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 (July 2, 2019) This year marked the 8th anniversary of the Solidarity Fair in Corvallis, Oregon. Started as a project by members of the Corvallis Industrial Workers of the World and Occupy Corvallis, the Solidarity Fair is a once a year event that brings together groups and individuals from the Willamette Valley that are interested in grassroots…
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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 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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