Month: July 2017

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Arundhati Roy: We Must Globalize Dissent

Arundhati Roy July 11, 2017 Arundhati Roy

Source: In These Times

RADICAL CHANGE CANNOT AND WILL NOT BE NEGOTIATED BY GOVERNMENTS; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public that can link hands across national borders. A public that disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public that has set itself against the governments and institutions that support and service Empire.

Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There’s no country on God’s earth that isn’t caught in the crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the International Monetary Fund checkbook. For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars—losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. read more

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“Trying to Build in the Rubble of Neoliberalism”: Michelle Alexander and Naomi Klein on Bringing Movements Together

Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor July 11, 2017 Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Source: Truthout

On Tuesday, May 9, Haymarket Books hosted a conversation between Michelle Alexander and Naomi Klein, moderated by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in front of a sold-out crowd of 3,000 at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. In this, the final part of the transcript of that conversation (lightly edited for length and clarity), the three women discuss movement-building, the need to write “people’s platforms” and not to rely on candidates, and their hopes and fears for resistance to the Trump regime. Read part one here and part two here. read more

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Frida Berrigan: Growing My Way Out of Dystopia

Frida Berrigan July 11, 2017 Frida Berrigan

Source: Tom Dispatch

In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 soared onto bestseller lists, as did Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which also hit TV screens in a storm of publicity.  Zombies, fascists, and predators of every sort are now stalking the American imagination in ever-greater numbers and no wonder, given that guy in the Oval Office. Certainly, 2017 is already offering up a bumper crop of dystopian possibilities and we’ve only reached July. But let me admit one thing: the grim national mood and the dark clouds crowding our skies have actually nudged me in a remarkably positive direction. Surprise of all surprises, Donald Trump is making the corn grow in Connecticut! read more

Spokesperson and presidential candidate María de Jesús Patricio, left, surrounded by members of the Zapatistas. Photo by Violeta Schmidt/Reuters

Dismantling Power: The Zapatista Indigenous Presidential Candidate’s Vision to Transform Mexico from Below

Benjamin Dangl July 7, 2017 Benjamin Dangl

The Zapatistas and National Indigenous Congress chose Nahua indigenous healer María de Jesús Patricio as their spokesperson and presidential candidate for the 2018 elections in Mexico. Patricio’s candidacy and radical vision for Mexico challenges conventional politics and marks a new phase for the Zapatista and indigenous struggle in the country. As the Zapatistas said of the decision, “we do not seek to administer power; we want to dismantle it.”