Consider This....

Consider This....
A Year Later, Fewer Deportations in Cities That Adopted “Welcoming” Policies
Michael J. Dax: New Mexico shows a different way.
A year after the Santa Fe City Council adopted in February 2017 a resolution strengthening its welcoming and non-discrimination policies toward immigrants, the federal government launched a series of audits demanding verification from local small businesses that their employees were eligible to work in the country. ... In response to this blitz, advocates and city officials held a press conference in early March calling out an attempt to disrupt business, wreak havoc, and create a culture of fear and panic. ... According to a new study from Pew Research Center, nationwide deportations made by ICE in 2017 increased 30 percent from the previous year. ... . In regions where sanctuary policies are more prevalent, increases have remained relatively low... [ Visit Website ]
Apr 12, 2018, 2:41pm

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The demise of the nation state
Rana Dasgupta: After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete – and spasms of resurgent nationalism are a sign of its irreversible decline ... 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. ... National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority: they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations... [ Visit Website ]
Apr 5, 2018, 4:02pm

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An Illustrated Essay: Why I Love the Real Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Sarah Lazarovic: In April 1917, Marjory Stoneman Douglas boarded a train in Miami with a bunch of other charismatic suffragettes. Their destination was the state capital, Tallahassee, where they would eloquently make the case for women’s right to vote. “We could have been talking to a bunch of dead mackerel, for all the response we got,” said Douglas. She had little respect for the “wool-hat boys,” the condescending, small-minded boors who were the state representatives. The women’s entreaties fell on stupid ears, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas would later remark that she was speaking “over the heads of the audience, to a future generation.” ... That generation is here... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 30, 2018, 2:36pm

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#DeleteFacebook? Not in Indian Country
Jenni Monet: And it’s not just Indian Country that would feel the extreme disconnect in a Facebook-less scenario. The entire Indigenous world would reel from its absence. To be sure, the social network has done more for bolstering the modern Indigenous rights agenda than perhaps any other platform of our time. ... For instance, the Navajo Nation has recently turned to the social network to monitor those who have gone missing from the reservation. ... From extreme rates of violence against Indigenous women to environmental battles like Bear’s Ears, Indian Country has used Facebook to help close gaps of injustice one post at a time. ... Facebook, for better or worse, is where Indian Country thrives, delivering rough draft to the authentic Indigenous narrative in a way that so few other platforms do... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 23, 2018, 4:55pm

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Tolerance Cuts Both Ways: Freedom for the Speech We Hate
John W. Whitehead: Nowhere in the First Amendment does it permit the government to limit speech in order to avoid causing offense, hurting someone’s feelings, safeguarding government secrets, protecting government officials, insulating judges from undue influence, discouraging bullying, penalizing hateful ideas and actions, eliminating terrorism, combating prejudice and intolerance, and the like. ... As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once warned, a silent, inert citizenry is the greatest menace to freedom. ... Perhaps the most important point that Brandeis made is that freedom requires courage. ... It’s time to start thinking for ourselves again.... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 22, 2018, 5:26pm

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Think Outside the Protest Box
Rivera Sun: Nothing changes, right? No matter how large our demonstrations get, no matter how many millions of people write and petition politicians, no matter how many people get arrested in front of the White House or at our state capitols, it seems that our (supposedly) elected officials keep turning a blind eye and deaf ear to our cries for change. ... So what can we do? ... Look for the all the power holders, not just the political ones. Your power holders on the issue may be investors, financiers, technicians, researchers, academics, social trend-setters, police chiefs, school administrators, CEOs and shareholders, and many other types of groups... Find the points of intervention and cut off the flow of labor, money, resources, information, and/or functionality until your demand for change is met.... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 21, 2018, 2:38pm

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The Cambridge Analytica Files
Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian, UK: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower" ... For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 18, 2018, 10:58am

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Introducing...Eugene Debs
Guy Miller, a socialist and former railroad switchman, reviews a new documentary about the early 20th century socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. ... The new documentary American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs is a labor of love for filmmaker Yale Strom. Trying to contain more than half a century of activism in a 93-minute format is an impossible challenge, but Strom manages to capture the essence of Debs--and that's a good start. ... The two passions that Debs took to his grave were industrial unionism and socialism... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 13, 2018, 12:27pm

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Not equal by any measure - On International Women's Day
Elizabeth Schulte: JUST IN time for International Women's Day, teachers in West Virginia have set an inspiring example with their nine-day walkout in a "right-to-work" state--and workers across the country are taking it up, including Oklahoma teachers preparing for a potential strike in April. ... The attitude of state officials was little different from what politicians around the country think teachers deserve: low wages, high health care costs, classrooms starved of resources. ... But by standing up and refusing to drop their demands, the West Virginia teachers, three-quarters of whom were women, found out who had their backs--students, parents and others workers, in West Virginia and all over the country... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 8, 2018, 10:03am

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Millions of Americans’ Right to Vote Is at Stake in This Case
Ari Berman: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach required proof of citizenship to register to vote. Now he’s being sued. ... The proof-of-citizenship measure prevented 1 in 7 new voters from registering between 2013 and 2016, nearly half of whom were under 30. A federal appeals court temporarily blocked a key part of the law before the 2016 election, finding “there was an almost certain risk that thousands of otherwise qualified Kansans would be unable to vote in November.”... According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 7 percent of Americans do not have ready access to their citizenship documents... [ Visit Website ]
Mar 6, 2018, 4:08pm

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Armed and Dangerous: If Police Don’t Have to Protect the Public, What Good Are They?
John W. Whitehead: According to the U.S. Supreme Court, police have no duty, moral or otherwise, to help those in trouble, protect individuals from danger, or risk their own lives to save “we the people.” ... Why do we have more than a million cops on the taxpayer-funded payroll in this country whose jobs do not entail protecting our safety, maintaining the peace in our communities, and upholding our liberties? ... Cops in America may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us. ... They don’t answer to us. They’re not loyal to us .... And they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution... [ Visit Website ]
Feb 27, 2018, 10:16am

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The Cheapening of Human Life
Robert C. Koehler: There’s a bigger problem embedded in the social order than our lack of effective gun laws, and I hope the movement that emerges out of the Parkland massacre makes the leap beyond anger and single-issue politics. The nation’s weak gun laws — the easy availability of AR-15 assault rifles — are, in fact, a symptom of the general cheapening of human life in American society, which is reflected in the nation’s ever-expanding obsession with war and a military budget the size of Godzilla. War always has a way of coming home. ... planning for war — celebrating war, glorifying war — has a long-term psychological impact on a large segment of society... [ Visit Website ]
Feb 23, 2018, 12:20pm

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How ‘Strange Fruit’ Killed Billie Holiday
Brandon Weber: "Strange Fruit” may have been written by the Jewish Communist Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen) as a poem, but ever since Billie Holiday sang the three brief stanzas to music in 1937, she’s owned it. ... Jazz writer Leonard Feather referred to the song as “the first significant protest in words and music, the first significant cry against racism.”
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees [ Visit Website ]
Feb 20, 2018, 3:22pm

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How the GOP Used a “Two Santa Clauses” Tactic to Con America for Nearly 40 Years
Thom Hartmann: The Republican Party has been running a long con on America since Reagan’s inauguration, and somehow our nation’s media has missed it – even though it was announced in The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and the GOP has clung tenaciously to it ever since. ... First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. ... Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!” This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs... [ Visit Website ]
Feb 12, 2018, 12:16pm

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Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch is utterly depressing
Nathan Robinson, The Guardian, UK: Elon Musk is right: silly and fun things are important. But some of them are an indefensible waste of resources ... There is, perhaps, no better way to appreciate the tragedy of 21st-century global inequality than by watching a billionaire spend $90m launching a $100,000 car into the far reaches of the solar system. ... it’s important to have our priorities straight. First, perhaps we could make it so that a child no longer dies of malaria every two minutes ... Musk’s empire is fueled by billions of dollars in government subsidies. The Los Angeles Times revealed in 2015 that Musk’s companies benefitted from “grants, tax breaks, factory construction, discounted loans and environmental credits”... [ Visit Website ]
Feb 9, 2018, 10:14am

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