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Women Up In Arms: Zapatistas and Rojava Kurds Embrace a New Gender Politics

Charlotte Maria Sáenz Other Worlds
In both resistances, women took up arms to fight alongside their male counterparts showing both willingness and capacity to fight as soldiers. However their principal objective in the mountains is not military. Rather, their most important task is to form new persons: men and women in a more equitable relationship to each other--a relationship that is also anti-capitalist. Theirs is a commitment to building democracy, socialism, ecology and feminism.

Joseph Stiglitz on the Trans Pacific Partnership: "This Is A Big Deal"

Alexandros Orphanides In These Times
The TPP is a massive trade agreement between the United States, Canada, Chile, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Critics of the agreement say it amounts to the promulgation of corporate globalization and neoliberalization and have likened it to "NAFTA on steroids."

Beware of Official Histories of War:The Vietnam Case; The Power of Protest. Telling the Truth

Harry Targ; Tom Hayden, Heather Booth, et al; Doug Rawlings Portside
U.S. Vietnam policy was built on twenty-five years of lies. The Vietnamese fought Japanese occupation during World War II and sought a free Vietnam after the war free of colonial control. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon lied about their escalation of the United States involvement. The only way America can avoid becoming "waist deep in the big muddy" again and again is to clearly understand its history. The Power of Protest. Telling the Truth - May 1 - 2.

Right Wing Nation - A View from Jerusalem; Israelis Must Seize the Chance to Recover Quickly

Jeremiah (Jerry) Haber; Ari Shavit
Israel is not a liberal democracy that supports the flourishing of its citizenry. Democracy requires consent of the governed, and Israel controls, directly and indirectly, millions of Palestinians without their consent. There is a progressive, liberal, civil rights movement in Israel - the third largest list in the Knesset. The awful crisis of the right's victory is an unprecedented opportunity for us to learn from our mistakes and create a new mass movement.

Against Type

Lucy McKeon Boston Review
Popular culture may be getting more diverse in terms of gender and skin color, but it's still mostly flat in presenting diverse human qualities and differences. Few characters play against type, which makes the exceptions all the more remarkable. Part of the power of characters playing against type is simply their insistence, humorous and without qualified explanation, of their existence. In other words, like most of comedy, its power is better experienced, not explained

Youth Resistance Unleashed

Bernardine Dohrn Praxis Center
Now and historically, it is the youth who reject taken-for-granted injustices. In this moment, young people are the social actors – the leadership, catalysts, the activists, and the organizers – who seized and defined a continuing travesty of North American life: the police murder of Black lives. Rising up against the thickening layers of institutionalized white supremacy, young people are insisting that Black Lives Matter.

Black Women's Lives Matter: A Chant Less Often Heard

Andrea Ritchie Ravishly
#BlackWomensLivesMatter. It’s an affirmation that is essential in the face of the reality that Black women’s lives have been consistently devalued and erased. Not only has taking our labor and our lives been part of business as usual throughout this country’s history, so has violating our bodies through systematic criminalization, physical brutality and sexual assault by law enforcement agents, from slave patrols to present day police.

The Problem with the Singular Narrative Taught in History Classes

Michael Conway The Atlantic
Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. History is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be “official” by scholars on high.

These Urban Farmers Want to Feed the Whole Neighborhood--For Free

Sam Bliss Grist
Community food forestry demonstrates a smarter way to grow food locally — which is important, considering that we’re staring at a future of hungry, hungry humans. The Beacon Food Forest is a lush public garden where all of the produce is up for grabs. Instead of dividing the land into small patches for private planting, like most community gardens, volunteers cultivate the whole food forest together and share, well, the fruits of their labor with anyone and everyone.