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 Teka Lark (June 24, 2019) Direct action is a tool that should only be used when it needs to be used. Protesting with a permit is not direct action. Anytime you appeal to authority in a way that puts them in the position of reasonable, you’re not doing direct action. What is direct action? When you resist with your…
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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 Christian Matheis (June 21, 2019) “What do I tell my kids?” a student asked me last spring in an intro class on community problem solving. She, African-American and one of the few (4, she tells me) on the municipal police force of around 450 officers, caught my words. “What do I tell my kids???” she repeated as…
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By Christian Matheis (June 20, 2019) One of the things that happens to people from underrepresented backgrounds when they begin to advocate for themselves, including when they challenge patterns of institutional / systematic discrimination: attempts by people in positions of authority to get you to doubt your reality. We need to call this what it is: an attempt to get…
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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 Paul Messersmith-Glavin (May 1, 2019) If you like the idea of only working an eight-hour day, as opposed to say, twelve, thank an anarchist. This first of May – May Day – represents the day people around the world, for over a hundred years, celebrate and renew the commitment of anarchist organizers in Chicago in the 1800s to making…
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By Joseph Orosco (January 22, 2019) By now, a lot of people have heard the story of how Star Trek was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite TV show. It was, according to Nichelle Nichols, the only program he allowed his children to watch because it portrayed African Americans living in a future where they were treated equally and with dignity…
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By Joseph Orosco (December 21, 2018) Jason Wilson has written a good piece in The Guardian outlining how nonviolent action against far right and neo Nazi groups has been effective so far in dismembering those movements. This has been on my mind this week since news broke that notorious Springfield neo-Nazi Jimmy Marr was hospitalized after an altercation with Corvallis…
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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 Joseph Orosco (November 5, 2018) The folks at Futurism Studios feel that we have become too entranced by dystopian stories about technology and political developments. These stories can be good as tales of caution, they say, but too much can nurture cynicism and nihilism. We need utopian stories to offer us hope: “So fiction — of the dystopian and…
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