By Arun Gupta (July 23, 2019) I have a little quiz for you. The questions are related, but by no means comprehensive. I could add many others. From memory only! No googling. 1) What do you know about the origins of American policing, in both the South and the North, particularly in the 19th century? 2) What was the Great…
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By Joseph Orosco (June 25, 2019) Many people have responded in the last week to Arun Gupta’s call for a movement to end the mass detention of immigrants at the US/Mexico Border. He has created a Facebook social media presence to coordinate efforts: https://www.facebook.com/NoConcCamps/ He adds the following: “Hey Folks, I know many of you are eager to get involved…
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By Arun Gupta (June 23, 2019) Take a good look at these faces. What do you see? They are all indigenous peoples. 527 years after the conquest of the Americas began, we are still penning, brutalizing, kidnapping, and killing indigenous people. Asylum-seekers are 100% legal, protected by U.S. law as the signatory to international agreements such as the Fourth Geneva…
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By Arun Gupta (June 19, 2019) We need a massive march on the border, tens of thousands who will peacefully, nonviolently disrupt the machinery of ethnic cleansing, to give aid to migrants, to witness and record the concentration camps, the killings, the torture, the ethnic cleansing. The Left is good at mobilizing in large-scale protest: the anti-globalization movement, the anti-Iraq…
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By Arun Gupta (May 21, 2019) I am hearing a lot of despair lately, so I would like to share this story with you. In the early 1990s, when I was international news editor at The Guardian Newsweekly, we hired a bookkeeper named Frances. Being a political newspaper run by the staff, our interviews were a mix of questions about…
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By Arun Gupta (April 2, 2019) While I stayed away from the Russia controversy because I thought it was overblown, I did write an article in December 2016 pointing out of course Russia would want to destabilize the U.S. Putin is a brutal authoritarian and Islamophobe who persecutes journalists and the LGBT community. He carried out a program of such…
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By Arun Gupta (November 8, 2018) Everyone should be deeply disturbed what happened in the election. One seasoned electoral activist told me it was “A blue wavelet with a strong red undertow.” The Democrats lost crucial Senate and gubernatorial races, made only modest gains in state legislatures, and had a middling performance in the House. This election should have been…
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By Arun Gupta (October 25, 2018) Trump is a (white) nationalist. FOX News is his ministry of propaganda. Journalists are being murdered. Transgender people may be eliminated. 13,000 children are in concentration camps. Bombs are being sent to political opponents. Brownshirts violently attack people in three cities in a week. Families fleeing violence and poverty are dubbed terrorists and criminals….
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By Arun Gupta (July 20, 2018) Consider this. Jeff Bezo’s wealth has surpassed $150 billion. There are at least 11,600 homeless people in King County, where Amazon is located. Amazon recently strong-armed the Seattle City Council to repeal a small $275 annual head tax on large corporations to address the soaring homelessness in the wealthiest city in the Western Hemisphere….
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By Arun Gupta ( June 18, 2018) Immigrants are not your bludgeon to use against Democrats. Immigrants are not an object for your history lessons. Immigrants are not numbers in your game. Your argument that “it happened before” is utterly inhumane and shows complete contempt for solidarity for millions of immigrants in peril. What is happening now is unprecedented. Trump…
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By Arun Gupta (June 14, 2018) After immersing myself in Bourdain’s work for days — his books, interviews, hundreds of articles, a dozen shows — I did some cooking with my mom. Bourdain is right that the best food is to be found within the home. The most elaborate, artistic, and expensive, is in restaurants, but the food there is…
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