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…
Interviewer Charisse Burden-Stelly begins, “….apocalypse represented, for African and indigenous folks, the end of life as they knew it—that is, a life free from enslavement, genocide, and ongoing violence wrought by the insatiable drive of the group that came to be known as “whites” for endless profit. This ending was simultaneously the beginning of a capitalist world economy rooted in racial hierarchy, imperial domination, and militarized social relations, of which neoliberalism is merely the most recent enunciation.” | more…
“…the United States government understands that China’s scientific and electronic developments, particularly in robotics, in telecommunications, in “green technology,” and so on, has far surpassed that of U.S. and European companies, and this is an existential threat as far as the United States is concerned.” | more…
Asks Zillah Eisenstein: “Why is it that when people are talking about democracy…(there’s a) lack of recognition of the way that misogyny smothers the globe?” Clearly, democracy can take very misogynistic dimensions… | more…
