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Republican National Convention Perfect Place To ‘Cause Ruckus’

By Chad Childers for Loudwire.com. Prophets of Rage have played their first show in Los Angeles, with their second scheduled to take place Friday night (June 3) at the Hollywood Palladium, but what happens after that? Determined that their music is needed now more than ever, the collective of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk, Public Enemy’s Chuck D and DJ Lord and Cypress Hill’s B-Real will take their music to where it’s needed most. When asked about what the band was doing in July, Morello told Bloomberg Politics (in the video interview above), “Well there a thing called the Republican National Convention in July and that’ll be a perfect place for a band like Prophets of Rage to cause a ruckus and we will be there on the streets in the fields and in the concert hall.”

90 Percent Of Public Lacks Trust In US Political System

By Staff of AP and NORC - Seventy percent of Americans say they feel frustrated about this year's presidential election, including roughly equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans, according to a recent national poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. More than half feel helpless and a similar percent are angry. Nine in 10 Americans lack confidence in the country's political system, and among a normally polarized electorate, there are few partisan differences in the public's lack of faith in the political parties, the nominating process, and the branches of government.

Brazil Social Movement Plans To Escalate Land Occupations After Coup

By Staff of Tele Sur - Latin America's largest social movement has promised a new wave of farm occupations in Brazil following President Dilma Rousseff's suspension to stand trial in the Senate, an official with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) said. The movement, a long-time ally of Rousseff's Workers Party which says it has two million members across Brazil, will target "idle" farm land owned by members of the interim government and its backers, MST spokeswoman Marina do Santos said Tuesday.

How The Irish Easter Uprising In 1916 Sparked US Politics

By David Brundage for The Conversation - On July 27, 1919, Marcus Garvey, the African-American nationalist then nearing the height of his influence, rose to address a crowd of almost 6,000 people who had come to dedicate Liberty Hall, on Harlem’s 138th Street, as the new headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA, which Garvey had originally founded five years earlier in his native Jamaica, had grown rapidly since its relocation to the United States. By the early 1920s, it had chapters in more than 30 American cities and African-American supporters that historians believe numbered in the millions.

The Need For Progressive Voices

By Ralph Nader for The Nader Page - In 1961, President Kennedy’s Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Newton Minow described television as “a vast wasteland.” Perhaps nothing demonstrates that better these days than the rise of Donald J. Trump as a presidential candidate; now the presumptive Republican nominee. Trump’s boisterous carnival barker persona has dominated the airwaves for the entirety of the 2016 election cycle, eclipsing what precious little time remained for the serious issues that affect millions of Americans.

Flint Chess Game: The Politics Of The Battlefield

By Dr. Marsha Coleman Adebayo for Black Agenda Report - The game of chess is a complicated game employing zero sum, competitive Machiavellian strategies to protect key political or military principals. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king, and to protect the queen, the most powerful piece in the game, as long as possible. One fallen knight on the political chessboard of the Flint, Michigan water crisis is Susan Hedman, the EPA Regional 5 Administrator whose callous disregard for the health and safety of Flint citizens triggered her forced resignation although she has escaped any criminal liabilities.

Expanding Democracy Through The Commons

By Danijela Dolenec for Open Democracy - Even though I am a political scientist, I don't expect that the kind of political change that we need today will come from parliaments, governments or parties. Instead, I look to the streets. This is why when we talk about the future of democracy I put my hopes in the recent cycle of protests and new social movements emerging around the world since 2008. They are usually interpreted as being motivated by austerity, assuming that people protest worsening standards of living, unemployment, and economic insecurity.

Real Story In Brazil Shown By Next President And Finance Chief

By Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept - IT’S NOT EASY for outsiders to sort through all the competing claims about Brazil’s political crisis and the ongoing effort to oust its president, Dilma Rousseff, who won re-election a mere 18 months ago with 54 million votes. But the most important means for understanding the truly anti-democratic nature of what’s taking place is to look at the person whom Brazilian oligarchs and their media organs are trying to install as president: the corruption-tainted, deeply unpopular, oligarch-serving Vice President Michel Temer (above).

Ash Carter’s Asian Folly

By Peter Lee for Counter Punch - Ash Carter is on a mission: to convince Asia’s democracies that Asian security is synonymous with American leadership. Unfortunately for him, the two concepts are not theoretically or even empirically identical, as is revealed by a major clanger Secretary Carter dropped at the Council for Foreign Relations on April 8, 2016. During the Q&A, Carter stated that the PRC was screwing things up in the South China Sea, thereby promoting militarization and insecurity in “a region that has had it good for 70 years”…

Crisis In Brazil

By Glenn Greenwald, Euan Gibb, Andrew Fishman, David Miranda, Bea Whitaker and João Machado for The Bullet - Brazil's lower House of Congress on Sunday voted to impeach the country's president, Dilma Rousseff, sending the removal process to the Senate. In an act of unintended though rich symbolism, the House member who pushed impeachment over the 342-vote threshold was Dep. Bruno Araújo, himself implicated by a document indicating he may have received illegal funds from the construction giant at the heart of the nation's corruption scandal.

Fidel Castro Makes Rare Appearance At Cuban Congress

By Staff of Tele Sur - Leader of the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro Ruz made a rare public appearance during the closure of the seventh Congress of the Communist Party Tuesday morning, where President Raul Castro Ruz was also in attendance. "This may be one of the last times that I speak in this room," said Fidel Castro. "I appreciate the invitation and the honor to speak in front of you," he said. "The Cuban people will be victorious."

Radical Politics In Age Of American Authoritarianism

By Henry A. Giroux for Truthout - The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by many in the US today point to the divide between those who are and those who are not willing to commit to democracy. Debates over whether Donald Trump is a fascist are a tactical diversion because the real issue is what it will take to prevent the United States from sliding further into a distinctive form of authoritarianism. The willingness of contemporary politicians and pundits to use totalitarian themes echoes alarmingly fascist and totalitarian elements of the past.

When Will US Government Stop Persecuting Whistleblowers?

By Chelsea E Manning for The Guardian - The US government is heavily invested in an internal surveillance program that is unsustainable, ineffective, morally reprehensible, inherently dangerous and ultimately counterproductive. In the months following the US government’s initial charges against me over the release of government records in 2010, the current administration formed theNational Insider Threat Task Force under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several other US government agencies.

People Are Stopping The TPP; Time To Finish Off Corporate Trade

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Mint Press News and Popular Resistance - WASHINGTON — (Opinion) There has been a remarkable turn of events recently when it comes to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its European equivalent, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. They are faltering and moving in a downward spiral, if the movement keeps doing its job this will continue for the duration of the Obama presidency. The people-powered movement against trade, the largest anti-corporate trade movement in history, has built its power over the last five years.

Supreme Court Halts Clean Power Plan, Wide Implications

By John H. Cushman Jr. for Inside Climate News - The Supreme Court put on hold the linchpin of President Obama's climate policy, barring the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday from carrying out the administration's new Clean Power Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants. It was a surprising decision of staggering proportions, with repercussions that go far beyond the U.S. electrical grid, threatening the credibility of the Paris Agreement on climate change reached by the world’s nations in December.
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