( Tomdispatch.com) – Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and the Northeast by extreme weather events and in the West by a stunning fire season; and an […]
Generations of Struggle: Lessons on Defending Democracy
By Liz Theoharis | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – My father, Athan G. Theoharis, passed away on July 3rd. A leading expert on the FBI, he was responsible for exposing the bureau’s widespread abuses of power. He was a loyal husband, dedicated father, scholar, civil libertarian, and voting-rights advocate with an indefatigable commitment to defending […]
When You Lift from the Bottom, Everyone Rises: Have We Entered America’s Third Era of Reconstruction?
( Tomdispatch.com) – West Virginia, a state first established in defiance of slavery, has recently become ground zero in the fight for voting rights. In an early June op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin vowed to maintain the Senate filibuster, while opposing the For the People Act, a bill to expand voting […]
Mother’s Day Tears: The Fierce Prophetic Vision of Poor Women
( Tomdispatch.com) – One hundred and fifty years ago, in the bloody wake of the Civil War, the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe issued a “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” The world, she wrote, could no longer bear such terrible violence and death. She called on women across the country to “rise up through the ashes and devastation” […]
Can America finally kick the Habit? – “The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World”
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Fifty-four years ago, standing at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his now-famous “Beyond Vietnam” sermon. For the first time in public, he expressed in vehement terms his opposition to the American war in Vietnam. He saw clearly that a foreign policy defined […]
Whose Rights Matter in Pandemic America? Not Those of Poor Americans, That’s For Sure
By Liz Theoharis | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – In June 1990, future South African President Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress only months after being released from 27 years in a South African apartheid prison. He reminded the political leadership of the United States that “to deny people their human rights is […]
MLK Marched nonviolently on DC with the Disadvantaged for the Vote: Trump’s armed militia Flew First Class with Privilege to suppress the vote
By Liz Theoharis | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – 2020 will go down as the deadliest year in American history, significantly due to the devastation delivered by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, count in nearly two trillion dollars in damage from climate events (many caused by, or heightened by, intensifying global warming), a surge of incidents […]
The Great American Moonshot: Now we Need a Vaccine for Poverty, Inequality and Racism
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Martin Luther King, Jr., offered this all-too-relevant comment on his moment in his 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”: “The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the […]
The Other America: The New Politics of the Poor in Joe Biden’s (and Mitch McConnell’s) USA
( Tomdispatch.com) – In the two weeks since Election 2020, the country has oscillated between joy and anger, hope and dread in an era of polarization sharpened by the forces of racism, nativism, and hate. Still, truth be told, though the divisive tone of this moment may only be sharpening, division in the United States […]
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