Articles
Articles
A jail built on a landfill is at the center of America’s coronavirus outbreak
Rachel Ramirez: New York City is the epicenter of the country’s COVID-19 outbreak — and perhaps nowhere is that outbreak more dangerous than in the city’s most notorious jail complex: Rikers Island. ... built on a landfill and surrounded by polluting infrastructure, has long suffered hazardous environmental conditions like extreme summer heat, flooding, and noxious pollution. ... More than 10,000 people are normally incarcerated on the island at any given time. Roughly 90 percent of them are people of color, and 67 percent have not been convicted of a crime and are simply awaiting trial...
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Apr 9, 2020, 4:25pm
Articles
‘We Who Were Nothing & Have Become Everything’
Nina Agadzhanova leapt before a tramcar on March 8, 1917, grabbed the keys from the driver and declared the city of Petrograd on strike, writes Vijay Prashad in this overview of International Women’s Day celebrated on Sunday. ... On March 8, 1917 (Feb. 23 by the old Julian calendar), a hundred women in the textile factories in Petrograd decided to go on strike; they went amongst the other factories and called their fellow workers onto the streets. Before long, around 200,000 workers – led by the women – marched through the streets. “Down with war,” they cried, and “no bread, no work.” This strike set in motion a cascade of protests which eventually broke the Tsarist state and inaugurated the Russian Revolution....
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Mar 6, 2020, 3:45pm
Articles
The Golden Age Of White Collar Crime
Michael Hobbes: OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons ... it is impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it ... And why wouldn’t they? The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. ... In January 2019, white-collar prosecutions fell to their lowest level since researchers started tracking them in 1998...
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Feb 22, 2020, 12:47pm
Articles
The World We Want - Making Space for Restorative Justice
Amanda Abrams: Rather than focusing on rehabilitation, our police, courts, and detention systems are aimed at retribution, particularly toward people of color; they harshly punish those who break the law instead of addressing the real reasons crimes occur, experts say. ... Re-visioning means thinking big ... In the place of Miranda warnings, plea deals, and prison cells are truth-telling, accountability, and forgiveness. And pain—which lies at the heart of so many of the crimes that currently wind up before the justice system—is met with love, transformation, and healing. ... restorative justice allows a crime survivor to explain what they need to make things right, and then holds the guilty party accountable for doing it...
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Feb 21, 2020, 2:22pm
Articles
For Returning Citizens, Success Begins with a Ride Home
Isabella Garcia: A California-based program provides newly released long-term prisoners with a chance at a new life. ... A study from 2014 found nearly 80% of newly released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within five years of their release, more than half of them by the end of their first year out. ... The Ride Home Program, founded in 2013, is a California-based program that offers free reentry services to people being released from long-term prison sentences ... Clients of the program are guided through the first steps of reentry, such as finding housing, submitting paperwork, and securing employment, by the reentry counselors who pick them up....
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Feb 6, 2020, 4:15pm
Articles
Venezuela, January 2020: Hardship and Resistance
Peter Lackowski: This January I went to Venezuela with a group of North Americans to see for ourselves how economic “sanctions” are affecting people’s access to food. We wondered how the Venezuelan popular classes are responding to the massive attack on their economic well-being. ... We saw a complicated scene, with virtually every kind of productive activity crippled in many ways ... Food is acquired in quantity by the government, and packages of basic things ... are distributed through committees set up by communal councils ... Seeds are another bottleneck. The imported seeds that Venezuelan farmers have relied upon are no longer available. ... Many campesinos have turned to sophisticated organic methods to replace imported fertilizers. ... Meanwhile, a new kind of society, one based on communal values of cooperation, social solidarity, and mutual support, is emerging...
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Jan 29, 2020, 3:03pm
Articles
The Rise of Smart Camera Networks, and Why We Should Ban Them
Michael Kwet: There’s widespread concern that video cameras will use facial recognition software to track our every public move. Far less remarked upon — but every bit as alarming — is the exponential expansion of “smart” video surveillance networks. ... Private businesses and homes are starting to plug their cameras into police networks, and rapid advances in artificial intelligence are investing closed-circuit television, or CCTV, networks with the power for total public surveillance. ... In the not-so-distant future, police forces, stores, and city administrators hope to film your every move — and interpret it using video analytics. ... To understand the situation we’re facing, we have to understand the rise of the video surveillance industrial complex...
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Jan 27, 2020, 11:59am
Articles
The Authoritarian Dreamscape of the New Wild West
William deBuys reports on the humanitarian and environmental disaster of Trump’s border wall. ... The Department of Homeland Security, under authority conferred by Congress, has declared more than 50 federal laws inoperable along sections of the U.S. boundary with Mexico, the better to build the border wall that Donald Trump has promised his “base.” Innumerable state laws and local ordinances have also been swept aside. ... Prominent on the list of suspended laws is the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which, until recently, was the nation’s look-before-you-leap conscience. ... How will wildlife be affected by a barrier that nothing larger than a kangaroo rat can get through? And how much will pumping scarce local water to make concrete draw down shallow desert aquifers?...
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Jan 17, 2020, 4:04pm
Articles
The Searching Life and Enigmatic Death of Albert Camus
Edward Curtin: Albert Camus’ search ended sixty years ago on January 4, 1960, the day he died. Although he had already written The Stranger, The Rebel, The Plague, and The Fall, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he felt his true work had barely begun. ... Like the inhabitants of the rat-infested French-Algerian city of Oran in Camus’s The Plague, the United States is “peopled with sleep walkers” ... Were Camus alive today, he would no doubt be struck by the constant stream of news reports exemplifying the hubris of our technological rationality, a mode of thinking that has made a fetish out of technology, worships efficiency, and considers any critical protest as irrational ... He would be appalled by the arrogance of a nation led by technocratic experts and politicians who have embraced the power of pure reason devoid of values....
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Jan 5, 2020, 12:09pm
Articles
The Global Corporate Tax Scam Is Under Pressure
An interview with Edmund FitzGerald: For decades, multinational companies have used fraudulent accounting techniques to evade corporate taxes with impunity. Thanks to populist pressure and national rivalries, international talks are now underway to explore reforms. ... the existing international taxation system was established in the 1920s when there were very few multinational companies ... It’s very clear that we need a global tax system, because otherwise companies can evade taxation very simply. ... they can make sure that their Irish subsidiary or their branch in the Cayman Islands is extremely “profitable,” but there is little or no corporation tax ... The G20 asked the OECD to put together an international consensus by 2020 of what would be a suitable method of taxing multinational companies ... for the first time they’re arguing that multinational companies have to be taxed globally and not just at the local level...
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Dec 24, 2019, 12:39pm
Articles
How America Broke Up With the Democratic Party
Thom Hartmann: Many grassroots Democrats separated from their party in the 1990s, and the 2020 election may be the last chance to save the marriage. ... Since 1981, not one American president has seriously challenged the neoliberal basis of Reaganomics. Billionaires and corporations now largely run our politics, to the point that average working people’s desires are about as likely to be made into law as random chance. ... All they need do today is reimplement Democratic policies from 1933 to 1979, updated for modern times. ... Raise taxes on the rich, bring our factories home, expand the safety net, support GI Bill-style free education, and restore union rights. The party should know its history...
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Dec 18, 2019, 2:13pm
Articles
The New Deal Funded the Arts. The Green New Deal Should, Too.
Ashley Dawson: Cultural work has a key role to play in shaping the climate-friendly economy. .... The Green New Deal must, at bottom, be about changing people’s minds: about where power should come from and who has the right to generate it; about what a just transition for workers and affected communities should look like; about what constitutes a good life. ... The Green New Deal cannot just be about building more stuff. In fact, a crucial element of the Green New Deal must be figuring out how to consume much less without spurring mass unemployment ... Building up the so-called social economy could include cooperative institutions for childcare, elder care, education and other services. It must also include cultural work...
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Dec 7, 2019, 3:05pm
Articles
Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Heidi Boghosian & Michael Steven Smith: [T]he most important things that are happening and shaping our democracy are the CIA’s covert actions, which are all deniable and never reported on. ... Basically, the essence of [the CIA’s] mandate is to—through sabotage and propaganda— control political and social movements in foreign countries ... they can infiltrate any agency of the government and assign office positions in that agency—for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration ... and allows the CIA to control the drug business around the world, which is really important for the United States ... It’s mandated to protect the national security of the United States. And by definition, that means the people who actually own the industrial infrastructure, the banking system...the individuals who own the United States, the millionaires and billionaires...
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Dec 4, 2019, 4:11pm
Articles
Fingerprint Analysis Is High-Stakes Work — but It Doesn’t Take Much to Qualify as an Expert
Jordan Smith: Brendan Max and two of his colleagues in the Cook County, Illinois, public defender’s office got some good news and some bad news in the spring of 2018. Actually, it was the same news: The three lawyers had nearly aced a proficiency test designed for fingerprint examiners. ... None of them had any training or real expertise in latent fingerprint analysis — the practice of trying to match a fingerprint collected from a crime scene to the known print of a suspect — aside from what they’d learned during their years working criminal defense. .... What, if anything, do proficiency tests say about the abilities of the forensic examiners taking them? ... While it may or may not be true that no two prints are exactly alike, there are plenty of very similar prints...
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Nov 29, 2019, 12:10pm
Articles
The Life and Times of Jimmy Hoffa
Chris Wright: With the possible exception of John L. Lewis, no twentieth-century union leader was as beloved by the members as Hoffa. He made it a point to be approachable and endlessly responsive ... That working class is dead now. But in its heyday, it was one hell of a force to be reckoned with. ... my ethics are very simple. Live and let live, and those who try to destroy you, make it your business to see that they don’t and that they have problems. ... when you talk about the question of hoodlums and gangsters, the first people that hire hoodlums and gangsters are employers ... so if you’re going to stay in the business of organizing the unorganized, maintaining the union you have, then you better have a resistance. ...
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Nov 15, 2019, 11:58am
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