International Politics and Economy

Seattle’s BLM Autonomous Protest Zone and the Paris Commune of 1871: Anti-Capitalist Spirit still Lives

Oli Mould | – A new autonomous zone set up in Seattle by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement bears some striking similarities with the Paris Commune of 1871. Despite its brutal ending, the seminal event in the French capital 150 years ago set the agenda for progressive urban politics and broader social justice movements […]

Dissent

Drones and Protesters: How High-Tech Surveillance Amplifies Police Bias and Overreach

The Conversation

By Andrew Guthrie Ferguson | – Video of police in riot gear clashing with unarmed protesters in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has filled social media feeds. Meanwhile, police surveillance of protesters has remained largely out of sight. Local, state and federal law enforcement organizations use […]

Dissent

What – or who – is Trump’s Bogeyman Antifa?

The Conversation

By Stanislav Vysotsky | – The movement called “antifa” gets its name from a short form of “anti-fascist,” which is about the only thing its members agree on. President Donald Trump and some far-right activists and militants have claimed antifa is allegedly conspiring to foment violence amid the protests sweeping the U.S. In my forthcoming […]

Bill of Rights

How Trump brought US Racist Policing and Racist Foreign Policy Together on D.C. Streets

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

(Code Pink) – On June 1, President Trump threatened to deploy active-duty U.S. military forces against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in cities across America. Trump and state governors eventually deployed at least 17,000 National Guard troops across the country. In the nation’s capital, Trump deployed nine Blackhawk assault helicopters, thousands of National Guard troops […]

Democracy

The Other Looting: We’ve Just witnessed a Nationwide Police Riot, Fueled by Trump’s talk of “Terrorists”

Dan Dinello

Reacting to Protests Against Brutality and Racism, the Police Try to Crush Dissent by Brutally Beating, Gassing, and Shooting Protesters

Democracy

The 2020 uprisings, unprecedented in scope, join a long river of struggle in America

The Conversation

By Matthew Countryman | – The river was the metaphor that best captured “the long, continuous movement” of the black freedom struggle for theologian, historian and civil rights activist Vincent Harding. Harding, who had served as a speechwriter for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote in his groundbreaking 1981 study of African-American history, “There is […]

Dissent

Light ‘Em Up! How America’s Forever Wars came to our Streets

William J. Astore

(Tomdispatch.com) – From their front porches, regular citizens watched a cordon of cops sweep down their peaceful street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rankled at being filmed, the cops exceeded their authority and demanded that people go inside their houses. When some of them didn’t obey quickly enough, the order — one heard so many times in […]

Democracy

George Floyd and Mohamed Bouazizi: What Americans can Learn from Tunisia’s Arab Spring

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In mid-December, 2010 in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, a small drama unfolded that would change the world, and certainly would change Tunisia. Tareq Mohammed Bouazizi, a street peddler who had just bought $200 worth of produce to sell off a cart, was harassed by police for not […]

Authoritarianism

The rest of the world sees uprisings, not riots, in Trump’s US

Reese Erlich

(48hills.org) – One of Germany’s largest dailies ran the headline “This killer cop set America ablaze,” with a photo of the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd. Protests in the United States, the article reported, looked like “scenes out of a civil war.” Bettina Gaus, political correspondent for the Berlin daily Die Tagezeitung, tells […]