Latest News: Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

“The not-so-winding road from Iraq to Ukraine” — WAR IN UKRAINE authors Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies featured in Morning Star

Sunday, March 19th, 2023

The invasion of Iraq 20 years ago casts a long shadow over today’s neocon attempts to stir up World War III, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

“The US record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine.

Yet the US never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere.”

Read the full article here.

“Finding Solidarity in a Mexican Immigration Detention Center” — INSIDE SIGLO XXI by Belén Fernández reviewed by Jacobin

Saturday, March 18th, 2023

“Fernández possesses considerable literary gifts, but this book probably won’t get much mainstream attention. Even as discussion of domestic racism and economic inequality has gone mainstream, even after decades of US war crimes all across the globe, anti-imperialist analysis remains muted, even stigmatized. But if an engaging narrator and lively prose could help change that, Fernández would be that narrator and Inside Siglo XXI would be that book.”

Read the full review here.

“The Road to Auto Debt” — CARS AND JAILS authors Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross featured in n+1

Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

 
“FOR MANY AMERICANS, it is easier to acquire a new car than to find a rental apartment they can afford. But there is a high price, in sheer debt, to pay for getting that ride on the road. The average monthly loan payment for a new vehicle recently passed the $700 mark, a figure that does not include insurance and the steep costs of maintenance. Currently, Americans owe 1.52 trillion dollars in auto debt—a staggering sum that has doubled over the last decade, due in large part to the migration of subprime loans from the housing to the auto market.”

Read the full article here.

WAR IN UKRAINE by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies cited in INTERNATIONALIST 360°

Sunday, March 12th, 2023

“The background to the war has recently been well-summarized in Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies’ book, “War in Ukraine; Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict” and in Benjamin Abelow’s “How the West Brought War to Ukraine”.”

Read the full article here.

“Free Spirits” No More — CARS AND JAILS by Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross reviewed by Imaginations

Thursday, March 2nd, 2023

“In CARS AND JAILS, New York-based professors of Social and Cultural Analysis Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross build on this theme, devastatingly undermining the mythology of automobiles as “freedom machines” and foregrounding the irony of tropes like the Buick “Free Spirit”. The book exposes the grim contrast between images of freedom and the reality of a society in which decaying or non-existent public transport creates auto-necessity that drags working people deeper into debt and, especially for people of colour, exposes them to the hazards of pretextual police traffic stops for “driving while Black”.”

Read the full review here.

“An alert and knowledgeable public would demand an end to the bloody war in Ukraine” — WAR IN UKRAINE authors Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies featured in Morning Star

Saturday, February 25th, 2023

On the anniversary of Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine, the media coverage of this war reaffirms the old adage that the first casualty of war is the truth. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies argue that renewed peace talks, not escalatory arms shipments, are crucial to end the bloodshed.

Read the full article here.

“How US police got the deadly power to stop drivers at will” — CARS AND JAILS authors Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross featured in The Guardian

Friday, February 3rd, 2023

“Between 2017 and November 2022, 730 people were killed by police during these incidents. More than once a week during that time, someone not being pursued or investigated for a violent crime met their death after a traffic stop. An alarming number were stopped on the pretext of any one of a hundred or more petty traffic code violations.

How did police achieve the power, and impunity, to stop motorists seemingly at will?”

Read the full article here.

The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Medea Benjamin on her book “WAR IN UKRAINE: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict”

Monday, November 7th, 2022

Listen to the full podcast here.

“Talking to working people about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles” — Maximilian Alvarez interviewed about THE WORK OF LIVING on Breaking Points

Friday, August 26th, 2022

This book is very courageous… It’s very rare that you have the voices of actual working people directly put out into the press and shared with the world.” —Krystal Ball, Breaking Points

Watch the full interview here.

“Building out renewable infrastructure at the speed needed to mitigate the climate emergency” — PEOPLE’S POWER author Ashley Dawson interviewed on Democracy Now!

Friday, August 26th, 2022

“We need a public alternative which can be democratically controlled… so that we can be guaranteed that it’s a just transition which saves not just frontline communities but also the working class, more broadly.”

Watch the full interview here.

“How much looted art is really out there?” — DECOLONIZE MUSEUMS author Shimrit Lee interviewed on Something Offbeat

Friday, August 26th, 2022

Listen to the full interview here.

“Biden’s Embrace of Saudi Arabia Despite Horrid Rights Record” — KINGDOM OF THE UNJUST author Medea Benjamin interviewed on Democracy Now!

Thursday, August 25th, 2022

 

Watch the full interview here.

“Glimpses of a Homegrown Revolutionary” — THE MONSTER ENTERS author Mike Davis featured in Capital & Main

Sunday, August 21st, 2022

“Mike Davis is the most consequential writer and thinker on Los Angeles since… perhaps ever. But his work roams far beyond Los Angeles, including popular and scholarly work on environmentalism, Marxist theory, urbanism and public health. He is also conversant in ‘hard’ sciences like geology, and can read specialized literature in fire science and climatology. Over the years he’s blurred the lines between these disparate fields. He braids them together with an indefatigable faith in a revolutionary project: nothing less than the liberation of humanity from human exploitation, which today also requires the end of humanity’s malevolent exploitation of the natural world.

His faith in revolution is historically situated, pointing toward a string of moments in which ‘utopian’ visions have flourished in the here and now, before crumbling under the weight of counterrevolutionary forces and internal contradictions, only to be taken up again. There have been large-scale experiments such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Republic, and countless small-scale ones, like Christian Base Communities in 1980s rural Central America. Mike tells us that the future must be ‘excavated in the past,’ rescued from under the ruins of reaction…

At the core of Mike’s work is how he values the dignity of life itself — lived as equitable, healthy, sustainable. And not just human life. He identifies class struggle as the primary engine of modern human history, and he is also an environmentalist because capitalist exploitation violates not only the bodies of workers but the Earth itself.”

Read the full article here.

“The evolution of Christopher Hitchens” — THE DEAD CENTER author Luke Savage speaks with The Harper’s Podcast

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

Listen to the full podcast here.

“Imperial hubris towards poorer nations can’t hide America’s own failures” — INSIDE SIGLO XXI author Belén Fernández writes for Al Jazeera

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

“The US advertises itself as being at the vanguard of global ‘development’, but the nation’s healthcare, poverty and other indicators suggest a policy of willful counterdevelopment instead… Such is the ironic nature of imperial power, it seems, that the global hegemon responsible for oppressing much of the third world must also keep a significant portion of its own populace in third-world conditions.”

Read the full article here.

“As a national rail shutdown over mounting labor disputes looms in the US, it’s worth asking how we got here from the folks who know best—the workers” — THE WORK OF LIVING author Maximillian Alvarez speaks with In These Times

Friday, August 19th, 2022

“Right now, the major railroad companies and 13 different unions representing over 115,000 railroad workers have reached an impasse in contract negotiations that have been going on for years, and we are now closer to a national rail shutdown than we’ve been in a generation. President Biden has even appointed an Emergency Presidential Board to try to mediate between the rail unions and the rail carriers, but if that mediation fails we’ll be on the verge of a historic shutdown.

So, how did we get here? If you talk to any railroader in private, you’ll get an earful about how decades of corporate greed, consolidation, cost cutting, automation, layoffs, and other profit-maximizing, shareholder-serving decisions have upended the railroads and turned what used to be good lifelong jobs into exhausting, impossible jobs that veteran workers are leaving in droves. But if any workers speak up publicly about what’s going on on the railroads, they will likely face severe consequences.

Luckily, we were able to connect with Jay, a qualified conductor who was licensed to operate locomotives at 19 years old, and who became a qualified train dispatcher before he was 23. We talk about Jay’s life, how he came to work at the railroads, and what the job of a train dispatcher entails, but we also talk about how the industry has changed in recent decades, the havoc those changes have wreaked on workers and the supply chain, and why we should all be concerned about the crisis the railroads are in right now.”

Listen to the full episode here, and pick up a copy of THE WORK OF LIVING here.

“Degeneracy, Depravity, and the New Right” — HEAVEN IN DISORDER author Slavoj Žižek writes for Project Syndicate

Thursday, August 18th, 2022

“An ideology that allows its adherents to act on their worst impulses can mobilize millions.”

Read the full article here.

“At Substack, business is personal” — WELCOME TO HELL WORLD author Luke O’Neil featured in The Observer

Wednesday, August 17th, 2022

“The publisher has previously responded unconventionally to writers leaving, like when [Hamish] McKenzie wrote a 4,500-word acknowledgement in June of writer Luke O’Neil’s departure—what [Spencer] Ackerman called a ‘Drake album’ due to its deeply reflective, even intrusive, feel.”

Read the full article here.

“Substack, the self-proclaimed bastion of free speech, demands extra-contractual loyalty from its workers” — WELCOME TO HELL WORLD author Luke O’Neil featured in Boing Boing

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

“Writers like Luke O’Neil were no longer comfortable taking that blood money from Substack. And so, when their one-year pro contracts with the company expired, they left… This, in turn, made Substack very mad. Co-founder Hamish McKenzie even wrote a novella-length rant about how sad and betrayed he felt by O’Neil’s departure.”

Read the full article here.

“A blueprint for honest journalism… [Glen Ford] merges the art of storytelling with a revolutionary conscience” — THE BLACK AGENDA reviewed by Toward Freedom

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

“Ford’s depth of analysis and the breadth of topics he analyzed is awe-inspiring… May more people be inspired to do the honest journalism he modeled.”

Read the full review here.

“Matt Taibbi on the Depravity of the Media and Liberal Interventionists” — HATE INC. author interviewed on The Scott Horton Show

Monday, August 8th, 2022

“Educating and agitating a new generation of activists, organizers, and intellectuals” — Glen Ford’s THE BLACK AGENDA featured in LA Progressive

Sunday, August 7th, 2022

“We [must] remember and emulate Glen Ford’s tireless contributions to the Black liberation, peace, and socialist movements… A good place to begin commemorating Ford is by picking up his book and studying the work that he left behind.”

Read the full article here.

“It’s Time for Public Power. New York State Could Lead the Way” — PEOPLE’S POWER author Ashley Dawson writes for Truthout

Saturday, August 6th, 2022

“Energy should be a public good, reliable and accessible to all, regardless of one’s ability to pay. It’s time to take power out of the hands of polluting, for-profit corporations. To decarbonize rapidly, we need to democratize our energy systems. It’s time for public power.”

Read the full article here.

“Rebelling against poor representation” — THE WORK OF LIVING author Maximillian Alvarez featured in Columbia Journalism Review

Friday, August 5th, 2022

“‘I let my editorial strategy be that I let ‘the rabble’ in more as a collaborator,’ Maximillian Alvarez, editor in chief of The Real News Network and a former temporary warehouse worker, says. ‘I give them the platform and the tools to report on their own struggles.’ Alvarez recalls working twelve-hour shifts in that earlier position, where he helped supply big box stores with products like feather pillow inserts. At home, when he watched television news, he rarely saw people whose circumstances reflected his own, or those of his coworkers or family members. He has brought that perspective, he says, to his editing and also to his podcast about working-class people.”

Read the full article here.

“Fed Up With Democratic Emails? You’re Not the Only One” — THE BIG DISCONNECT author Micah L. Sifry writes for The New York Times

Thursday, August 4th, 2022

“If democracy is indeed on fire, the thing to do is to stop asking people to buy water bottles and organize them into fire brigades instead. Neither the national Democratic Party nor progressive leaders seem to have learned that lesson. They aren’t wrong to call the next election the most important in our lifetimes. And abortion bans and the Jan. 6 committee hearings may well recharge their base. But it’s what the base manages to build with that energy that will matter.”

Read the full article here.

“Glen Ford’s Irreplaceable Journalism” — Margaret Kimberley’s foreword to THE BLACK AGENDA published in Eurasia Review

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022

I was very proud to write the preface to Glen Ford’s book, The Black Agenda , which was published posthumously by OR Books. As we approach the first anniversary of Glen’s passing, I endeavored to explain why his journalism was truly irreplaceable.”

Read the full foreword here.

“The world according to Žižek” — HEAVEN IN DISORDER reviewed by Morning Star

Monday, August 1st, 2022

“As Žižek explains, the challenges we face in the 21st century are unprecedented and the situation is far from excellent (as could be the future) unless a unified movement arises to address issues such as global poverty, climate change, the Covid pandemic, political apathy and other social ills… Whether or not you agree with Žižek, his ideas are worthy of consideration and encourage us to reflect upon our own views and actions.”

Read the full review here.

“A stirring record of life in an emergency” — Maximilian Alvarez’s THE WORK OF LIVING reviewed by Publishers Weekly

Tuesday, July 19th, 2022

“[Maximillian] Alvarez debuts with an empathic interview collection featuring people who kept ‘the gears of commerce and society turning’ during the Covid-19 pandemic.… The conversations shed light on a wide variety of jobs and convey the essential humanity of the interviewees. This is a stirring record of life in an emergency.”

Read the full review here.

“The devastating afterlives of colonial rule” — Shimrit Lee’s DECOLONIZE MUSEUMS excerpted in The Evergreen Review

Sunday, June 19th, 2022

“That museums are today seen by many as ‘neutral’ is a testament to the extent that the histories of museum spaces have been buried by their modern operators. To examine those histories is to know that museums are really crime scenes–to use a metaphor proposed by Wandile Kasibe of IZIKO Museums of South Africa—spaces that house the memories of atrocities committed during the colonial period, including theft, murder, and genocide… Today, it is impossible to find a Western museum that doesn’t hold some amount of cultural material from Africa, Asia, Oceania, or Native America—an enduring sign of the devastating afterlives of colonial rule. Wall texts often tell neutral, authoritative narratives of the objects displayed, but that passivity fails to reckon with the extractive nature of colonialism by which most of the Global South was robbed of culture, resources, and people in plain sight.”

Read the full excerpt here.

“Labor is and will remain the wave of change” — THE WORK OF LIVING author Maximillian Alvarez interviewed on The Zero Hour

Sunday, June 19th, 2022

Listen to the full interview here.