U.S. capitalism has a hate-love relationship with the nation’s schools. On the ‘hate’ side is a stream of complaints from business leaders and organizations about the many students, particularly in city schools, who fail grade-level achievement tests, are high school dropouts or, if they complete high school, do not have the academic qualifications for college and advanced-skills education…. | more…

In mid-April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out a six-day operation in the New York metropolitan area, detaining a total of 225 people. ¶ One month later, a young US citizen named Augustina stood in Manhattan’s Foley Square, a few hundred feet from ICE’s regional headquarters, and told a crowd of journalists and supporters how the series of raids—code-named ‘Operation Keep Safe’—had impacted her and her family…. | more…

Although the 1967 revolutionary armed peasant uprising in Naxalbari, at the foot of the Indian Himalayas, was brutally crushed, the insurgency gained new life elsewhere in India. In fact, this revolt has turned out to be the world’s longest-running “people’s war,” and Naxalbari has come to stand for the road to revolution in India. What has gone into the making of this protracted Maoist resistance? | more…

Gerald Horne: … I think that particularly with regard to students of African descent (but not exclusively students of African descent), it’s very important for them not to see Black people only in the role of slaves…. One of the many scandals of historiography in the United States is not dealing with that history, which I think leads to a misimpression that the slave population was inert, or as … Kanye West said, 400 years of slavery is “a choice.” Basically, I mean that kind of opinion comes clearly from this idea of presenting enslaved people as passive…” | more…

Michael E. Tigar is a renowned human rights attorney and author of over a dozen books, including the forthcoming Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power. The University of Texas at Austin has archived thousands of Tigar‘s documents, photographs, and creative works, as well as video oral histories, which are scheduled to go digital…. | more…

Monday, October 1, Howard Waitzkin, author of Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health, will be in Albuquerque, NM, giving two presentations based on his book, and extending a discussion of today’s ailing medical system: what’s wrong, how it got this way, and what we can do to heal it. | more…

I had high hopes for Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism for a couple of reasons…. ¶ My hopes were not only met, they were exceeded. Horne has written both a scholarly treatment enriched by primary sources excavated from archives three hundred years old but also a fierce polemic that hearkens back to those of CLR James and WEB Dubois…. | more…

Internationally renowned human rights attorney Michael Tigar, author of the forthcoming Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power, talks to Law & Disorder host Michael Steven Smith and attorney Jim Lafferty about the growth of the national security state and the (further) decline of justice. | more…

As a lifelong activist, Howard Waitzkin has worked for single-payer national health programs in the United States and Latin America; local community and worker control for accessible health services; civilian health and mental health services for active duty military personnel in the struggle for peace; and policies to improve the social, political, and economic determinants of illness and early death…. | more…

The eighteenth century was the slavers’ century. At least six million Africans were kidnapped and shipped to the Americas—with far more killed resisting capture—making the trade in enslaved Africans the most valuable in the world. ¶ Yet it was the tumult of the 1600s that put the pieces in place for what was to come and in this fascinating new book Gerald Horne shows just how pivotal that century was for the trade itself, as well as capitalism and white supremacy, its economic and ideological corollaries… | more…

The US mainstream media had two competing events to cover the night of April 28: the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC, and a Trump rally in Macomb County, Michigan, a predominantly white working-class suburb of Detroit. Journalists mainly focused on the dinner, but the more important story may have been a remark President Trump made in the course of his 80-minute speech at the rally… | more…

Jeremy Kuzmarov talks with Black Agenda Radio host Glen Ford about how Democrats and war-hawks are reaching for ever-higher heights of anti-Russian hysteria, ascribing near super-powers to Moscow and Vladimir Putin. All this is déjà vu for many older Americans, who remember the Cold War days when Russians were thought to be under every bed… | more…

Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano: Our book provides a historical perspective on contemporary affairs by showing how the Russo-phobia that has been prevalent in our political discourse over the last four to five years has deep and long historical roots, and has often been used by government leaders to turn public attention away from domestic inequalities…” | more…