By Arun Gupta (May 17, 2017) There is a lot of grief and anguish in Portland. The killings of the two men standing up to defend women of color were horrific and jarring to everyone in the city of what their sense of community is. But life and politics go on. Here are some principles you may find useful going…
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By Joe Lowndes (May 31, 2017) There is now a fully-realized fascist social movement in this country. It is not anchored in one party or organization, and it is still amorphous, diverse, and in formation. But it is fully here now. In this last astonishing week alone we have seen a white supremacist murder in Maryland, and a double-murder in…
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By Chris Lowe (May 30, 2017) I first ran across the term “neoliberal” in the context of being a scholar of Africa in the 1980s when neoliberal economists and policy makers took over the World Bank and IMF under Reagan and Thatcher, and began imposing what were known as “structural adjustment” policies on poor countries seeking to renew loans. For…
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By Alexander Reid Ross (May 27, 2017) I am so deeply horrified right now. Jeremy Christian, the PDX killer, represents exactly the kind of person I’ve been researching and cautioning against. A clear white supremacist, he also identified with subcultures and called himself an “anarcho-nihilist” who sympathized with “both Commies and Nazis because of Semitic Patriarchal Monotheism.” A registered libertarian,…
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By Chris Lowe (May 17, 2017) We watch in awe and dismay Donald Trump’s amazing performance art piece Drunken Juggler President. We prepare to duck and dodge when the next plate in the plate spinning part caroms off toward us, and to groan: Noooo, don’t drop the globe! The details are endlessly fascinating, in that recurring monster movie dream time…
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By Mark Rudd (May 16, 2017) My friend, Glenn Silber, a filmmaker in Santa Fe, is currently screening his 1979 gem, “The War at Home,” which tells the story of the anti-Vietnam War movement in Madison, WI, from 1963 to 1970. I attended the opening showing on May 5, as well as an earlier screening at University of New Mexico,…
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By Chris Lowe (May 13, 2017) Since Comey was fired as FBI director, an increasingly widespread meme has emerge in the commentariat, that the U.S. is in “the biggest political crisis since Watergate.” The question this raises is the nature of the crisis. Is it caused by the actions of Donald Trump? In that case, removing him would resolve it….
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By Paul Messersmith-Glavin (May 12, 2017) This is in response to the “City Must be Done with Punk Fascists” Oregonian editorial of Friday, May 5th, and their call for responses to the police action at Portland’s May Day parade. The Oregonian asks: what do anarchists want? From my own perspective, anarchists want a society free of racism, class exploitation, misogyny,…
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By Joe Lowndes (May 11, 2017) The Comey firing puts the left in a bind. On the one hand, he was the head of the most powerfully repressive institution within the US. The chief enemy of all struggles for liberation, the damage it has done to people, organizations, and movements over the last century is incalculable. Under Comey, the FBI…
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By Joseph Orosco (May 10, 2017) A new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies claims that Mexico is the second largest conflict zone behind Syria in 2016. Some 50,000 people died in the Syrian conflict in 2016. In Mexico, some 23,000 people were killed in one year as a result of drug cartel violence (that’s more than the…
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By Mark Naison (May 10, 2017) No one familiar with the history of New York City should be surprised by the scandals that have beset the Trump Administration. No one, I repeat no one, could have had the success Donald Trump had in putting up building after building in New York City during the 1970’s and 1980’s without having ties…
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