OCTOBER 2017
Volume 30
Number 10
ZMAG MISSION
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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Commentary
The alt-right is self-named. The alt-right also invented the term “alt-left” as a term with no specific meaning other than to label whoever the alt-right considers an enemy
The fact is that the U.S. Government has borrowed some $3 Trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund, money now owed by Uncle Sam to millions of working Americans. Social Security is only broke if Uncle Sam defaults on its debts to us. The debt to Social Security is less than 20 percent of the total U.S. Government’s debt.
If we truly want to challenge racism, oppression, and inequality, we should turn our attention away from the few hundred marchers in Charlottesville and towards the real sources and enforcers of our unjust global order. They are not hard to find.
In a recent New York Times survey only 36 percent of U.S. adults could correctly locate North Korea on an unlabelled map. Yet according to a recent poll (Chicago Council on Global Affairs) 75 percent of Americans believe that North Korea’s nuclear program is a critical threat to the United States.
As early as 1998, Cedice Libertad, Atlas’s flagship think tank in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, received regular financial support from the Center for International Private Enterprise. In one grant letter, NED funds marked for Cedice are listed to help advocate ‘a change in government.’
A blatant double standard can be seen when we compare coverage of Kagame and leaders who have been defiant of the West such as the late Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Several years back, I led a team of authors drafting articles of impeachment against then-President George W. Bush for then-Congressperson Dennis Kucinich. We drafted over 60 and settled on the best 35. Had Congress moved forward, it would not have passed all 35 or convicted on them. But we felt it was important to establish the record and present the options
Effectively, this “executive order” served-up a wish list that would have been compiled by any real estate mogul who doesn’t want any government agency or public group to come between him, his building, and his bottom line. In the name of building more useful infrastructure executive order is designed to let developers skirt environmental regulations, and most likely, labor, health, and safety regulations as well. The Executive Order will make it a lot easier to build more Trump towers in flood plains, but do little or nothing for the country’s true infrastructure needs.
Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, has been reduced to rubble. It has been finally conquered, snatched back from the notorious group, Daesh, after months of merciless bombardment by the U.S.-led war coalition, and a massive ground war. But “victory” can hardly be the term assigned to this moment. Mosul, once Iraq’s cultural jewel and model of co-existence, is now a “city of corpses
Features
Afghanistan is evidence of the never-ending policy of full spectrum dominance sought by the U.S. empire
The most reliable guide to understanding neoliberalism is Jack Rasmus’s book, Central Bankers on the Ropes, which examines the fundamental role of central banks in our current savage global economy.
The vicious assault on counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia by a volatile amalgam of Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Alt-Right and other white nationalist forces was one of the most horrific acts of domestic terrorism in American history
Trump's administration is contributing to social calm and order by setting out to give local police more military weapons, from armored troop carriers to grenade launchers.
Studies have shown that doctors who have received payments from pharmaceutical companies are more likely to prescribe those companies’ medications. But pharmaceutical companies go far beyond wining and dining doctors, or paying them speaking fees. They organize “patient advocacy” groups that pretend to be grassroots organizations
PepsiCo is the world’s second-largest snacks producer. It makes Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, Gatorade and Tropicana products in more than 200 countries, and holds at 84 on Forbes’s World’s Largest Public Companies, right behind Amazon. In 2016, it had a market value of $159.4 billion and employed an estimated 264,000 workers. It should come as no surprise that when PepsiCo shut down on June 20, the workers held an assembly and voted to resist.
Leaders of the United States know that they bear significant responsibility for the violence in Mexico