“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” —Malcolm X
Geography Archives: United States
U.S. intel will bring Assange to the U.S. in Chains
Julian Assange, a hero in the struggle against imperial wars and the lies that states tell to justify them, is in mortal danger.
Results and prospects from the U.S. midterm elections: a discussion with Lance Selfa
Red Flag editor Ben Hillier speaks with Lance Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of the essay collection U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty, about the meaning of the midterm election results and what comes next.
Climate change is the product of how capitalism “values” nature
Capitalist industrialization has led us to the edge of the precipice of climate change, and avoiding the end of civilization as we know it may require the development of a view in direct opposition to the way in which capitalism “values” nature, according to John Bellamy Foster.
Amazon’s accent recognition technology could tell the government where you’re from
AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s […]
Massive Woolsey fire began on contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory, close to site of partial meltdown
The tremendously destructive Woolsey Fire has been widely reported as beginning “near” the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne), but it appears that the fire began on the Rocketdyne property itself.
Living our lives inside a tragedy the size of the planet
After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the ‘supermarket of the world’. Instead, Argentina’s economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively […]
Prisoner prophet: revisiting George Jackson’s analysis of systemic fascism
The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing U.S. Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new–both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters–Trump’s emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in U.S. history.
Edinburgh tells fascist Bannon to go back home
Ex-Trump aide’s visit ‘legitimises racist views’
California’s wildfire and climate change warnings are still too conservative
Another Hot, Dry Year Is Fueling The State’s Deadliest, Most Destructive Wildfire. Scientists Say Wildfires Here Are Consistently Surpassing Their Projections.
When media say ‘working class,’ they don’t necessarily mean workers—but they do mean White
Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders.
Toward Racial Justice and a Third Reconstruction
This piece provides an overview of the bitterly polarized and consequential political moment in which the United States, along with many other countries, is embroiled in. It also suggests a strategic approach for U.S. progressives and the left to maximize our contribution to defeating the Trump and the far right, and advancing toward racial and […]
Magic imperialism and the great American wall
You all know how the saying goes: “Poor Mexico–too far from God, too close to the United States.”
Et tu, RT? Amplifying Western disinformation on Rwanda
The Great Lie about the Rwandan bloodbath opened the door to a far larger genocide in Congo and justified U.S. military interventions all over the planet. During a recent campaign event, Florida Senator Bill Nelson said, “That story of Rwanda is very instructive to us because when a place gets so tribal that the two […]
Reclaiming radical creativity
Podcast (co-hosted with Marine from A Privileged Vegan): veganvanguardpodcast.com ___ adrienne maree brown – Emergent Strategy: https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrat…
#76 – “One-dimensional man”
By Swampside Chats. Discovered by Player FM and our community—copyright is owned by the publisher, not Player FM, and audio streamed directly from their servers.
Long read: the neoliberal order is dying. Time to wake up
In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives–supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order”–rather than in individuals.
Oxford-style debate: Ethno-nationalism and systemic crisis are symptoms of the present
In his 1999 book The Bridge over the Racial Divide, William Julius Wilson wrote that economic insecurity creates conditions that hollow out the civic values of liberal democracy, and constitutes the “breeding grounds for racial and ethnic tensions”.
“Hell No!’—Stokely Carmichael twenty years on
Within a timeframe of hardly four years, Stokely Carmichael’s organizational efforts evolved from the mobilization of black voters in Alabama and Mississippi to building a large movement resisting the military draft at the height of the Vietnam war, culminating in the SNCC’s “Hell No! We Won’t Go!” campaign.
The law versus worker rights
Organizing a union is no easy task in the United States. Although organizing a union is supposed to be a protected right, businesses regularly fire union supporters knowing that they face minimal punishment even if found guilty for their actions. In fact, the rights of all workers, regardless of their interest in unionization, are being […]
