“The federal courts should be a sanctuary in the jungle,” said Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer in the “Scopes” Monkey Trial. Legendary lawyer Michael Tigar took those words to heart. He hunted the jungle’s predators — the likes of Pinochet. He defended its prey — the likes of Lynne Stewart and Julian Assange. He gave counsel to Panthers like Angela Davis, and, as you just learned, briefly shared a cell with the likes of Bobby Seale. | more…
“The bargain was that if they worked together, they could expropriate the land from the Native Americans and accomplish what came to be called the American Dream, and with a little luck and a lot of pluck, they could then somehow down the road gain free labor from enslaved Africans, and so there was a sort of corrupt bargain at the onset of what is now the United States of America…And still to this very day, you have this kind of class collaboration between some of the ninety-nine percent and some of the one percent. How else can you explain how and why a faux billionaire, Donald J. Trump in November 2020, received almost seventy-five million votes?” | more…
“I thought to myself, ‘I’ve never heard any of this really,’ and I (came of age during) the anti-war movement, I’m a historian of this time period.” If you think you’ve heard enough about the Vietnam War, just wait. | more…
“The members were Santhals, Oraons,as well as tea garden workers, who were allied in a struggle for surplus land distribution. On the whole, death sentences were avoided, but arms were snatched and land was distributed. The aim was to abolish the feudal order….” | more…
“Donnelly gives a short account of the origins of neoliberal imperialism, which emerged in the 1970s as a result of three challenges to the post–World War II global economic order: 1) the decline in the value of the U. S. dollar; 2) economic stagnation and a falling rate of pro t in the rich countries; and 3) the Third World “debt crisis”. Donnelly’s retelling of this story is remarkably concise and coherent; captured in a mere 30 pages, it is perhaps one of the best short overviews of the emergence of neoliberal global capitalism that I have read….” | more…
“….almost half the book comes in the form of substantive interviews that are not simply rich and compelling in the sense of capturing the struggles and experiences of a diverse range of Latin Americans. They are also incredibly smart. The researchers interviewed some really sharp, experienced activists who have clearly thought deeply about political struggle for some time.” | more…
If you want to hear more of the details and stories around the trials of the Chicago 8, Julian Assange, Lynne Stewart, Pinochet, and dozens more dramatic court cases with direct impacts on each of our daily lives, then it will be well worth your while to give your ear to Law and Disorder’s most recent conversation with Michael Tigar. Still, in his book Sensing Injustice, Tigar goes well beyond merely, if magnificently, narrating a profound array of legal battles. Tigar well understands the limits of law in the fight for justice, and of the role of the lawyer — as do his fellow lawyers Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith —and challenging existential questions about the nature of the legal profession also come up in the Law and Disorder interview. | more…
Did you happen to catch Rob Wallace on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver? It’s a primer on what we all wish was “a once in a lifetime nightmare” but which “is actually part of a global trend, because the total number of disease outbreaks has increased significantly since 1980;” And “this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the worst that mother nature has to offer us.” If the below John Oliver program were merely the ultimate in sardonic entertainment, it might be purely depressing, but instead it’s almost a relief to watch. It’s essentially a 20 minute summary of
“International mainstream media, on the one hand, and also, the official media, really both of them silence the voices of the Bolivarian people, of the Chavista people, of the working class of the people of Venezuela….full internationalism should do its work to reverse that situation.” As a part of that effort to reverse the silencing of the Venezuelan people, Marquina adds: “It’s very important to understand that there is class struggle within the Bolivarian process, so in the exercise of organizing internationalism, being aware of those tendencies is actually very very important….” | more…
“…from the world of Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory through to that of the Marsalis family, with the common thread being New Orleans, often cited as the birthplace of the music…an anatomy of resistance; at every stage, despite Jim Crow, gangsters and extreme violence, jazz developed and bloomed….” | more…
As a work of social history, Jazz and Justice traces the origins of Jazz in the northern part of this hemisphere, but the issues it raises are quite contemporary. As his reviewer notes, “the now-common expression ‘gig work’ originated in the jazz world. The near-endless list of Black jazz musicians who have died early deaths is testimony to the overwork the gig economy forced on them.” | more…
New from Monthly Review Press! Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change is a vibrant literary and legal feat! Essential reading for lawyers, for law students, for anyone who aspires to bend the law toward change. | more…
“…the thought was, this is the cost of doing business, and that they would externalize the cost, not just on the people of China, but on the rest of the world…China is not alone in that. The U.S. has done that, Europe has done that…the Swine flu, H1N1 that emerged in 2009 outside Mexico City, our team calls that the NAFTA flu, (from) the U.S. meat dumped onto the Mexican market….In other words we did it ourselves, in 2009, this very thing that China has also been doing for several decades.” | more…
