Progressive Media Advocates
Carl Matthes: Since 1922, only 44 women have served as Senators. Today, in the United States Senate, the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” there are now twenty female Senators, the most ever serving at one time. While women total over 50% percent of the population, only 20% of Senators are female.
Cheryl Aichele: Thursday night, August 2, participants of the July 12 Chalk Walk protest at Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk are helping organize a Community Town Hall meeting to provide space for sharing ideas, concerns, and suggestions for moving forward together as members of the community of Downtown Los Angeles.
Robert Letcher: Sweet-sounding campaign promises and sugar-coated talking points—normal electioneering—will only dig us all deeper into the mire we’re already stuck in.
Tom Degan: The Grand Old Party is willing to destroy this country in order to obtain and retain power. They’ll stop at nothing in order to achieve those ends – even if there is nothing left for them to govern.
Mary Dudziak: “Liberals” and “conservatives” are often talking past each other on questions of national security, and there is a need to reshift the conversation, and get beyond partisan and left/right divides.
Mark Naison: During the 1960’s, New York city was the scene of an incredibly powerful anti-war and student movement. Like Occupy Wall Street, this movement was often attacked for being unrepresentative of the city’s working class. In reality, this movement was far more diverse in class and race than critics at the time, or historians, realized.
Simon Hall: Public opinion, at least as measured by opinion polls, was incredibly hostile toward the antiwar movement even as support for the war in Vietnam waned.
Tom Engelhardt: Facing the challenges of a world at the edge — from Japan to the Greater Middle East, from a shaky global economic system to weather that has become anything but entertainment — the United States looks increasingly incapable of coping.
Joseph Palermo: The wide dissemination of Beck’s views wouldn’t matter much if the United States were in better shape today. But the status quo that is emerging cannot help but create a highly volatile electorate for years to come. Class lines are hardening, mobility is stifled, unemployment will remain near double digits for many years, there is a sea of angry voters who are susceptible to jingoistic appeals and conspiracy theories (like the ones Beck promotes). The ongoing fiscal crisis at the local, state, and federal levels has led to the heartless rollback of public institutions at exactly the time when they are needed the most.
Yet, the long view shows that since this racial system had a beginning, and important changes have taken place, one can venture that it will also have an end. The election of Barack Obama is an encouraging sign.
Three decades after the Johnson Administration plunged into war in Southeast Asia, two decades after the last helicopter fled Saigon as the communists rushed in and a conflict that had claimed the lives of more than three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans, McNamara has become just another celebrity passing through.
Class conflict. Political dissent. What it means to be an American. Many people assume these things are incompatible. Throughout America’s history, most U.S. citizens denied the reality of class divisions in their midst, seeing them as either European or somehow related to Soviet communism. And political dissent has not been understood to be central to [...]
Robert Reich: The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up.
James Rhodes: Perhaps it is her wildly colorful style or the exaggerated use of glowing women and hidden cats or maybe it has something to do with the tranquility of her work that connects with the “common man” — certainly an artist of the people.
Carl Matthes: June 2013 may well become one of the most remembered Gay Pride months in the amazingly rapid march by the LGBT community towards equal rights under the law.
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Howard Zinn
Joseph Palerrmo: I saw Howard speak in Ithaca and in Santa Cruz and his talks were always so emotionally powerful and sensitive to human suffering and injustice. But he could also be hilariously funny, with a comedian’s sense of timing. And he had the most developed sense of irony — and the ability to convey irony — of anyone I’ve ever seen or read.