DOD, FBI, King and the Tremors of History

January 23, 2020 by Common Dreams The FBI—the agency that saw King and the civil rights movement as a communist plot—subjected him to merciless surveillance and may have tried to get him to commit suicide. by Robert C. Koehler This nation’s lack of atonement for its past—combined with the endless wars it is currently waging—make King’s legacy profoundly problematic, by …

Other bad periods: Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

By Ann GibbonsNov. 15, 2018 , 2:00 PM Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning …

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other congressional progressives want to tax companies that overpay their CEOs. Most Republicans would go even further: A Harvard Business School study found that Americans think the right CEO-worker pay ratio is no higher than 7 to 1

All this could mean bipartisan traction for a new bill introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Barbara Lee earlier this month. It would raise the federal corporate income tax rate on companies that pay their CEOs more than 50 times their median workers’ pay.The bigger the gap, the bigger the hike. At a …

The End of Neoliberalism and Rebirth of History

By Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project-syndicate.org November 14, 2019 | CREATE! For 40 years, elites in rich and poor countries alike promised that neoliberal policies would lead to faster economic growth, and that the benefits would trickle down so that everyone, including the poorest, would be better off. Now that the evidence is in, is it any wonder that trust in elites and confidence …

When Anti-Immigration Meant Keeping Out Black Pioneers and Keeping Blacks from Voting in the Midwest

In the 1850s, Midwestern states used harsh laws to deny free African-Americans wealth and property. By Anna-Lisa Cox, a fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research. Sept. 20, 2019, NYTimes.com William Brown managed to get across the river safely, finding work in a small rural Illinois community close to the state’s border with Indiana. He would have known …

The Illegal Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom Government

By Keanu Sai, PhD, NEA Today.August 31, 2019 | EDUCATE! NOTE: This is the first of three articles we are publishing by Dr. Keanu Sai, a member of the Hawaiian Kingdom Subcommittee of the National Lawyers Guild. The articles were written to provide accurate information to Hawaiian (and other) students about Hawaiian history. Status Of The Hawaiian Kingdom Under International Law In 2001, …

From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the shape of cities has been defined by the technologies that allow commuters to get to work in about 30 minutes

JONATHAN ENGLISH, AUG 29, 2019, City Lab In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day. This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land …

‘Prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order’

Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting. According to a new …