Early in Exposed, his fascinating and disturbing new book on surveillance, social media, and the state, Columbia University legal scholar and critical theorist Bernard Harcourt includes two illustrations
Sally Denton’s book The Profiteers, demonstrates that the Bechtel Corporation—which spent an estimated $6.2 million in political contributions and $6.2 million in lobbying during the last election cycles—should be in the same class of villains.
The official Pentagon budget for 2015 was $596 billion, but actual spending is far higher.
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By now, I can tell that the kids are truly paying attention, so I let it all out. “The Taliban had surrendered a few months before I arrived in Afghanistan in late 2002, but that wasn’t good enough for our politicians back home and the generals giving the orders. Our job was to draw people back into the fight.”
Sounds a little like a joke (and in a sense it is): Two U.S. senators introduce a resolution based on fraudulent representations of reality, seeking to make the president insist that the Saudis bomb fewer civilians in Yemen
New information emerged recently about toxic contamination from chemicals used to manufacture Teflon pots and pans and many other consumer, military, and industrial products
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Never underestimate the global myopia and indifference that lurks beneath the surface of the United States’ supposedly Leftist higher educational system
Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the renowned anti-war activist, award-winning poet, author and Jesuit priest, who inspired religious opposition to the Vietnam war and later the U.S. nuclear weapons industry, died at age 94, just a week shy of his 95th birthday
The Panama Papers show us, once again, that capitalism is a system of absolute greed. It is a system where capitalist governments help their mates to hide their income and wealth while all the time businesses pretend they are paying their “fair share” of taxes.
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On the night of April 22, three days after the presidential primary, seven words buried at the end of a Times Union blog let slip the fact that Sanders had won the 20th Congressional district
In just over a dozen words, the paper managed not only to trivialize everything two presidential candidates stood for, and not only to reference the myth that Nader caused Al Gore to lose an election he didn’t in fact lose, but also to obliterate the last six months of a presidential campaign that had permanently shaken up the political status quo
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the Left is the movement that is in favor of all decent things—freedom, justice, peace. Of course we have to define it for ourselves, but traditionally it’s the movement that’s been in favor of more freedom, more justice, more equality, more participation, more control over our own lives—all decent things. That’s the Left.
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In Part 1, I began with a case where the New York Times belatedly acknowledged that it had failed to print news fit to print, news which, not coincidentally, contradicted a party-line theme the editors had enthusiastically and uncritically supported five years earlier
Moore tells the history of how racial segregation came about here and considers a variety of ways through which it might be reversed
Over the last months France has been rocked by mass protests, occupations, and strikes
The war on terror’s methods of mass surveillance and remote warfare are not unique. The U.S. is also addicted to covert tools in its “war on drugs,” with disastrous consequences. In April 2015, USA Today broke a story with the headline: “U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades.” At first glance, it appeared to Read more…
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It’s not very often that you hear or see a salaried corporate media operative defend Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Cuban Revolution and its accomplishments. That’s why I did a double take when I read an opinion piece titled “Cuba’s Success Lost in Media Frenzy”
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The irony of the Krugman/Gang of Four attack is that Sanders’s proposals represent what were once Democratic party positions and programs—positions that have been abandoned by the party and its mouthpiece economists since the 1980s as it morphed into a wing of the neoliberal agenda.
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Thirteen years after the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is worth considering its full impact on this country and on the region. Bush-Cheneyism had a number of key pillars
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Even Bernie Sanders, now the nation’s foremost critic of big money in politics, seems taken aback by the scale of Chevron spending on Bates’s behalf.
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Ever so often we see an explosion of protest that propels an urgent issue to the fore of public debate
When it comes to global warming, what else don’t we know? What science does know, and what it can infer from studying archeological records, already makes anybody who thinks the long-term habitability of Earth is more important than short-term profits very worried.
Most observers think Sanders is on a quixotic quest and, with Wall Street’s political power, the chances of any revival of Glass-Steagall are, like his election to the presidency, slim. Yet Sanders has a strong argument, one that can be effectively made using Citigroup
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Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed the Bikini island.
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Because the recent shootings at the Peachtree Mall in Columbus, Georgia haven’t been blamed on Muslims, they’ve never been described in the press as acts of “terror,” in fact, they haven’t received much national attention at all. But they have stimulated a good deal of frightened commentary in the affected region, much of it depressingly Read more…
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The new film narrated by Roger Waters, The Occupation of the American Mind, traces the rise of Israeli war propaganda in the United States. This propaganda, which has skillfully swayed U.S. public opinion in support of Israeli wars and occupations, has in fact been not so much a matter of skill as a matter of Read more…
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On a cold winter’s night in December 2014, the police officer who maintain that Allen Locke lunged at him with a knife, killed Locke inside his house at Lakota Community Homes in Rapid City, North Dakota. No charges were filed against the officer
Events and other items of note for progressives
“If Trumbo has a weakness,” writes Tim Cogshell, “it’s the film’s failure to convey the depth and breadth of the Red Scare. Or the fact that it forever diminished America as an idea. America was less after the blacklist and that diminishment can be seen in the myriad investigations.”
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The daily front page claim by the management of the New York Times that they provide “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is comical in its audacious scope. “All” covers an awful lot of ground, and if pressed the editors might even concede that something “fit to print” might occur in places not covered by their journalists or correspondents
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One could suggest that Nicaragua and its people are suffering more than anything else from a collective trauma
The state of Texas passed a campus carry law that is set to take effect on August 1, 2016. Already, professors at the University of Houston were told that once the new law is effective, they might want to “be careful discussing sensitive topics,” “drop certain topics from your curriculum”
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Poll after public opinion poll in the U.S. today consistently show that U.S. voters overwhelmingly share the opinion that big money billionaires and their corporations were increasingly dominating U.S. elections.
Free Listings
Court-watchers have come to accept, since at least the early 1990s, that the Supreme Court has been dominated by conservative Justices. This resulted from too few Democratic presidents and the good fortune that Republican presidents had in appointing more than their fair share of Justices
I had a sense of the danger our Mexican and Central American brothers and sisters must feel as I stumbled through the uneven and gravelly scrub full of mesquite, yucca, cactus and other spiny vegetation
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Each stage in Afghanistan’s tragic 40-year history of intervention—the 1980s covert war, the 1990s civil war, and the U.S. occupation since 2001—helped transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state
While escaping their country of origin, people risk their lives traveling through contested parts of their country or over roads controlled by militias or warlords known to capture and kill people because of their ethnicity or religious sects
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Oddly, the Arabism of the Arab Spring was almost as if a result of convenience. It was politically convenient for western governments to stereotype Arab nations as if they are exact duplicates of one another, and that national sentiments, identities, expectations and popular revolts are all rooted in the same past and correspond with a precise reality in the present.
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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.
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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.