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Politics

Demystifying How The Hamas Leadership Works

September 1, 2024 Hanna Alshaikh, Mondoweiss. , , , ,
After Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau, was assassinated in Tehran, the Movement’s senior consultative body, the Shura Council, quickly and unanimously chose Yahya Sinwar as his successor. At the time of his killing, Haniyeh had been leading the Hamas effort in the ceasefire negotiations with mediators, and many analysts claimed that Sinwar’s rise signaled a total break with the policies of Haniyeh and other senior Political Bureau members. Much of this analysis is misinformed.  It betrays a shallow understanding of not just the leaders of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), but the wider Movement as a whole.

Bridging Political Divides Through Solidarity

August 29, 2024 Katy Habr, Labor Notes. , , ,
How should unions engage with members drawn to right-wing, anti-worker politics and candidates? One union trying to tackle this disconnect is the Communications Workers (CWA). Steve Lawton, former president of CWA Local 1102 in New York (now merged with Local 1101), has been heavily involved with political education through his work as a local leader and in the District 1 political department. In this interview he discusses organizing in a union with many Trump-supporting members, how to talk with members about immigration, and strategies for organizing and building solidarity across political divides.

New York Time’s Predictable Advice For Kamala Harris: Go Right

July 28, 2024 Julie Hollar, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. , , , , ,
As the Democratic Party began to coalesce behind Kamala Harris, the New York Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24) quickly put forward the knee-jerk corporate media prescription for Democratic candidates: urging Harris to the right. Under the subhead, “Why moderation works,” David Leonhardt explained that “the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party.” As evidence, he pointed to two polls. The first was a recent Gallup poll that found Trump leading Biden on the question of who voters agreed with more “on the issues that matter most to you.”

Reflections On The Legacy And Modern-Day Impact Of Malcolm X

June 5, 2024 Ujima People's Progress Party, Black Agenda Report. , , , , , ,
With the recent celebrations of the 99th birthday of Malcolm X, the Ujima People’s Progress Party feels it is a good time to reflect on his legacy and modern-day impact. Granted that this cannot be done complete justice in one column. Our objective here is to simply highlight a few things in his legacy that we feel contribute to his ideological lineage which in no small measure led to the forming of our party. First and foremost, Malcolm X was a Pan Africanist and as such the unification of all people of African descent was of the utmost urgency. The primary urgent objective was then and is today to recapture the motherland home of Africa and secure her resources both economic and cultural first for the benefit of African people and then the rest of the world in need.

Jewish Americans Oppose AIPAC’s Intervention In Democratic Party

March 21, 2024 Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC, Scheer Post. , , , , , ,
We are Jewish Americans who have varying perspectives. We’ve agreed to come together to highlight and oppose the unprecedented and damaging role of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and allied groups in U.S. elections, especially within Democratic Party primaries. We recognize the purpose of AIPAC’s interventions in electoral politics is to defeat any critics of Israeli Government policy and to support candidates who vow unwavering loyalty to Israel, thereby ensuring the United States’ continuing support for all that Israel does, regardless of its violence and illegality.

A New Alliance Could Change Puerto Rican Politics

March 18, 2024 Rafael Bernabe and Ed Morales, Portside. , , , ,
Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States since the 1898 Spanish-American War. It had only US-appointed governors until 1948, and in 1952, Congress passed a joint resolution that approved its first constitution, which provided for limited autonomy. It would become a “Commonwealth,” but the island remained an unincorporated territory that lacked sovereignty and full rights afforded to US citizens, despite the fact that residents of Puerto Rico were granted citizenship in 1917. Since then, the island’s politics have revolved around three political parties whose platforms are focused on its political status.

Charlie Chaplin’s Enduring Legacy

December 24, 2023 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. , , , ,
Few individuals did more to shape modern cinema than the actor, director, and producer Charlie Chaplin. One of the greatest of all comic mimes, he also pioneered cinematic techniques and storytelling. His films with his iconic role as the beleaguered Little Tramp with baggy trousers, mustache, cane, and bowler hat were not only comic masterpieces, but unflinching looks at poverty, unemployment, capitalism, exploitation, the callousness of authority, the search for meaning and dignity in a hostile world, and the yearning for love and acceptance. He argued that drama should be derived from the close observation of life. He refused to follow the conventions, including the penchant for exaggerated melodrama, perfecting his work with hundreds of takes, subtle acting, and nuanced facial expressions.

Tackling The Problem Of ‘Captive Audience’ Meetings

November 6, 2023 Daniel Perez and Jennifer Sherer, Economic Policy Institute. , , ,
Political and religious coercion in the workplace is a growing problem affecting workers from all backgrounds and across the political spectrum. U.S. employers have tremendous power over worker conduct under current federal laws. For example, employers can require workers to attend “captive audience” meetings—and force employees to listen to political, religious, or anti-union employer views—on work time. In the face of this growing threat, legislators in 18 states have advanced bills to protect workers from offensive or unwanted political and religious speech unrelated to job tasks or performance.

Lessons From One Hundred Years Of Journalism

September 22, 2023 Mischa Geracoulis, Project Censored. , , , , ,
In Mr. Associated Press, Gene Allen investigates the Associated Press (AP) and its trajectory from a pony express news agency founded in 1846 to the international stage, by way of the person most responsible for that transformation, Kent Cooper (1880-1965). As exceptional as every era believes itself to be, the history chronicled in these pages reveals that many of the problems currently facing the media and the public’s relationship to it are reiterations of the past. Some one hundred years on, Allen—a professor emeritus of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University—analyzes Cooper’s time in the news industry and spotlights evergreen issues, including the politicization, polarization, and corporatization of the news.

The Nonsensical ‘Right And Left Need To Unite To Take On Elites’ Take

August 17, 2023 Adam Johnson, The Real News Network. , , ,
Every few months—sometimes for sinister and ideological reasons, sometimes for just plain ahistorical and dimwitted reasons—a pundit comes along who thinks they’ve cracked the DaVinci code of class politics. “What if,” they ask us (as if the question has not been asked countless times before), “left and right unite to take on the elites”? The phrasing of the question can vary, but it’s invariably some version of the same claptrap. This take has a particular superficial appeal: What if the right and left could set aside their seemingly insurmountable differences and unite to take on these mysterious “elites,” or “those in power”? What if, indeed!

How Liberal Comedians Became Lap Dogs For Establishment Power

August 12, 2023 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. , , , , ,
The fusion of politics, news, and entertainment has given prominence to comics like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Bill Maher, who serve as attack dogs for the Democratic Party, which has joined forces with the establishment wing of the old Republican Party against Donald Trump and his supporters. By belittling Trump and his followers, these comics feed the smug, self-righteousness of the ruling establishment, bolstering their sense of moral and intellectual superiority. All the while, they remain comfortably constrained by the corporations and advertisers that employ them.

The Supreme Court And Political Corruption

July 7, 2023 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
The Supreme Court of the United States is enshrined in the Constitution as one of three branches of government, the other two being the Executive branch, the presidency, and the Legislative branch, the Senate and House of Representatives. In other words the Court is a lawmaking body. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was a landmark, a case that most Black people commit to memory. The Court declared that public accommodations could not be considered equal if they were separate, and thus began the long road to ending segregation in the law.

You Can’t Organize Alone

June 1, 2023 Keisa Reynolds, In These Times. , ,
I spent a number of weekend mornings in small rooms attending workshops across downtown Chicago in my early 20s, around 2015. In one, abolitionist Mariame Kaba taught some two dozen participants about the legacy of the women in Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist movement, connecting their organizing in the 1920s with the framework Black feminist abolitionists were creating a century later. Learning that history was valuable in itself. Equally important was Kaba’s assurance that we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel — there was no analysis or strategy we were considering that hadn’t been used in the past. That might sound like reason for despair, but for me it was immediately empowering; white supremacy doesn’t want abolitionist organizers to know how close we’ve gotten to a common goal.

Durham Report Reveals The Real Threat To ‘Democracy’

May 20, 2023 ​​​​​​​Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
Six years and millions of dollars later, the “Durham report” released on May 15th confirmed once again what a few of us had the nerve to argue before all of the reports and stories that subsequently emerged – that “Russiagate” was the most massive fraud ever perpetrated on the U.S. public by a section of the capitalist rulers and represented a maturing of a form of U.S. neofascism unique to this historical moment. The public may have forgotten that during the Trump Administration U.S. Attorney General Bob Barr assigned John H. Durham as special counsel to review the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.  The Durham report, as it is being referred to in the media, corroborated many of the conclusions reached by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report in 2019.

Hydropolitics: An Interview With Erik Swyngedouw

May 8, 2023 Sanaa Alimia, Red Pepper. , , , ,
Water is not, and has never been, a standalone issue. Over the past 20 or 30 years, in a context of increasing concern with access to water in terms of quality, particularly in the global south, there has been an extraordinary amount of activism around water: access, struggle, ownership, etc. What has that done to systematically change the configuration of access to water? Almost nothing. Clearly the highly triaged and uneven access and distribution of water is a major issue. It’s the number one cause of premature mortality in the world. Poor access to water is a concern that many activists share. Something has to be done. But the focus on the specificity of the issue is politically stifling.
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