As the world burned this summer, as millions starve or go short of food around the globe, and as the quality of life for the majority of the population in the western countries tumbles and staggers, asking how we can change things for the better becomes an increasingly critical question…. | more…

Since working-class voters have been made responsible for everything from Brexit to the rise of the far right across Europe to Trump in office, the left has rediscovered class. Among the many contributions made to relevant debates in the past two years, some have been very good, some very bad, and many very confused. This text is about one of the best…. | more…

In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates wonders if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class. If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. | more…

The Michael Tigar Papers website provides a glimpse of Tigar’s career and life. It is organized around a digital collection of papers that Tigar donated to the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. It also includes excerpts from an oral history that the Rapoport Center conducted with him…. | more…

Michael E. Tigar, author of the forthcoming Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power, returns to Law and Disorder Radio to talk with Michael Steven Smith about the work facing movement lawyers: to expose top-down myths about racism, criminal justice, free expression, workers’ rights, and international human rights that dominate legal ideology. | more…

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…