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July/August 2016
Volume 29
Number 7/8

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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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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Esther Vivas: What Remains of All Our Outrage?

However, real change does not come about only through conquering institutions, but through gaining support from a mobilized society. What remains of all our outrage? A regime in crisis, not ready yet to fall, but ready to be reconfigured

Michael Winship: All The Presumptive Nominee’s Men

You will know our presidents and presidential candidates by the company they keep

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Paul Street: Hillary Clinton’s Not-So-Strange Right-Wing Bedfellows

Democratic Hillary Clinton supporters got churlish when they heard media reports last spring that Clinton was favored over Donald Trump by the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch and by leading arch-imperial foreign policy neoconservatives like Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Eliot Cohen. But unpleasant as many mainstream corporate and Clintonite Democrats might find such “strange bedfellow” Read more…

Compiled by Joel Chaffee: Upcoming Events for Progressives

EVENTS   SOCIALISM – The Socialism Conference is scheduled for July 1-4 in Chicago, featuring talks and panel discussions. Contact: [email protected]; http://www.socialismconference.org. CUBA – The 27th Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba is traveling through the US from July 5-15. The Caravan will educate about the important role US citizens can play in lifting the U.S. blockade Read more…

Mateo Pimentel: HISTORY HANDBOOK: Seeing Red: Nixon and the Presidential Election in Chile, 1970

That Nixon facilitated the ousting of Allende via collusion with the Chilean military and Allende’s political enemies comes as no surprise to students of the American war in Vietnam

Rivera Sun: HISTORY HANDBOOK: White Rose Leaflet Campaign, 1942

In June 1942, a pair of German university students formed the White Rose, a German resistance movement that used a series of leaflets to decry Nazi militarism and call for an end to the war.

David Blight: HISTORY HANDBOOK: The First Decoration Day, 1865

Americans understand that Memorial Day, or “Decoration Day,” as my parents called it, has something to do with honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

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Elizabeth Martinez: HISTORY HANDBOOK: Scapegoating Immigrants, 1992

In Los Angeles during the 1992 uprising, many longtime Mexican American residents said, “We’re not the ones rioting, it’s those immigrants”—meaning Mexicans and Central Americans. At a rally where Dolores Huerta was speaking, an African American woman stood and screamed angrily at Huerta, “Go back to Mexico. We need our jobs.” Incidents like theseand there Read more…

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Edward S. Herman: Public Editors & Structural Bias

Sullivan claims that the NYT has and should maintain “abiding attention to society’s have nots.” To the war on labor and decline of labor unions, which they have scanted for years?

William Boardman: “Historic” Empty Suit Visits Hiroshima

The U.S. chose an almost undamaged city full of civilians as the target that would best bring the Japanese to their knees. Now that is something to “ponder,” as Obama suggested, but chose not to do. It doesn’t take much pondering to begin to wonder whether incinerating thousands of civilians might not be a war crime

T.J. Coles: Why The Poor Stay Poor

The devastating wars raging across the Middle East can be explained in large part by America’s commitment to a doctrine of global militarism called “full spectrum dominance

Ellen Isaacs: Migration: A Reflection of Capitalism

The news is full of tragic and shocking stories of the flight of refugees, such as the 12.6 million Syrians internally or externally displaced and 800 drowned this year in the Aegean sea. Today, more desperate refugees are seeking shelter in Europe than at any time since World War II. According to the United Nations Population Council, there were 232 million international migrants worldwide in 2013

Chris Brooks: Long-Term Organizing

Corporate grocery chains are continuing their offensive, with Kroger the latest example. The company wants concessions, even though it doesn’t need them—it’s making record profits and just gave its CEO a handsome raise.

Tom H. Hastings: Field Report from the Dick Cheney Hunting Instruction Manual

I live in a town of suspenders. The police chief is the current best example. He was just suspended for shooting his buddy in the back

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Martha Rosenberg: What Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know About the Opioid Epidemic

Twenty years ago, none of the pain conditions now presented as requiring opioids would have been presented that way. Nor were between 40 and 52 people a day dying from opioids

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Immanuel Wallerstein: Behind Brazil’s Crisis

The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has been suspended from her office while she goes on trial by the Senate. If convicted, she would be removed from office, which is what is meant in Brazil by “impeachment.” Anyone, even Brazilians, who have been trying to follow the last several months of political maneuvering may be excused if they are somewhat confused by the many turns this process has taken

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Ramzy Baroud: Palestine’s Nakba in the Larger Arab Catastrophe

On May 15th of every year, for the past 68 years, Palestinians have commemorated their collective exile from Palestine.

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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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