"In 50 years’ time, historians will look back on the period between 2015 and 2020 in British politics with bewilderment and astonishment.
For the whole time Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party, the entire media-political establishment turned its anti-racist spotlight remorselessly, relentlessly, not on Israel - a state condemned by all of the world’s leading human rights organisations for its apartheid system - but on its victims and their supporters.”
"Journalist Asa Winstanley has been one of the most consistent and compelling voices exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam perpetrated against Jeremy Corbyn and the left to prevent a left-wing government – a weaponisation since confirmed even by the Starmer-commissioned Forde Report. In his new book, ‘Weaponising Anti-Semitism’, Winstanley provides a convincing history of the development of the smear before Corbyn was ever in the frame to lead the party – and the way it was used to help bring Corbyn’s leadership down after the left terrified the Establishment by coming close to winning the 2017 general election.”
"In this compilation available from OR Books, Jamie Stern-Weiner has drawn together an incomparable selection of contributors to debate key questions concerning Israel-Palestine from the perspective of those committed to justice and national liberation.”
"Of course, direct action is nothing new. Indeed it is a longstanding tool for bringing about social change. Apartheid, equal rights for women and basic health and safety laws were all won by decades of collective action taken by workers, women and people of colour. They combined protests and traditional political campaigning with an array of direct action techniques — including, in the last resort, recourse to hunger and general strikes.
Many of the steps taken by campaigners today draw on the past for inspiration. Emily Davison and dozens of suffragettes were forcibly fed in prison for going on hunger strikes before she tragically threw herself in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913."
"On March 27, 40 men were killed in a fire at a migrant detention centre in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The victims hailed from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela.
Like so many thousands of refuge seekers from around the world, they had been jailed in Mexico for the crime of aspiring to a better life in the United States – which forces its southern neighbour to act as deputy gatekeeper and migrant antagonist."
For 50 years Medea Benjamin has been an activist, sticking her nose everywhere it's not wanted -- straight into the authoritarian, militaristic business of American empire. And where she was once welcome on that most "liberal" of cable news outlets, MSNBC, since becoming a thorn in the side of Democratic administrations as well as Republican, she's no longer welcome to grace their airwaves.
Jimmy and Americans' Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss with Benjamin her initiation into the world of social justice and the many struggles she's been a part of since.Watch the full interview here.
"Rather than presenting the intersection of cars, jails, debt, and surveillance as a distinct movement that we must find the energy and time to add to our list, the book presents “mobility justice” as a site that connects movements and deepens our understanding of how power works across intersecting forms of extraction and oppression. Another part of the magic of this study—and what makes it a pleasure to read—is the way it balances its rigorous analysis with the human stories that connect the conceptual dots."
In this week’s episode of Terra Verde, host Gary Graham Hughes talks with Cascadia Times investigative journalists Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate about their new book, Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest, which celebrates the beauty and complexity of these ecosystems and uncovers how climate policy mechanisms that favor extractive industry are contributing to the ongoing degradation of this amazing rainforest.
"In the American popular imagination, the car is a symbol of freedom. But in reality, for many, it can actually be a trap.
That’s one takeaway of “Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality,” a book by Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross, professors at New York University (OR Books, November, 2022). The two, who work in a research lab at NYU with formerly incarcerated students, trace the pathways that lead Americans from cars to jails and from jails to cars and back again."
"As the third anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic passes us by, the Biden administration is seeking to declare an end to the federal public health emergency, along with policies and benefits that provide protection and support for working people who kept the economy open and running during a planetary health crisis. In doing so, the president is leaving the states responsible for addressing gaps and protecting workers."
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.”
"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."
"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.”
"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”."