By Paul Messersmith-Glavin (October 8, 2019) Extinction Rebellion is a necessary and vital response to the climate crisis. They are forcing the issue and helping us focus on what’s important. But they are mistaken in targeting people caught up in a larger system by blocking traffic and disrupting everyday life, rather than aiming for instance at the 100 corporations and…
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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 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 (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 Rocio Mercedes Alvarez (May 29, 2019) Over a week has passed. The series is wrapped up and millions of Game of Thrones fans worldwide have either had their hearts broken or their decades-long theories confirmed. To say the final season was controversial is an understatement, especially if you followed the countless super-fans on a variety of social media…
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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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