Latest News: Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

“How growing up in a New Deal city shaped Bernie Sanders’s vision for America” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN excerpt published in Public Seminar

Friday, June 26th, 2020

It is always a surprise–and no surprise–that New York constantly reinvents its political and economic vision. Ted Hamm’s Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up in the New Deal City Shaped Bernie Sanders’ Politics (OR Books June 2020) explores the thirty years of progressive politics that shaped Brooklyn and New York, decades that made Bernie Sanders the politician he is today.

Read the excerpt here.

“US Indicts Julian Assange Again—But Why?” — HOW I LOST BY HILLARY CLINTON author Joe Lauria interviewed on Loud & Clear with Brian Becker and John Kiriakou

Friday, June 26th, 2020

Listen to “US Indicts Julian Assange Again – But Why?” on Spreaker.

NEW VIDEO: CAUTIVOS author Ariel Dorfman discusses Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera with the Diane Rehm Book Club

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

“Israel will pretend that illegal annexation is a compromise” — I ACCUSE! author Norman Finkelstein interviewed on Pushback with Aaron Maté

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

“Seeing Boris Johnson seeking to cope with the pandemic has become more and more like watching Peter Sellers play Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for CounterPunch

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

The BoJo Follies

The ‘Five O’Clock Follies’ was the name given during the Vietnam War to US military press briefings that were infamous for announcing non-existent victories and wildly exaggerated numbers for enemy casualties.

British government briefings about the Covid-19 epidemic have taken a shorter period to gain the same dubious reputation for making over-optimistic claims. Supposedly crucial advances in the battle with coronavirus are greeted with fanfare only for these successes to evaporate mysteriously or be downplayed as marginal a few weeks later.

Read the full article here.

“We are in the midst of a unique historical moment. We will have to invent a new way of life, new rituals.” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek interviewed by the Times of Israel

Monday, June 22nd, 2020

Slavoj Zizek is considered a rock star philosopher. One of the most important popular thinkers of the 21st century, he is wild and funny and bursting with charisma. A scholar rooted in the here and now and a philosopher who references Jacques Lacan and Quentin Tarantino in equal measure, he is a sought-after lecturer and a learned provocateur.

With the outbreak of the global COVID-19 health crisis, Zizek published a book called “Pandemic!” which triggered a maelstrom of reactions. The text is a brilliant analysis, delivered in real time, of the significance of the crisis that has swamped the world.

Read the full interview here.

“A penetrating look at the intersection of threats from new diseases as they mix with the much older maladies of capitalism, greed, and inequality” — THE MONSTER ENTERS reviewed by the Progressive

Friday, June 19th, 2020

It’s a rare occurrence for a writer to reissue an older work because it has acquired new relevance, but such was the case for Mike Davis. His 2005 study of the risks of an avian flu pandemic, The Monster at Our Door (New Press), has come back with a vengeance in the emergence of COVID-19, under a new title, The Monster Enters.

It was a book Davis himself no longer even owned a copy of. “I wanted it off my bookshelf in order to exorcise the anxiety involved in its writing,” he writes in the new introduction, while in lockdown in his home in San Diego, California.

Davis’s forty-four-page intro is, by itself, worth the price of admission. Crafted in his distinctive prose (“I write this . . . bunkered in my garage with innumerable cans of Chef Boyardee, a few pints of Guinness, and some virology textbooks.”), he takes the reader through an analysis of our present moment that is part history lesson, part detective story, part science class, and most of all, cogent political analysis.

The book is well researched, with twenty-three pages of notes and citations, but nonetheless accessible, with a penetrating look at the intersection of threats from new diseases as they mix with the much older maladies of capitalism, greed, and inequality.

Read the full review here.

“The World in Which Bernie Sanders Grew Up” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN excerpt published on Lit Hub

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
Theodore Hamm on WWII-Era Brooklyn, the New Deal, and Commies Fightin’ Fascists

Read the full excerpt here.

“To Survive This Era, Writers Must Rejoin The Working Class” — THE DEEP END author Jason Boog interviewed by HuffPost

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
Jason Boog, author of “The Deep End,” sees a template for writers and publishing workers today in the political activism of Great Depression writers.

Read the full interview here.

“Why Policing Is Broken” — HATE INC. author Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
Years of research on brutality cases shows that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers of police violence.

Read the full article here.

“Heastie-Controlled Slush Fund Props Up Embattled NY State Assembly Incumbents” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm writes for the Indypendent

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
As the June 23 primary nears, money is flowing in multiple directions.
While candidates backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders — including second-term Manhattan Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou and aspiring Brooklyn State Senator Jabari Brisport — have amassed hefty sums of small contributions, many long-term incumbents are relying on large transfers relayed by New York’s Democratic Party leadership.

The main account delivering five-figure sums to candidates is the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee (DACC), which is controlled by Speaker Carl Heastie. As of last week’s 11-Day Pre-Primary filing, DACC had nearly $4 million to spend. In the first two days of this week, nearly $100,000 has poured into its coffers.

Read the full article here.

“Masego Panyane talks the legacy of the Black Consciousness Movement” — THE BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS READER co-author interviewed by Independent Online

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020

We caught up with Masego Panyane, the co-author of “The Black Consciousness Reader”, to talk about her journey as a young writer and how she became part of this remarkable book.

The Soweto-born writer, singer and content creator says the book is about the “legacy” of the Black Consciousness Movement.

The 26-year-old writer said, “The book came about as a conversation that the co-authors and I were having, about what the Black Consciousness Movement looks like, 40 years after the death of one of its more prominent leaders, Steve Biko.

“We thought it would be a good idea to find all the activists and champions of the Black Consciousness Movement to have that conversation with them. And to take the story forward by looking at how the philosophy of Black Consciousness keeps playing a role in South Africa today.”

Read the full interview here.

“Iraq’s new prime minister faces a host of challenges. Coronavirus is just one of them” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020
Plunging oil revenues, an Isis fightback and a brewing US-Iran conflict make Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s job a tough one, Patrick Cockburn writes.

Read the full article here.

“Why aren’t we seeing more, not less, of the political figures whose programs and insights are today more relevant than ever?” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for RT

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020
With everything that’s plunging the world into chaos right now, one thing surprising me is, why are Greta Thunberg and Bernie Sanders comparatively quiet? Make no mistake, racism, climate issues and the pandemic are all connected.

Except for a short note from Greta that she thinks she survived the Covid infection, the movement she has mobilized has failed to avoid getting drowned out by the Covid-19 pandemic panic and the anti-racism protests in the US. As for Bernie, although he advocated measures (like universal healthcare) which are now, amid the pandemic, recognized as necessary all around the world, he is also effectively nowhere to be seen or heard. Why aren’t we seeing more, not less, of the political figures whose programs and insights are today more relevant than ever?

Read the full article here.

“Matt Taibbi responds to critics” — HATE INC. author interviewed on Hill TV’s Rising

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020

“The American Press Is Destroying Itself” — HATE INC. author Matt Taibbi writes on Substack

Monday, June 15th, 2020

A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press

Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.

Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.

But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

Read the full article here.

“The jokes in parliament prove British leaders have no idea how bad slavery was—and why people are protesting” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent

Monday, June 15th, 2020
The description of what slavers did as “atrocities” is not an exaggeration. Appreciation of the savage reality of slavery is clouded among white populations by films like Gone with the Wind which emphasise sentimental attachments between master and slave. One way to understand what it was really like is to recall how Isis enslaved the Yazidis in northern Iraq and Syria in 2014, murdering men, women and children and selling thousands of women into sexual slavery.

Terrified women held in Isis jails waited to be raped and sold to the highest bidder. “The first 12 hours of capture were filled with sharply mounting terror,” says a UN report on what happened in one jail. “The selection of any girl was accompanied by screaming as she was forcibly pulled from the room, with her mother and any other women who tried to keep hold of her being brutally beaten by [Isis] fighters. [Yazidi] women and girls began to scratch and bloody themselves in an attempt to make themselves unattractive to potential buyers.” The reference comes from With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State by Cathy Otten.

Read the full article here.

“The Cynical Forces Behind America’s Forever Wars” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn interviewed on Scheer Intelligence

Friday, June 12th, 2020

“Pandemic! Protests! Panic!” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek interviewed on Big Think

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

“Today Ellsberg is celebrated as the patron saint of whistleblowers while Assange is locked in a cell in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison for 23 and a half hours a day” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author and IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE contributor Patrick Cockburn writes for the London Review of Books

Thursday, June 11th, 2020
Julian Assange in Limbo
Julian Assange was running WikiLeaks in 2010 when it released a vast hoard of US government documents revealing details of American political, military and diplomatic operations. With extracts published by the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País, the archive provided deeper insight into the international workings of the US state than anything seen since Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971. But today Ellsberg is celebrated as the patron saint of whistleblowers while Assange is locked in a cell in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison for 23 and a half hours a day. In this latest phase of the American authorities’ ten-year pursuit of Assange, he is fighting extradition to the US. Court hearings to determine whether the extradition request will be granted have been delayed until September by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the US he faces one charge of computer hacking and 17 counts under the Espionage Act of 1917. If he is convicted, the result could be a prison sentence of 175 years.

Read the full article here.

“Pat Robertson: ‘God’s Chosen Candidate'” — THE GOSPEL OF SELF author Terry Heaton interviewed on Long Shots podcast with Conor Powell

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

“Both the hard right and liberal left are steeped in racism and its legacy. The hope for change comes from elsewhere” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for the Independent

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
What emerges in violent protests on the streets of America is an anger that cannot be adequately represented in our political space, writes Slavoj Zizek

Read the full article here.

“Defeat ISIS, betray the Kurds, murder the Iranian military mastermind—what does it add up to?” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn interviewed on Here & There

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020

“The ordeal we face is not lockdown and isolation, but what happens when our societies start to move again” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for the Independent

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
Authoritarians are exploiting this crisis, writes Slavoj Zizek. If China succeeds in Hong Kong, the violent takeover of Taiwan could be the next step – then a full scale Pacific war

Read the full article here.

“Media-Darling Cop Terence Monahan’s Legacy of Brutality” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm writes for the Indypendent

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
He took a knee on Monday night at Union Square protests, garnering the effusive praise of Mayor Bill de Blasio. But on Thursday night, he quite literally looked the other way when cops started roughing up protesters in the Bronx.In between, Chief of Department Terence Monahan — the NYPD’s highest-ranked uniform officer — appeared on the network-TV morning shows and with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, whose “Big Brother” apologized to Monahan for criticizing the department’s handling of looting earlier in the week.

Relatively unknown outside of police circles until now, Monahan is suddenly in the spotlight. Yet throughout his nearly four-decade career with the NYPD, Monahan has been a leading practitioner of both broken-windows policing and crackdowns on protests, two of the main issues that enrage many activists on the streets today.

Read the full article here.

“Frank Sinatra, Woody Guthrie, Arthur Miller & the Reds on the Brooklyn Waterfront” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN excerpt published in the Indypendent

Friday, June 5th, 2020
New York City during the 1930s and 1940s saw a unique array of political alliances. Although FDR was a Democrat, he was not connected to the party’s two leading machines in the city, Tammany Hall in Manhattan and its counterpart in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, FDR’s close ally Fiorello La Guardia was a liberal Republican.

La Guardia (aka the “Little Flower”) was also closely linked to leftist Congressman Vito Marcantonio and the garment union-driven American Labor Party (ALP), which had strong ties to the Communist Party (CPUSA). Here’s a sampling of how these connections played out just after the war, with Woody Guthrie, then living on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, as our point of entry.

Read the full excerpt here.

“I don’t agree with those who claim that now is no time for politics… No! Now is a great time for politics, because the world in its current form is disappearing.” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek profiled in Haaretz

Thursday, June 4th, 2020
The pandemic is liable to worsen, ecological disasters loom and technological surveillance will terminate democracy. Salvation will come only by reorganizing human society. A conversation with the radical – and anxious – philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

Read the full profile here.

“It is a sad paradox, but perhaps not surprising, that some of humanity’s greatest writing has been born in times of turmoil.” — CAUTIVOS author Ariel Dorfman writes for the Washington Post

Thursday, June 4th, 2020
Let me invoke Miguel de Cervantes who, for six long months, was unjustly incarcerated in Seville at the end of the 16th century. It was there that he began to write his groundbreaking “Don Quixote de la Mancha,” a process I have conjured up in my own recent novel “Cautivos.”

Read the full article here.

“Anti-lockdown protesters show how the idea of ‘freedom’ has degenerated” — AN INHERITANCE FOR OUR TIMES editors Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson write for Salon

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

How a reductive, anti-social conception of liberty became mainstream

Read the full article here.

“A rich and compelling examination of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 literary classic” — CRUSOE AND HIS CONSEQUENCES reviewed in Peace News

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

This is a rich and compelling examination of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 literary classic Robinson Crusoe – the story of a shipwrecked man who survives on a desert island for 28 years, two months and 19 days.

Read the full review here.

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