GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) is a private firm that runs more than a hundred for-profit prisons and youth and immigrant detention facilities, in which captives are beaten and raped. One judge called one of their juvenile jails in Mississippi “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions.” The GEO Group runs three facilities in [...]
Our worst nightmares reverberate with the prediction of respected scientist James Hansen: if we don’t stop TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, then it’s “game over” for stabilizing the climate. With final US governmental approval (or not) to complete the pipeline looming, struggle over it is intensifying. In late January, representatives from more than 25 First Nations [...]
Capitalism is a dysfunctional economic system that benefits a few while exploiting and neglecting the majority. But it’s not only that. It’s also a social relationship of domination, where a small class of capitalists exerts power over the whole society through the private ownership of the means of production. Under capitalism, the purpose of all commodity production (including food) is [...]
Grab a shirt from your closet. Look at the tag inside the collar, and you’ll see where it was produced, listed right next to the size and material composition. Chances are that it was sewn in some other country that you’ve never been to, by someone who lives on the edge of desperation. The current configuration of the garment [...]
Sunday marked a devastating loss for the Latin music community with the death of Jenni Rivera, a Long Beach, California-based artist dubbed the “queen of grupero.” After a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, around 3:30 a.m. Sunday morning, Rivera, age 43, boarded a private Learjet 25 with her publicist, stylist, lawyer, and make-up artist. All were [...]
After being on the run for years, facing charges of conspiracy and multiple acts of arson, Rebecca Rubin turned herself in to U.S. law enforcement on the morning of Nov. 29. She is accused of belonging to Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front for several years starting in the mid-1990s. The FBI labeled both ELF and ALF “terrorist [...]
Economic systems are in a dialectical (mutually interdependent and contradictory) relationship with the political structure and prevailing ideas of each society as a whole, with the economy being the dominant or determining aspect. This is not to say that influence doesn’t go the other way, but economy has a stranglehold on everything else, shaping its nature (both bending [...]
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we each live our lives according to our own personal internalized philosophical theory — a more or less contradictory jumble of assumptions, beliefs, intentions, and hypotheses about the nature of the universe and our place in it. Each of us has ideas about the nature of existence, motion, [...]
Don’t call Stephanie McMillan a Democrat. Don’t call her a liberal, either. The winner of the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights Journalism Award — and native South Floridian; she penned her first lefty piece, a review of Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth, as a student at the frou frou Fort Lauderdale high school [...]
You already know this: while earning your college degree was informative and pleasant enough, plenty of us head in a different direction. Or maybe the experience wasn’t so awesome or helpful, but we’re sticking, steadfast and stubborn, to what we set out for in the first place. Joshua Miller, the executive director and founder of [...]
Venezuela has been in the media lately: following the death of Hugo Chávez, his chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro, beat challenger Henrique Capriles in the current election for presidency. It was a miniscule margin of a win—about 50.7%–and as of this write-up, a contested verdict. But if you’re the average United Statesian, you are less aware [...]
