Recent ZMagazine
We cannot continue to promote the same unjust and oppressive educational structures that have endured for centuries
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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
“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.”
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The ‘Wall of Vets’ have demonstrated that they are most certainly continuing that long and important legacy through their peace work
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.
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We must ensure that Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service end now
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Never has it been more clear that our health system is broken
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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
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
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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
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Tunisia, and many African countries, must demand a French apology. By doing so, they declare “loudly and intelligibly” that they are finally free from the “white man’s (selfish and racist) values,” and that they truly see themselves as equal
The most magical aspect of this type of organizing under “social distancing” is that it reveals, even in a moment of extreme isolation, the depth of our connection to each other
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Trump has repeatedly told Americans that the virus would simply go away—like magic. Now, he has even taken steps to control hospital data on the virus, just like the sleight of hand that a magician requires in order to perform an illusion
After making America sick again, Trump is trying to compensate for his administration’s failure by buying Gilead’s production for the next three months for the U.S., leaving nothing for the rest of the world
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Millions of Americans, inspired and energized by the Bernie 2020 campaign, certainly do not want to stay right where they are, in the midst of the capitalist wilderness surrounding us
Photo by lev radin/Shutterstock.com Here’s a quietly unsettling moment from the current cries for change churning across the nation: A teenage girl is at a grocery store in the small town of Marion, Virginia. Her brother, Travon Brown, age 17, had recently become both beloved and hated—the center of controversy—in the town, because he Read more…
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“We cannot defeat this pandemic with a divided world.”
Hatuey led the first guerrilla warfare against European invasion of the western hemisphere
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The government mostly does what its constituents with money and power make it do
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My duty to my students is to protect the learning environment and ending such derelict non-leadership is part of that duty that I share with teachers everywhere
What matters about the present moment is that change seems to be coming from multiple directions, both outside and within the corridors of political and economic power, as our ignorance shatters and we wake up
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Photo by Johnny Silvercloud/Shutterstock.com C.J. Polychroniou: It’s been argued by many, from various quarters, that COVID-19 has been a game changer. Do you concur with this view, or are we talking of a temporary situation, with a return to the “business as usual” approach being the most likely scenario once this health crisis is Read more…
Photo by bgrocker/Shutterstock.com Since George Floyd was murdered, we have seen an increasing convergence of the “war at home” against Black and brown people with the “wars abroad” that the U.S. has waged against people in other countries. Army and National Guard troops have been deployed in U.S. cities, as militarized police treat Read more…
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Photo by bgrocker/Shutterstock.com Protesters demonstrating against white supremacy and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s public lynching have been met with illegal repression by law enforcement. Police have utilized toxic chemical and sonic weapons, dangerous projectiles, intrusive surveillance, physical violence and “kettling” to trap demonstrators after dispersal orders are given. In a study conducted by the University Read more…
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The grassroots movements of workers and the unemployed formed a crucial part of the process that led instead to the emergence of the New Deal and the development of new and expanded forms of working-class organization
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The truth is that statues are a thing of the past only as long as they stand quietly in squares, as indifferent to us as we are to them
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Photo by Tverdokhlib/Shutterstock.com Today America is at a crossroads, a turning point…at an intersection of the old imperial order at home and abroad with the birthing of a new order, “a new normal” if you will. For millions of people in America, the unprecedented street uprisings offer a glimmer of hope that after 350 Read more…
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Photo by Amani A/Shutterstock.com We are in the midst of the largest mass uprising in half a century. It is a response to the killing of an unarmed Black man named George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But it challenges a pattern of Black oppression that goes far beyond one cop killing one Read more…
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It’s not a COVID-19 economy. It’s a capitalist economy, the instability of which has been rendered even more unstable by the current COVID-19 health crisis
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Photo by bgrocker/Shutterstock.com Here is one thing I can write with an unusual degree of certainty and confidence: Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin would not have been charged with the murder of George Floyd had the United States not been teetering on a knife edge of open revolt. Had demonstrators not turned out in massive numbers Read more…
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Like Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump will desecrate sacred ground to shamelessly promote his hollow but dangerous political ambitions
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Criminological data has told us for decades that police are irrelevant for public safety
It’s fascinating to see pundits on CNN, MSNBC and other networks now discussing “systemic racism” after they’d spent months during the Democratic presidential primaries in panicked overdrive propping up “the system.”
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Photo by Untitled Title/Shutterstock.com The current uprising against police violence and racism is just beginning. It is rapidly shifting public consciousness on issues of policing, violence against Black people and others, and systemic racism. The movement is deepening and becoming broader as well as putting forward solutions and making demands. The confluence of crises Read more…
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For a variety of reasons—rewarding giant corporations, getting reelected, and dominating the world―Trump remains fixated on “winning” the arms race
Reinvest in people? Are we really ready for that level of common sense?
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White organizers who are serious about anti-racism need to have ongoing connections to people of color, by participating in a multicultural organization of some kind, at a minimum
I may be idealistic in what I feel needs to and can happen, but what other choice do I have? What other choice do we have? I want not only mine, but all the suffering I have witnessed to end
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Revolution becomes the only way finally to secure progressive reforms
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We need to redefine our militarized national security embodied in weapons and global top cop mentality as urgently as cities and states need to rethink community security embodied in militarized police
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There is a meme circulating in this time of pandemic that we are all in this together, that COVID-19 is, as New York Governor Cuomo stated, the “great equalizer.” From one vantage point, this appears to be true: as I write, news broke that a staff person to Vice President Pence and another to President Read more…
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Getting past conspiracies is not easy to do, but it is imperative if we want to organize for a better world
If there was any remaining debate about the sincerity of global fashion’s commitment to the people and communities on which it depends, however, it was settled in the wake of the current COVID-19 crisis
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Even though 1,000 workers at Tyson’s slaughterhouse in Waterloo, Iowa, have tested positive for the coronavirus, it has reopened. Tyson has said last week it would begin slaughtering pigs. The company promised that workers would receive daily screenings and access to nurse practitioners, but many who can transmit the coronavirus are asymptomatic. At 2 other Read more…
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While my immediate feelings about what should happen to the right-wing anti-science protesters who paraded around cannot be put in writing, I will suggest that society should not be put at risk by those trapped in delusions
At present local health departments and the CDC have only about 2,200 professional “disease detectives,” although other health staff often assist during a contagious outbreak Photo by theskaman306/Shutterstock.com Conservative governors are now openly at odds with epidemiologists as plans move ahead for more than half the states to loosen social distancing and permit Read more…
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Over the course of U.S. history, farmworkers, although essential, have been terribly mistreated
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For the next six months, getting rid of Trump and as many of his overt supporters as possible is job number one, far and away
With almost 2.3 million people behind bars, the U.S. continues to have the highest number of prisoners in the world, a legacy of several decades of racially propelled policies of harsh sentencing and rapid prison building
The first institutional change would have to be in our criminal justice system and our underlying theory about the maintenance of social order. Disarm policing. Rethink justice