Isra Hirsi Is 16, Unbothered, and Saving the Planet

As the co-founder of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike and the daughter of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Isra Hirsi is grappling with harassment, safety threats, tokenization, and privilege on a national scale years before she's even allowed to vote.

GM Dumped Health Care for Striking Workers

GM cuts healthcare benefits for workers, as strike enters 4th day. This induces workers to get more angry. GM thinks this will scare them or get them to rethink the cost of their benefits. It's going to backfire. It's quick, rash and insensitive.

WFP’s Nod to Warren and Inevitable Need to Choose

A lot of progressive groups (and voters) have held off on making the Sanders-vs.-Warren choice. But they’ll face more and more pressure to decide how best to block Biden, and to defeat Trump.

The US Has “Disappeared” More Than 42,000 Migrants

The most successful of Trump’s anti-immigrant measures up until now — possibly the most vicious — hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves. In operation since late January, Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), originally called “Remain in Mexico”

Sept 19, 2019-Reader Comments, Resources, Announcements

Reader Comments: Climate Strike resources (lots of them); Immigrants; Nuclear arms race; GM strike; Trump now controls science and weather; classical music; Vietnam war; Kikotan Massacre; and lots of resources and announcements;

Something Special is Happening in Rural America

There is a “brain gain” afoot that suggests a national homecoming to less bustling spaces.

Money Is the Oxygen Which Ignites Global Warming

What if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries moved away from fossil fuels?

Greta Thunberg Urges Congress to Take Action

Teen climate activists attend a hearing to address the climate crisis and its traumatic effect on the younger generation

Defender if Brazil's Indigenous Tribes Murdered

“His death highlights how standing up for environmental and indigenous rights protection can cost people their lives.”

Global Left Midweek - September 18, 2019

Climate Strike * Israeli Election * International Women * France * Hong Kong Left * Norway * Brazil * Canada
Read more

Culture

books

Convergence On the Right

Cathy Nugent Workers' Liberty
As the far right grows world-wide through the confluence of traditional conservatives, authoritarian elements, white nationalists and previously marginal fascists, its sway makes struggles against capital problematic. A new book charts alternatives.

books

How To Think Freely

Jennifer Wilson The New Republic
In their encounters with Western art, Soviet audiences found ways to reimagine themselves.

film

Once Upon a Time in Tarantino’s Hollywood

J. Hoberman NY Review of Books
Tarantino succeeds in superimposing two meta-narratives: the end of the Western and the self-destruction of the counterculture. Both stories are symptomatic of the war in Vietnam, though here Vietnam is little more than background.

food

José Andrés Serving Free Meals In The Bahamas

Mikaela Lefrak WAMU American University Radio
Chef and restaurant owner José Andrés spoke at the National Book Festival in D.C. last month about his humanitarian work. Celebrity chef José Andrés and his nonprofit humanitarian relief organization, World Central Kitchen, have served more than 200,000 free meals in the Bahamas and distributed food in the Carolinas and Florida since Dorian hit.

books

Vietnam: Terror Was Absolute

Chris Mullin London Review of Books
Decades after the US retreat from Vietnam, the causes of the war and the outcome are still controversial if not murky, its lessons still not understood by US foreign policy makers. A comprehensive new book aims to clear away much of the detritus.

poetry

“Sitting Around Singing Kumbaya”

Arielle Greenberg Poetry Northwest
"Come by here": Listen as the Maine-based poet Arielle Greenberg takes you to the radical roots , the heritage and legacy of the oft-maligned song, Kumbaya.

Labor

labor

Exposing Wage Theft Without Fear is Possible and Necessary

Noreen Ahmed National Employment Law Project
To tackle the problem of wage theft, which almost always places on workers the burden and risk of coming forward to report violations, we have to address the problem of retaliation.

labor

GM Strikers Have One Chance: Vote No

Jane Slaughter Labor Notes
With top leaders discredited but refusing to step away, GM strikers have just one tool to use between their rock and their hard place: their right to vote no. Chrysler workers did it in 2015.

labor

The Human Cost of a Cheap Manicure

Kim Kelly Teen Vogue
Teen Vogue runs an op-ed column, No Class, dedicated to worker struggles and the American labor movement. This week's column focuses on the troubling working conditions at nail salons and the organizing efforts to change them.

Friday nite video

video

Filibuster

John Oliver explains why filibusters exist, why they shouldn't, and why it's stupid to drink coffee like a cat.

video

How Black Americans Were Robbed of Their Land

Over the course of the 20th century, black Americans have lost approximately 12 million acres of land. This mass land dispossession—a war waged by deed of title, which has affected 98 percent of black farmers—can only be called theft, says Atlantic writer Vann R. Newkirk II in a new documentary.

video

Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird | "Freedom Is A Verb"

It's a verb, it's a verb, freedom is a verb,
Something never finished, never done.
It's something you must make, 
It's something you must take,
It's something you must constantly become

video

Raise Hell: The Life & Times Of Molly Ivins

The story of media firebrand Molly Ivins, six feet of Texas trouble who took on the Good Old Boy corruption wherever she found it. Her razor sharp wit left both sides of the aisle laughing, and craving ink in her columns. She knew the Bill of Rights was in peril, and said "Polarizing people is a good way to win an election and a good way to wreck a country."