Articles
Articles
Epifanio Camacho: a Militant Farmworker Brushed Out of History
Tanya Golash-Boza – Michael Golash: Cesar Chavez is perhaps best known for his role in the 1965-1970 Delano grape strike and boycott and his nonviolent tactics in those protests. ... Although Chavez insisted on nonviolence, there was dissent within the National Farmworkers Association as some workers believed more militant tactics were necessary. One of these workers was Epifanio Camacho. ... Camacho developed a revolutionary consciousness through his struggles. He eventually joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and began to organize workers in McFarland and other towns in the Central Valley to join the PLP and to become communists. Chavez continued to work with politicians and to organize consumer boycotts to make changes to the existing system...
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Mar 25, 2019, 12:03pm
Articles
Water Protector Scales Water Well-Drilling Rig
Rivera Sun: Water Protector Buck Johnston of Taos, New Mexico pulled off a daring 4-day direct action at the top of a multistory well drilling rig this week. On March 14th, accompanied by a small action support team, he scaled the equipment and hooked into the top of the multi-story tower with a climbing harness. ... On the ground, a group of citizens called Guardians of Taos Water (GOT Water) lit a ceremonial fire at the gate near the highway, lifted song and drum, and began a peaceful prayer action in support of his direct action. ... This Indigenous-led action is protesting part of a controversial water agreement that plans to drill 16-plus deep aquifer wells in order to extract large quantities of water from previously untapped deep aquifers beneath the Taos Valley Watershed ... Many feel that these deep wells are largely intended to enable development rather than meeting existing water needs...
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Mar 20, 2019, 4:23pm
Articles
The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit
Matt Taibbi: Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled. ... The military has become an unstoppable mechanism for hoovering up taxpayer dollars and deploying them in the most inefficient manner possible. Schools crumble, hospitals and obstetric centers close all over the country, but the armed services are filling warehouses for some programs with “1,000 years’ worth of inventory,” as one Navy logistics officer recently put it...
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Mar 18, 2019, 4:16pm
Articles
How America's Food Giants Swallowed the Family Farms
Chris McGreal, Guardian UK: Across the midwest, the rise of factory farming is destroying rural communities. And the massive corporations behind this devastation are now eyeing a post-Brexit UK market ... “In the past 20 years, where I am, independent hog farming just silently disappeared as the corporates came in” ... We’ve become poorer. Our communities are basically shattered and in more than just an economic way – in a social way too ... This collapse has in good part been driven by the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations, or Cafos. In these industrial farming units, pigs, cows and chickens are crammed by the thousand into rows of barns. Many units are semi-automated, with feeding run by computer and the animals watched by video, with periodic visits by workers who drive between several operations...
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Mar 11, 2019, 2:55pm
Articles
Living at the mercy of “La Lista”
Elizabeth Maskasky: EARLY EVERY morning, migrants from all over the world gather at El Chaparral, a plaza on the Mexican side of the Tijuana-San Diego border. A plethora of languages can be heard — many of them Indigenous, in addition to Spanish, French, English, Arabic and Russian. ... On one side of the plaza, migrants line up to put their names on La Lista (The List) — the numbering system for the increasingly notorious and illegal “metering” imposed by the U.S. on asylum seekers before they are allowed to cross the border. ... On the other side of the plaza, migrants whose numbers are close to being called gather with their luggage and their families to hear the numbers of the day. On any given day in Tijuana, an average of only 50 migrants out of the thousands who are waiting are allowed to cross the border...
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Mar 1, 2019, 3:21pm
Articles
Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, UK: After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on the planet. But its benefits mask enormous dangers to the planet, to human health – and to culture itself ... Concrete is how we try to tame nature. Our slabs protect us from the elements. They keep the rain from our heads, the cold from our bones and the mud from our feet. But they also entomb vast tracts of fertile soil, constipate rivers, choke habitats and – acting as a rock-hard second skin – desensitise us from what is happening outside our urban fortresses. ... It also magnifies the extreme weather it shelters us from. Taking in all stages of production, concrete is said to be responsible for 4-8% of the world’s CO2. Among materials, only coal, oil and gas are a greater source of greenhouse gases. Half of concrete’s CO2 emissions are created during the manufacture of clinker, the most-energy intensive part of the cement-making process...
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Feb 26, 2019, 10:24am
Articles
Mexican migrant details harrowing journey across the Sonoran desert following deportation
Angel Andres and Anthony del Olm : WSWS reporters spoke with Miguel, a Mexican migrant who wished to share his story, which demonstrates the plight of immigrants who make the treacherous journey through the deserts along the US-Mexico border region as their last option in search of a better life. ... In his story, the threats posed by an unforgiving terrain and climate are only a portion of a dangerous landscape filled with the Mexican police, cartel thugs and the US border patrol. ... Miguel describes an intricate and complex underground network requiring the tacit cooperation of both governments along with groups of thugs, human smugglers and drug traffickers...
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Feb 20, 2019, 2:06pm
Articles
Eugene V. Debs and the Endurance of Socialism
Jill Lepore: Half man, half myth, Debs turned a radical creed into a deeply American one. ... Eugene Victor Debs left school at the age of fourteen, to scrape paint and grease off the cars of the Vandalia Railroad, in Indiana, for fifty cents a day. He got a raise when he was promoted to fireman, which meant working in the locomotive next to the engineer, shovelling coal into a firebox ... Debs, who wrote a lot about manliness, always said that the best kind of man was a sand man. “ ‘Sand’ means grit,” he wrote in 1882, in Firemen’s Magazine. “It means the power to hold on.” When a train stalled from the steepness of the incline or the weight of the freight, railroad men poured sand on the tracks, to improve the grip of the wheels. Men need sand, too, Debs said: “Men who have plenty of ‘sand’ in their boxes never slip on the path of duty.” Debs had plenty of sand in his box...
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Feb 17, 2019, 3:27pm
Articles
A 2015 Case Was Supposed to Overhaul California’s Solitary Confinement. The Reality Is Much More Complicated.
Marisa Endicott: The 2015 agreement in Ashker v. Brown virtually eliminated indefinite solitary sentences and permitted isolation only for prisoners who commit serious offenses while in detention—making it a behavior-based punishment rather than a status-based one. In requiring court-ordered monitoring, the judge mandated CDCR to turn over internal violations reports between 2015 and 2017, which revealed which offenses sent prisoners to solitary based on what information. ... “Basically, prison staff are prosecutor, judge, jury, everything,” says Jean Casella, co-director of the watchdog organization Solitary Watch, noting that the conviction rate in prison hearings is over 90 percent in most states. “If a [correctional officer] wants you to go to solitary, you’re probably going to go to solitary.” ...
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Feb 14, 2019, 2:48pm
Articles
The Facts About The Humanitarian Crisis In Mexico And Central America
Doctorswithoutborders.org: As a medical humanitarian organization treating people in Honduras, El Salvador, and along the migration route through Mexico, we can be absolutely sure of this: a wall will do nothing to address the humanitarian crisis in Central America driving large numbers to flee north in search of safety and security. ... A humanitarian crisis demands a humanitarian response. ... What the White House fails to acknowledge is that the chaos and suffering at the southern border are the direct results of US policies designed keep out migrants and asylum-seekers at all costs. The US is not only failing to address the humanitarian crisis in Central America but is fueling a wider crisis in Mexico. ... We know that nothing—not a wall or even an ocean—will ever stop people who are simply trying to survive...
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Feb 8, 2019, 2:43pm
Articles
Raymond Lo: THE YEAR OF THE PIG
The Year of the Pig, 2019, in the Hsia calendar, is symbolized by two Chinese characters – with Yin earth sitting on top of Pig which is water element. So it is an earth year with Earthly branch water conquered by Heavenly stem earth on top. According to the cycle of birth and destruction, which governs the inter-relationship between the elements, if the two elements are in the destructive cycle and have fighting relationship, then the year will have more conflicts ... This year 2019 is Earth conquers Water, the two elements are in destructive cycle. Normally such configuration will mean more conflict and less harmony in international relationship. But the nature of Yin Earth is a garden or “Mother Earth” which is more gentle and moderate. ... In general, the Yin Earth Pig year, with earth on top and water below, is symbol of peace and relaxation on the outside with under current of danger, unrest and deception inside...
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Feb 5, 2019, 4:28pm
Articles
The White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized the Rights of Wild Rice. Here’s Why
Winona LaDuke: Finally, plant species have rights, too. ... Manoomin (“wild rice”) now has legal rights. At the close of 2018, the White Earth band of Ojibwe passed a law formally recognizing the Rights of Manoomin. According to a resolution, these rights were recognized because “it has become necessary to provide a legal basis to protect wild rice and fresh water resources as part of our primary treaty foods for future generations.” ... The Rights of Manoomin are modeled after the Rights of Nature, recognized in courts and adopted internationally during the last decade. In 2008, Ecuador and Bolivia both added Rights of Nature clauses to their constitutions. ... In 2016, the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin became the first U.S. tribe to adopt the Rights of Nature, and in 2017 the Ponca Nation in Oklahoma became the second. Also in 2017, the New Zealand government granted the Whanganui River the full legal rights of a person as part of its settlement with the Whanganui iwi, a Maori people...
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Feb 2, 2019, 12:14pm
Articles
Sky Bears, Earth Bears: Finding and Losing True North
Louisa Willcox: Stars and the heavens have long captured the human imagination. ... ancient peoples invented fascinating stories about constellations that reflected their aspirations and relationships with the natural world and each other. The dramas that played out in the heavens unified their world and gave their lives meaning. ... No group of stars has been more durably famous than the Big Dipper, which is part of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. ... Ursa Major and its neighbor Ursa Minor, the Lesser or Little Bear, are the first two constellations listed in the earliest star catalogues dating from nearly 3000 years ago. ... Playing center stage in the night sky, bears were often depicted as guides and teachers, and literally provided direction...
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Jan 19, 2019, 11:55am
Articles
The documentary Israel doesn’t want you to see
Mukund Rathi reviews The Lobby, a documentary about Israel’s efforts to undermine the movement for Palestinian rights with its vast array of dirty tricks. ... A FOREIGN government is spying on Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights to free expression. It is secretly giving money, intelligence and strategic advice to political groups that create fake social media pages, ghostwrite op-eds in major newspapers and push for legislation to support its aims. ... These groups spend tens of thousands of dollars on “astroturf” protests against college student activists and have created anonymous websites to smear them. They are trying to redirect social justice movements like Black Lives Matter to support their own ends. ... And when journalists uncover these questionable practices and attempt to inform the public, this foreign government and its allied groups made sure they were censored. ... I’m talking about Israel...
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Jan 15, 2019, 12:24pm
Articles
6 Ways the Border Wall Could Disrupt the Environment
Laura Parker, National Geographic: Trump's plan to build a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific could come with unintended consequences for wildlife and people. ... 1. Threatening diverse landscapes ... Construction of a border wall will bisect the geographic range of 1,506 native animals and plants, including 62 species that are listed as critically endangered. ... 2. Exacerbating flooding ... Flooding disasters occurred in Arizona after 700 miles of fencing was constructed during the George W. Bush administration. The barriers acted as dams during rainy season flash floods. ... 3. Perils to wildlife and plants ... The border wall could disconnect a third of 346 native wildlife species from 50 percent or more of their range that lies south of the border ... Limits on migration, in turn, affects plants...
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Jan 11, 2019, 12:00pm
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