The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the Am...
The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats openly pillage and loot. Programs instituted to prote...
Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, McDonald’s—which makes its uniforms in prison—AT&T, Starbucks, which ma...
People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel, Vitale said when we met. They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically n...
Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by...
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money, and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality, and fre...
Many of America’s policing techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected in American colonies such as the Philippines before being introduced to police departments in the...
Force, Simone Weil wrote, is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.2
Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls junk politics. Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than cla...
But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movemen...
A group trying to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians portrays itself, in this rhetorical twist, as victims of an effort to curtail the civil rights of Christians. One
A Department of Defense program known as 1033, begun in the 1990s and authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act, and federal homeland security grants to the states have provided a total of...
Motivation of positive
You know, I come out of the church. I not only grew up in the church but graduated from seminary, and I look at this as a mass movement. I give it very little religious legitimacy, especially the extr...
Slavery is legal in prisons under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have...
Revolutions can even be faux revolutions when, through the careful manipulation of counterrevolutionary forces, they demand not reform but the restoration of retrograde power elites. The Central Intel...
It is sometimes said that, by virtue of his psychological make-up, man cannot live unless he attaches himself to an object that is greater than himself and outlives him, and this necessity has been at...
If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative, Hudson said. If the socialist parties and media don’t come f...
Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men [and women] in war. The...