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June 2016
Volume 29
Number 6

ZMAG MISSION

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Z Magazine is an independent monthly magazine founded in 1988. Our mission is to publish in depth articles that critique society's political, economic, social life and institutions. We see the race, class, and gender dimensions of personal life as equally important in understanding current circumstances and as necessary for developing visions and strategies for progressive change.

 

 

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DONATIONS

We survive through income from paid subscriptions, sales of videos and books, online Sustainers, individual donations. and periodic fundraising. We are non-profit, tax exempt under the Institute for Social and Cultural Communications. We are currently in dire need of funds. To donate by mail, send checks payable to Z Magazine, 215 Atlantic Ave, Hull, MA 02045 (508- 548-9063). To donate online go to: www.zcommunications.org and become a Sustainer.

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Recent ZMagazine

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Noam Chomsky: The Costs of Violence

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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Edward S. Herman: Foreign Engagement v. Aggression

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

Laura Finley: Changing the Conversation About the “Woman Card”

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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Jack Rasmus: Is the U.S. Economy Heading for Recession?

The recent 0.5 percent growth rate is the latest in a steady declining U.S. GDP growth trend over the past year.

Karen Dolan: It’s Time to Get Cops Out of Schools

There’s only one way to make sure no more young girls are body-slammed by uniformed officers

Tony Romano: We All Have a Right to the City

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?

Compiled by Joel Chaffee: Free Listings

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…

Eric Laursen: Exposed

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

Jeremy Kuzmarov: The Profiteers

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.

Pete Dolack: Capitalism’s Fuel

The official Pentagon budget for 2015 was $596 billion, but actual spending is far higher.

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Rory Fanning: The War in Our Schools

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.”

William Boardman: Saudies Should Kill Civilians More Slowly…?

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

Sharon Kelly: Toxic Teflon

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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Paul Street: Kagame Visits Harvard

Never underestimate the global myopia and indifference that lurks beneath the surface of the United States’ supposedly Leftist higher educational system

John Dear: The Life And Death of Daniel Berrigan

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

John Passant: Panama Papers: Capitalism Working for the Obscenely Rich

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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Lawrence Wittner: Getting the Story Wrong: The Distortion of Politics by the Press

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

Robert Koehler: Opening the Closed Political Culture

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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Noam Chomsky: All Decent Things

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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Edward S. Herman: News Fit to Print But Not Printed, Part Two

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

Patrick T. Reardon: The South Side

Moore tells the history of how racial segregation came about here and considers a variety of ways through which it might be reversed

Sam Cossar-Gilbert: #NuitDebout

Over the last months France has been rocked by mass protests, occupations, and strikes

Esther Kersley: Drones, Drugs, & Death

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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Paul Street: Obama in Cuba

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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Jack Rasmus: Neoliberal Economists v. Bernie Sanders

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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Juan Cole: With Us Or Against Us?

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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Steve Early: The Last Hurrah in Richmond?

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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Mark Engler: Claiming Our Victories

Ever so often we see an explosion of protest that propels an urgent issue to the fore of public debate

Pete Dolack: No Planet for Optimism

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.

Edward Morris: Why Bernie’s Right About Glass-Steagall

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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John Pilger: A World War Has Begun

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed the Bikini island.

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Michael Lesher: Blindness of Privilege

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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David Swanson: Israeli Lies Fall As Corporate Media Falls

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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Bill Berkowitz: Native Americans : America’s Invisible People

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

Compiled by Joel Chaffee: Free Listings

Events and other items of note for progressives

Margot Pepper: Living With Trumbo Under The Blacklist

“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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Edward S. Herman: News Fit to Print But Not Printed, Part One

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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Leonidas Oikonomakis: Nicaragua and the Ghosts of Revolution

One could suggest that Nicaragua and its people are suffering more than anything else from a collective trauma

Laura Finley: Stifling Academic Freedom the NRA Way

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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Jack Rasmus: Money And the U.S. Presidential Elections

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.

Compiled by Joel Chaffee: Free Listings of Events and New Book/Film Releases

Free Listings

Stephen Bergstein: Scalia’s Judicial Legacy

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

Ken Jones: Walking the Migrant Trail

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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Alfred W. McCoy: America’s Opium War in Afghanistan

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

David Rosner: A Swollen River of Refugees

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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Ramzy Baroud: Plan B: Dividing the Arabs

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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Jeremy Brecher: A New Wave of Climate Insurgents

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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Samantha Winslow: Teachers Hold Walk-in Protests in 30 Cities

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

Mel Gurtov: Dark Spots, Light Spots, and Apple’s Protest

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.

William Barber: Why It’s Possible to Reject the Klan and Still Support Racism

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.

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