by Medea Benjamin & Zoltan Grossman Since George Floyd was murdered, we have seen an increasing convergence of the “war at home” against Black and brown people with the “wars abroad” that the U.S. has waged against people in other countries. Army and National Guard troops have been deployed in U.S. cities, as militarized police treat our cities as occupied war zones. In … [Read more...] about 10 Reasons Why Defunding Police Should Lead to Defunding War
xenophobia
What Is Happening in Bolivia’s 3 May Elections?
by Vijay Prashad On 10 November 2019, a coup d’état took place in Bolivia. The commander-in-chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces asked President Evo Morales to resign. The police had already mutinied, and society had already been destabilized — this had been triggered by a presidential election whose results had not been recognized by the opposition and whose results had been … [Read more...] about What Is Happening in Bolivia’s 3 May Elections?
The Immigration Con Job
by Ted Morgan For many years now, an immigration “crisis” has regularly emerged as a hot topic in the corporate media. Presidents and Members of Congress from both political parties have in different ways raised alarms about undocumented or “illegal” immigrants in the United States. And both parties have raised false expectations that they might resolve the nation’s … [Read more...] about The Immigration Con Job
The Making of Inheritance
Cambiz Amir-Khosravi While planning a trip to Florida in 2011 to see my ailing mother-in-law, I realized that the Department of Motor Vehicles had misspelled my last name. Instead of Khosravi, they spelled it Khosrui. It might be a minor issue to most people but having a Middle Eastern name in today’s xenophobic climate I naturally became paranoid. Having heard of … [Read more...] about The Making of Inheritance
Orwell’s Doublethink, Alive and Well in Trump’s America
Anthony DiMaggio George Orwell’s 1984 is a dystopian novel about authoritarianism, and is widely understood as a critique of Stalinism and centralized communist states. But Orwell believed that propaganda functioned in both communist and capitalist states alike. His insights about the uses and abuses of propaganda are remarkably relevant when studying American and … [Read more...] about Orwell’s Doublethink, Alive and Well in Trump’s America
The Road Not Taken
(With apologies to Robert Frost and his poem by the same title) When I saw the headline 'Attitudes on Arabs, terrorism shifting' in today's Morning Call, I expected to read that people here in the Lehigh Valley were finally getting over their prejudices and stereotypes about Arabs & Muslims. Instead, I learned that even as other fears have decreased, ‘wariness of … [Read more...] about The Road Not Taken