Hello

flags

Welcome to ZCommunications. The site has ZNet and ZMag content, topic and place pages under the Focuses link in the top menu - reading lists and whole books, debates, interviews, multimedia, Blogs, comments, a Store, a Sustainer program and more.

Relating to Z

To participate more deeply and generally in ZCommunications, please become a Sustainer. Sustainers who log in will see "+ New" in the black band at the top. Use that to add a blog post. Sustainers can comment on all content! Sustainers, please also upload a photo, using options in the left menu for "Your Account." There you can also change your settings, etc.

You can Help Z in many ways, one time donations, becoming a Sustainer, using our Store, etc. Just click Help Z.

If you have ideas or problems please send them to sysop@zmag.org

 

All Content Types

avatar
Juan Cole: Trump doesn’t Understand History any more than he Understands Epidemics

Professional historians have always been skeptical and the very tools of their profession are seditious, because history teaches us that things could have been different (contingency) and can still be different

Au Loong-Yu: Hong Kong in Revolt

Interview on the development of the protest movement in his place of birth over the past two decades, setting them within the context of broader political trends in mainland China and beyond

avatar
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: North Carolina Nurses Win Union in Landslide After Bitter Opposition

HCA Healthcare had brought in a phalanx of union-busting firms to intimidate nurses into voting no

Zoe Mendelson: Feminists Take Over Federal Building in Mexico City and Use Painting as a Weapon

In protest of femicide, the artists painted over portraits of all-male historical figures hanging in the National Human Rights Commission

avatar
Daniel Ellsberg: U.S. Press Freedom Under Attack in WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Extradition Case

“Now the American press is staring right down the barrel at the use of the Espionage Act against American journalists and publishers for doing journalism.”

Randall Hyman: New Fossil Fuel Projects Meet Indigenous Resistance in New Mexico

“They’ve always put a price tag on our forehead, and just expect us to be quiet”

James Fallows: The Media Learned Nothing From 2016

The press hasn’t broken its most destructive habits when it comes to covering Donald Trump

Alina Stamenova: Why miners in Ukraine’s longest city are holding an underground strike

Under a media blackout, mine workers in Ukraine are refusing to come up from their mines – for wages, better conditions and an end to poor management.

avatar
Jesse Jackson: Myths and Lies About Poverty in America

The recent decision to block action on a second rescue package is a decision to increase the number of Americans in poverty, the number of children who go hungry

Luis Arce: Last November’s Coup Was About Plundering Bolivia’s Resources

Massive protests last month forced Bolivia’s postcoup government to pledge that elections will take place on October 18

avatar
Richard Falk: Is This What Peace Looks Like?

Trump Induced Normalization Agreements with Gulf Monarchies:

Various Contributors: A 10-Point Pledge to Social, Racial and Economic Justice

We will move forward together and we will accept nothing but freedom. We will not take one step back, and we will bring a new day to our beloved country

avatar
Badri Raina: Atrophy

What human work may yield a fruit That outlasts hate, untruth, bigotry, if that work should issue from A soul in crooked jeopardy?

Victoria Theisen-Homer: The “Broken Windows” Approach to Teaching

We cannot continue to promote the same unjust and oppressive educational structures that have endured for centuries

avatar
Norman Solomon: Why the Left Must Reject and Elect Biden at the Same Time

To organize against a government headed by Trump is to push against a thick stone wall. To organize against a government headed by Biden holds out the real potential of progressive breakthroughs

Jack Payden-Travers: Respecting the Dignity of Every Human Being: Reflections on John Lewis

“It can be nothing more than a sad and sorry thing without the presence on the part of the sufferer of a graceful heart, a heart that holds no malice toward the inflictors of his or her suffering.”

avatar
Brian Trautman: The “Wall of Vets” Continue Long Legacy of Veteran Activism

The ‘Wall of Vets’ have demonstrated that they are most certainly continuing that long and important legacy through their peace work

Mel Gurtov: Falling Behind: COVID, Climate Change, and Chaos

When is the last time you read of a company that has actually substantially reduced its carbon emissions, or a bank that has removed its investments in, say, an oil or coal producer? They’re thinking about it, while Rome burns.

avatar
Marjorie Cohn: Congressional Candidates and Voters Sue to Stop Trump’s Sabotage of USPS

We must ensure that Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service end now

avatar
Cal Winslow: California’s Health Care Crisis

Never has it been more clear that our health system is broken

avatar
Noam Chomsky: Trump Is Quite Capable of an “October Surprise”

It’s anything but a sure thing. Election tampering is a huge industry. Massive campaign funding in the last days can have a major effect, as seems to have happened in 2016

M Adams: On Community Control of Police

What we have been naming as community control has to do with Black people in particular being able to determine policies, practice, procedures, as well as hiring and firing of police

avatar
Sonali Kolhatkar: President Trump, Child-Trafficker-in-Chief

While the Department of Homeland Security claimed that MPP would “decrease the… ability of smugglers and traffickers to prey on vulnerable populations,” in fact it does the opposite

avatar
Noam Chomsky: There’s Reason for Hope

The Black Lives Matter movement is the biggest social movement in American history with support beyond anything that’s ever been registered in the past. It’s not alone. It’s a sign of substantial changes in popular consciousness

Abrahm Lustgarten: Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration

Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?

avatar
Norman Solomon: Trump’s Climate Denial Gains Strength If We’re in Denial About His Neo-Fascism

“There are an awful lot of reasons why it is so important for Trump to be defeated and removed from the White House, but I continue to believe that the most important one is the climate crisis”

Manuella Libardi: Amazon heroes who don’t give up

The Guardians of the Forest, a group of indigenous Guajajara in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, struggle to defend their land from invaders and to guarantee their survival in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic

Ari Berman: “Mass Voter Disenfranchisement”

GOP Ramps Up Assault on Voting Rights Across U.S. Ahead of Election

avatar
Dean Baker: Is Repealing Section 230 the Way to Fix Facebook?

We should never be in the position of having to rely on the goodwill of a billionaire to allow democracy to work

Robert Lipsyte: Taking the Next Knee

Is this Athletic Revolt For Real and Is It a Danger to Donald Trump?

Joe Guinan: In and against, and outside, the party

Following major defeats, the left on both sides of the Atlantic must urgently get stuck into community organising, movement building and political education

avatar
Alice Speri: A Progressive Prosecutor Faces Off With Portland’s Aggressive Police

Portland’s new district attorney said he wouldn’t prosecute most protesters. Police kept arresting them anyway.

avatar
Victor Grossman: Which Way, Germany?

ore working-class muscles, politically speaking, might, like those ferrymen long ago, help the divided party to move and grow. It will be needed

Katherine Speller: Women in ICE Detention Centers Were Given Hysterectomies Without Informed Consent

A look into the practices putting immigrants detained in the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) — operated by private prison company LaSalle Corrections — at risk and allegedly irreparably harming their health and freedom

avatar
Juan Cole: As Trump and Iran square off on Venezuela Oil Shipments, will US Go full Pirate of the Gulf?

The purpose would be to ramp up US patriotism ahead of the November election and attempt to get the US public on Trump’s side as a war president

Paul Jay: Who Will Win – a Conscious People or Anti-Democratic Elites?

Interview about the state of the peoples’ movement

avatar
Indigo Olivier: Meet the Students Trying to Organize the First Campus-Wide Undergraduate Union

Inside the groundbreaking student organizing drive at Kenyon College

Brett Wilkins: For Palestinians and Their Supporters, Arab-Israeli Pacts Are ‘A Stab in The Back’

From the West Bank and Gaza to Washington, D.C. and beyond, Palestinians and their allies stress that only an end to Israel’s illegal occupation can bring peace to the Middle East.

avatar
Noam Chomsky: Chomsky, Walker and Ellsberg Defend Julian Assange

Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Ellsberg oppose the extradition of Julian Assange to the US to face charges under the Espionage Act

avatar
Michael Albert: A Class Between Labor and Capital?

What the two class view leaves out, however, is that capitalists are not the only class that has major relative advantages

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II: “Trump Is Criminality Personified”

Interview on protecting the vote and mobilizing the Poor

avatar
Sonali Kolhatkar: In California, We Need to Fight Fire With Fire

Western capitalist approaches have created dangerous conditions in California, but Indigenous communities have managed fire as a natural part of the ecosystem

Peter Gleick: These explosive fires are our climate change wakeup call

Scientists have been warning of the growing threat of climate change, and now those projections are a reality

avatar
Medea Benjamin: A “Persistent Eye in the Sky” Coming to a City Near You?

What are the possible effects on our civil liberties from having high-tech surveillance platforms circling over millions of Americans, gathering information about our every move?

avatar
Joshua Cho: Journalists Need to Be Clear About a Clear Threat to Democracy

It’s important for US media not to propagate the myth of US exceptionalism, which often makes false accusations of “election theft” against Global South countries like Bolivia and Venezuela, and misleads Americans into thinking election theft “can’t happen”

avatar
William rivers Pitt: Every Trump Lie Is a Confession

It is difficult to think straight when the president is ruining your country in real time at the top of his voice and right in your face. That, of course, is the entire point of the exercise

Mattea Kramer: Medicating Isolation

Drug Use in the Covid-19 Moment

Jake Johnson: Climate Catastrophe Is Much More Expensive than Green New Deal

“The Green New Deal is not too expensive because the alternative is far, far more dreadful, more destructive.”

avatar
Patrick Cockburn: America’s War on Terror is the True Cause of Europe’s Refugee Crisis

What we are really seeing in those pathetic half-swamped rubber boats bobbing up and down in the Channel are the thin end of the wedge of a vast exodus of people brought about by military intervention by the US and its allies

Dan Le Batard: Colin Kaepernick’s absence should haunt Roger Goodell and the NFL

We all saw who you didn’t kneel beside. And we all saw whom you kneeled before.

Skip to toolbar