Structural Racism Continues to Beset Pandemic Response

All across the nation, online signups for shots have been far easier for white-collar families with fast computers and high-speed Internet.

Vietnam Veterans Descended on the Capitol 50 Years Ago

Bigger than the Jan. 6 insurrection, the 1971 antiwar mobilization known as Operation Dewey Canyon III altered the course of the war and uplifted the nation.

A Border-Industrial Complex Keeps the Border in Crisis

In 1994, the US’s annual border and immigration budget was $1.5bn. In 2020, the budget exceeded $25bn - a 16-fold increase

Verdict: Derek Chauvin Found Guilty on All Counts

George Floyd’s brother called the ruling “historic.”

Media Bits and Bytes - April 20, 2021

What is movement journalism? WTF is an NFT? Why does Chattanooga have the best broadband?

Country Catching Up to Bernie Sanders’ Way of Thinking

Today it’s clear that on issue after issue, Sanders’ thunder on the left has carried the day among a majority of Americans, including substantial numbers of Republicans. Conservative attacks on Sanders-style proposals are increasingly falling flat.

Long Road to Nuclear Justice for Marshallese People

U.S. nuclear testing resulted in entire islands vaporized and others uninhabitable due to radioactive fallout, displacing thousands of Marshallese people — many of whom out of necessity now live in the country whose government uprooted them...

The Far Right in Uniform: How Extreme Is U.S. Military?

A military is, of course, innately hierarchical, authoritarian, and adversarial, and war, by definition, is terror. There is an inheritance of violence in our increasingly militarized land that ought to concern us all, too.

Climate Commitments, Health Concerns: Giant Fuel Tanks

In the Los Angeles area alone, 11 new tank projects are underway, mainly in communities of color.

Attacks on Asian Women: Criminalization, War...

We need ongoing feminist solidarities to address...abolition, demilitarization and sex worker rights while continuing to work to end policing; for the decriminalization of sex work; for safe. accessible housing; and for stronger social safety nets.
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Culture

food

A Brief Anatomy of Outdoor Dining

Adam Gopnik New Yorker
Alfresco dining shelters are, in the midst of so much sadness, shining instances of the sheer bounce of creativity on our streets; they do what architecture ought to:solve social necessities with improvised forms; make common design from common need.

poetry

An Improver

Lesbia Harford The Guardian
There’s a strong feminist working-class voice in the poetry of Australian writer Lesbia Harford 1891-1927.

books

Eric Hobsbawm in the ‘London Review’: A Value-laden Selection

Richard J. Evans London Review of Books Blog
Eric Hobsbawm, among the most pre-eminent and valued Marxist historians of the late twentieth century, frequently reviewed for the London Review of Books. Here, a prominent British author does a dig into some of Hobsbawm’s many signal LRB essays.

books

A History of Unemployment and the Search for Solutions

Philip Harvey Jobs for All Newsletter
This book, writes reviewer Harvey, seeks "to provide an account of the nature and extent of the unemployment problem in the United States since the beginning of the industrial era following the end of the Civil War."

Labor

labor

Black Worker Centers: Building Workplace Power in the Communities

Matthew Cunnington-Cook The American Prospect
Worker centers in general serve as a clearinghouse for workers’ needs when forming a union is all but impossible. Even in anti-union terrains, the centers have found ways to change public and corporate policies.

labor

Black Worker Centers: Building Workplace Power in the Communities

Matthew Cunnington-Cook The American Prospect
Worker centers in general serve as a clearinghouse for workers’ needs when forming a union is all but impossible. Even in anti-union terrains, the centers have found ways to change public and corporate policies.

labor

Organizing Continues in the South

Various authors
Lots of attention has been on the Amazon unionization campaign in Alabama. But other workers are organizing in the South too: to form unions, win contracts, defend gains and enforce labor laws. Here is a small sample.

labor

Bessemer: No Organizing Effort Is Ever Wasted

Chris Townsend Marxism-Leninism Today
Amazon and the other major employers today will not be organized until the left wing does the hard, thankless, exhausting organizing work of patiently building real union structures and real organizational muscle.

Friday nite video

video

Visual Forensics: 78 Minutes of an Insurrection

A 3-D model of the Capitol grounds synchronizes, minute by minute, the Capitol Police's frantic calls for reinforcements with video footage and a software reconstruction of the mob's size and movement

video

Exploring Timelapse in Google Earth

Climate crisis? Urbanization? Desertification? See humanity’s impact on the Earth through a global time-lapse video of the planet since 1984.

video

Biko | Peter Gabriel

“You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire.” Featuring Yo-Yo Ma, the Cape Town Ensemble, the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, Taiko Project, Dynamic Music Collective and Silkroad.