Latest articles
"Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society." —Pedagogy of the Oppressed
by Paul Haeder / February 1st, 2026
The dichotomy between the social worker as a nine-to-five state agent and five-nine activist is a crucial one. The question can be summarised as: is there space, willingness and scope within social work to engage with broader structural issues that affect the lives of the people we work with?
I spent an hour with the Revolutionary Social Worker, who has a couple of Podcasts.
Listen HERE NOW.
The radio broadcast comes to Lincoln County and Internet listeners on March 4, 6 PM, Pacific, over at KYAQ.org, 91.7 FM, my …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 31st, 2026
When remote islands start to interest chatterboxes in think tanks and bureaucrats in foreign ministries, we can only assume that some matters will be exaggerated over others. With the Chagos Islands, there is one matter that is hard to exaggerate. The plight of its indigenous population has been horrendous, treated with brutish contempt by the British and the United States, banished from their homelands in the name of strategic interests. As Britain and its strategic footprint passed into the shade of US power, it became vital that Britannia perform the vital role of servitor, always assured that it would be a …
by Medea Benjamin / January 30th, 2026
Photo: Nuestra America gathering in Bogotá, Colombia. Credit: Progressive International
When Senator Tim Kaine told Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a recent Senate hearing on Venezuela that the administration’s announcement of a new Monroe Doctrine “does not land well in the Americas,” he was putting it mildly.
I just returned from an emergency gathering in Bogotá on January 24-25 with about 90 delegates from 20 countries, where speaker after speaker denounced the open revival of this doctrine — and its companion, the so-called Trump Corollary or “Donroe Doctrine” based …
by Shawgi Tell / January 30th, 2026
Privately-operated charter schools fail and close every week. The top four reasons include declining enrollment, mismanagement, financial malfeasance, and poor academic performance. Such closures are usually sudden, abrupt, and take place mid-year, leaving many parents, students, teachers, and principals stunned and stressed about what to do next.
Currently, 69 students are enrolled in the K-12 Agnes J. Johnson Charter School (AJJCS) located in rural Weott in Humboldt County, California. The deregulated charter school was authorized by the Humboldt County Board of Education in 2019.
On January 26, 2026, The Times-Standard reported that, …
by Caitlin Johnstone / January 30th, 2026
It’s just incredible how quickly and aggressively the US is advancing longstanding agendas of global conquest under the Trump administration. Now they’re racing to take out Cuba.
The US president has signed an executive order to impose new tariffs on countries that supply oil to Cuba, even indirectly, which is expected to dramatically increase the pressure on the already struggling island nation. This comes as the Financial Times reports that “Cuba only has enough oil to last 15 to 20 days at current levels of demand and domestic production” after the US cut off the supply from Venezuela, and …
Fighting against the current is always preferable to being swept away by it.
— Michael Parenti, The Terrorism Trap - September 11 and Beyond
by Michael K. Smith / January 30th, 2026
With the death of Michael Parenti, we have lost one of the greatest dissident voices in American history.
Parenti earned a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1962, and taught at a number of colleges and universities, never attaining a tenured position because he was “red-baited out of my college-teaching profession and left to survive on my writing and public speaking,” as he put it in his wonderful book Contrary Notions – The Michael Parenti Reader.[1] Unfortunately, this is rather common establishment treatment for those who not only write about politics and injustice, but stand up for the victims, …
by Jules Bernstein / January 29th, 2026
An experiment in western China over the past four decades shows that it is possible to tame the expansion of desert lands with greenery, and, in the process, pull excess carbon dioxide out of the sky.
Taklamakan Desert location. (PeterHermesFurian/iStock/Getty)
The sprawling greening project along the edges of China’s Taklamakan Desert is creating a visible and measurable carbon sink, even in one of the driest places on Earth, according to a study led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside. …
Another 1,000 word piece in the local weekly newspaper is yet another dust-up of the fascist policies of Trump, but also his deep bigotry, racism, misogyny
by Paul Haeder / January 29th, 2026
Forget about why I was at Samaritan-Corvallis’s ICU. The day before New Year’s, I had to undergo surgery THEN because of our failed health insurance mafia system. Samaritan Health Plan ended Dec. 31 at midnight.
While there, I gobbled up narratives of the people there: those doing the minute-to-minute care, and those doing the surgery.
Was I amazed at how professional the CNAs and custodial staff were? Was I impressed with the neurodiverse nursing staff and the compassion and the hard work and extended hours put in as healers?
Was I blown away by the dedicated …
by Greg Godels / January 29th, 2026
… for nearly two decades, every evening in the week, the dean of American newscasters, Walter Cronkite, would end his CBS television news show with the statement: “And that’s the way it is.” On the eve of his retirement in 1980, Cronkite admitted that isn’t the way it is: “My lips have been kind of buttoned up for almost twenty years…. CBS doesn’t really believe in commentary,” he charged.
— Quoted in Inventing Reality, Michael Parenti, p. 7.
Michael Parenti joins a pitifully small number of US intellectuals who, when facing …
by Visualizing Palestine / January 29th, 2026
The term “scholasticide” emerged in the context of Israel’s long history of targeting Palestinian institutions of higher learning, culminating in Israeli forces destroying 95% of campuses and university buildings in Gaza from 2023 to 2025. We partnered with Taawon’s ISNAD program to document scholasticide and the determination of Palestinian scholars and students to resume teaching, researching, and learning.
Support a Student Through ISNAD
Special thanks to Rioka Hayama for design collaboration on this visual.
Taawon’s ISNAD …
Campaign starts in 7 cities
by Veterans for Peace / January 29th, 2026
Rory Fanning at the Great Lakes IL, billboard
One of the VFP billboards. See them all here.
In response to the serial crimes ordered by the Trump administration in Minneapolis, Gaza and Venezuela, a national veteran’s organization is sponsoring billboards urging active duty and National Guard troops to “follow the law and their conscience” and refuse illegal orders.
In a now-famous video, Senator Mark Kelly and five other Members of Congress, all military veterans, boldly told active duty and National Guard troops they have the right and the duty to refuse illegal orders. “No …
The Preaching Pentecostal
by Binoy Kampmark / January 29th, 2026
Australia’s former Prime Minister and faithful Pentecostational conference on combating antisemitism held between January 26 and 27 at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center, ambitiously titled Generation Truth.
The December 14, 2025 attack by two ISIS-inspired gunmen on those attending a Hanukkah event on Sydney’s Bondi Beach had supplied him with a hot script. Australia’s Albanese government had been previously barked at by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for going wobbly on Israel and soft on Palestinians. Morrison was in hearty agreement, claiming that the Labor government had “walked away from the Jewish state while antisemitism has taken root …
by Godfree Roberts / January 28th, 2026
Faster, cooler, smaller, cheaper, they bypass US embargoes. And 2D fabs are 100% Chinese IP. The chip war we started is going as well as the Vietnam War after eight years.
China’s pilot production line for 2D semiconductors (atoms-thick materials like molybdenum disulfide) is a big deal¹, especially since no other country has a commercialized pilot or full production line for 2D semiconductors. The good news is,
Chips can keep getting smaller and better – Silicon chips are hitting their physical limits. 2D materials allow sub-1 nm. transistors, packing …
by David Swanson / January 28th, 2026
The U.S. government has the world’s most expensive military waging wars around the world. It also now has a military aimed at the United States itself. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has a budget larger than any military in the world except 12. It has military weaponry and vehicles. It has military training from the U.S. and Israeli militaries. It has veterans of foreign U.S. wars in its ranks. The man who murdered Renée Good had learned to kill people in Iraq, for which he was almost certainly …
by Kathy Kelly / January 28th, 2026
January 29, 2026, marks the second year since the Israeli military, using U.S. provisioned weapons, murdered Hind Rajab. Had she lived, this little Palestinian girl who liked to dress up as a princess would now be 7 ½ years old. An Israeli Defense Force unit fired a barrage of missiles at the car in which she and her relatives were fleeing from an Israeli military invasion of their neighborhood.
The family’s fatal ordeal began on January 29, 2024, in Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City, when Israeli forces …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 28th, 2026
Held between January 26 and 27 at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center and called Generation Truth, the second international conference on combating antisemitism was a picture of cracking contradictions. Organised by Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, it featured speakers from various far-right groups, many European, and saw Australia’s former Prime Minister and Pentecostal believer, Scott Morrison, address attendees. (The man is obviously touting for gigs.)
The attendance list caused problems prior to last year’s inaugural conference, not least because it included speakers from parties with memberships boasting neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. If this …
Resist and Build Alternatives to the Trump Regime Now: Part 2
by Jan Oberg / January 27th, 2026
Read Part 1.
This is the second of four TFF-created idea portfolios designed to curb the global reach of the United States and, in both the short and long term, help catalyse a worldwide nonviolent resistance to what many observers describe as the Trump administration’s uniquely confrontational, destructive and world-threatening policies.
These portfolios outline what governments and citizens across the world can do through dynamic diplomacy, creative initiatives, and strictly nonviolent means.
It seems painfully clear to me that the current political dynamics in Washington increasingly resemble the most dangerous pattern …
by Sammy Attoh / January 27th, 2026
The world is being reshaped—and disfigured—by those who profit from war. We often describe conflict as a diplomatic failure or a geopolitical tragedy, but beneath these narratives lies a harsher truth: war has become one of the most profitable industries on earth. A small network of corporations, financiers, and political actors grows richer with every missile launched, every sanction imposed, every crisis prolonged. Meanwhile, ordinary people—workers, tenants, refugees, families—pay the price.
The suffering of the poor has become the raw material of profit. While war profiteers glide across the sky in private jets and parade in factory‑engineered luxury, the poor stand …
by Paul Haeder / January 27th, 2026
Listen here to our talk, airing on my radio show, Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge. It is a microsm of AmeriKKKa’s large and small communities.
Heidi Lambert was voted into Waldport, Oregon’s volunteer mayoral position but was fired, then had to file a state ethics complaint, and now those fifth graders are running a recall petition….
Killing grounds for uniformed thugs, from Palestine to occupied Minnesota
by Phil Rockstroh / January 27th, 2026
So it has come to this: ICE Gestapo agents claim, without a judge’s order, they are permitted to enter houses at their fascist whim. Are they taking lessons from the Israeli Defense Forces now?
Moreover, the present criminal class of MAGA authoritarians are at liberty to transport the officialdom killer out the reach of accountability and prosecution — yet, under the runaway death train of authoritarian rule, lower rung thugs (e.g., ICE brownshirts) will not be safe from their own fascist overlords e.g., the mass …
The Gangster’s Brief
by Binoy Kampmark / January 27th, 2026
US President Donald Trump might leave an impression of violent novelty, at least for the leader of a nominal liberal democracy, soiling international relations with the gangster’s touch. This sense of iconoclasm is misplaced. While his conduct regarding the abduction of Nicolás Maduro certainly dumps mightily on the precepts of international law, legal advisors in the US government have been constructing, with a mixture of deviousness and disingenuousness, the rationale for just that very thing over decades. Ditto the justifications for torture that will forever blight the administration of George W. Bush, and theories that elevate the presidential office above …
This Day in Anarchist History
by subMedia / January 26th, 2026
On 25 Jauary 1911, in anarchist history we remember the execution of Kanno Sugako.
Kanno was a journalist, feminist and anarchist who had previously been imprisoned after a police attack on a small demonstration in Tokyo, known as the Red Flag Incident.
In 1910, police uncovered a plot to assassinate the Emperor of Japan and made mass arrests of anarchists and other leftists. Of those arrested, 26 people were brought to trial, most of them had nothing to do with it but 24 of them were found guilty on circumstantial evidence.
Kanno was alleged to be the ringleader of the plot. Unrepentant in …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 26th, 2026
It’s official. This tormented, heated, traumatised planet is now home to over 3,000 billionaires. (That number was reached last year.) In October 2025, Elon Musk became the first man to have wealth exceeding half a trillion dollars. These developments could still take alongside the fact that one in four people across the globe face hunger.
Oxfam’s Resisting the Rule of the Rich has, as its subtitle, “defending freedom against billionaire power”. It’s an important link, as money, rather than knowledge, tends to be the indicator of raw power. In her foreword to the report, the Secretary General of Amnesty …
by Valeriy Krylko / January 26th, 2026
The term neocolonialism first appeared in the mid-twentieth century and was used to describe the continuing control of colonial powers (Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy) over other nominally independent states, especially their colonies in Africa. In the 21st century, the meaning of the term neocolonialism has expanded and is now used to refer to the power of developed countries (the so-called Global North) over developing countries (the so-called Global South). In fact, neocolonialism is an indirect form of imperialism, representing a new phase of Western capitalist expansionism. It manifests itself in the manipulation of the economic, political, …
by Shawgi Tell / January 26th, 2026
Poor planning, leadership, and charter school applications are not uncommon in the charter school sector. Such recurrent problems not only give traditional host public school districts big headaches, they also ensure a range of foreseeable intractable problems in privately-operated charter schools, especially when everything is rushed and not well-thought-out. Privatization efforts in education and other spheres are known for often leading to less accountability, behaviors that undermine the public interest, and unsafe practices.
The Baltimore Planner reported on January 23, 2026 that Montgomery County’s only privately-operated charter school, MECCA Business Learning …
Workers' Power Tool
by Nayvin Gordon / January 26th, 2026
Oath to Support the Constitution: Us Constitution, Article VI, Clause 3
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Let us ask, who in the government has been betraying this oath?
The 1st Amendment
The First Amendment provides several rights protections: to express ideas through speech and the press, to …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 24th, 2026
When does the rot start in a politician? For some, it commences the moment election to office is confirmed. Others need to become cabinet ministers before being wholly blighted. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood may provide a classic case study. Given that security matters fall within her purview, it was probably too much to expect her to be enlightened on the issue of penology. As with previous occupants of the office, compassionate originality is not their strong suit. Preferred operating rationales are perceived toughness, punitive inclination and a closed mind.
Mahmood has, however, outdone her more recent contemporaries. She assumes that …
Across headlines and political speeches, we hear constant warnings about the “end” or “collapse” of democracy. The assumption is clear: democracy is a fixed, universally understood system now under threat. But this framing obscures a deeper reality. Democracy has never meant one thing. Across history, it has carried different meanings for different people, at different times, and has often been used to serve very different—and sometimes contradictory—purposes.
by Dennis Redmond and David Andersson / January 24th, 2026
At its best, democracy implies collective self-rule: the idea that people should have real power over the conditions of their lives. Yet democracy has often functioned less as a lived practice and more as a legitimizing language—invoked to authorize states, consolidate authority, or justify exclusion behind claims of popular consent.
I am not a historian, but in the West, democratic ideas seem to have developed alongside the formation of modern states and republics. As these institutions expanded—often through conquest, colonization, or territorial consolidation—democracy became intertwined with the needs of the state itself. Rather than asking how people might govern themselves, democratic …
We must teach ourselves to gaze into the contemporary heart of darkness without losing heart
by Phil Rockstroh / January 24th, 2026
Human history is a crime scene, and the perps have been, more often than not, men in uniform, often agents of the law, deployed by the political class to carry out their criminal intent. A defining refrain of Adolf Hitler was: “law and order.” Law enforcement entailed the perpetration of authoritarian ideology on the German public. To wit, we are witnessing the MAGA Reich’s ICE jackboot lowered on Minnesota where Trump has sent 13.6% of all ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city that represents .13% of the population of the United States.
In addition, speaking of minority populations, ICE Brownshirts, as …
The Eternal Fiction of the "International Rules-Based Order"
by Media Lens / January 23rd, 2026
The empty UN Security Council Chamber in New York City (Wikipedia)
These are exceptional times. The United States has been threatening to take over Greenland, an aggressive move against Europe. Now, and only now, are political leaders and compliant news media publicly acknowledging that the ‘international rules-based order’ is no more. Of course, it was only ever a convenient myth, blown wide open by the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Trump managed to dismiss Greenland’s status as part of Denmark with typical chutzpah:
‘I’m a big fan [of Denmark], but …
