Against the Current

THE BRUTALITY OF the Israeli Occupation, the scale of Israel’s continuing political turmoil, the undisguised Ku Klux Klan-ish murderous Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinian civilians and towns, the deepening rage within the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories and inside Israel — and the visible unease among the rulers of the United States’ Middle East Arab allies — have pressured the U.S. government to pretend that it cares about Palestine....

August 20 rally: Stellantis worker Kiada Shanklin (wearing T-shirt saying "I have three major reasons to strike") and her three children with UAW President Shawn Fain (far right). Photo UAW

SEPTEMBER 19 UPDATE: With the auto strike nearing the one-week mark, UAW President Shawn Fain will announce by noon Friday, September 22 that in addition to the three plants UAW workers struck when the contract expired, additional UAW workers will walk out of their plants if significant negotiations have not taken place. This strike strategy, dubbed the "Stand Up Strike," recalls the sitdown strikes of the 1930s....

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat

[On 13 September 1993 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo Accords at a White House ceremony officiated by United States President Bill Clinton. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of this agreement, and take stock of developments during the intervening decades and their implications....

Henrietta Lacks in the 1940s. Photo courtesy the Lacks family

THE FAMILY OF Henrietta Lacks and Thermo Fisher Scientific reached a settlement related to the unauthorized use of her cancer cells, which benefited labs and companies and proved invaluable for research for decades.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump and attorney Chris Seeger released a statement about the settlement:

"Members of the family of Henrietta Lacks and Thermo Fisher have agreed to settle the litigation filed by Henrietta Lacks’ Estate, in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The terms of the agreement will be confidential. The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement."...

SIXTO RODRIGUEZ, THE Detroit musician and composer whose work became wildly popular -- completely unknown to him -- in 1970s South Africa, has died at age 81. The nearly incredible story of his obscurity and rediscovery,...

Newly hired child labor, 1908. Are we going back?

Teen dies in sawmill accident as US states aim to roll back child labor laws (Headline of Wisconsin Public Radio, July 6, 2023)

THE POLICE RECEIVED an early-morning call regarding an unresponsive teenager at Florence Hardwoods, a sawmill in northern Wisconsin, reported the county sheriff’s office. Deputies and paramedics transported....

A FEW HOURS ago it became known that the FSB [Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation–editor] had opened a criminal case against well-known left-wing political scientist and sociologist, editor of the Rabkor online magazine Boris Kagarlitsky. The formal reason for initiating the case was the alleged "justification of terrorism," but we are absolutely sure that the persecution of Kagarlitsky is a political reprisal for his views.

Recently, Boris has been actively commenting on the current political situation, openly criticizing both the domestic and foreign policies of the Russian authorities....

WORK FROM HOME arrangements proliferated during the pandemic and became very popular among white-collar workers. They are now the subject of a tug of war between labor and management because high-profile bosses—like Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, Elon Musk at Twitter, Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase, and Andy Jassy at Amazon -- have decreed that it’s time to get back in the office....

Adolfo Gilly, Great Latin American Left Intellectual, Dead at 94 by Dan LaBotz

Adolfo Gilly, one of the great Latin American left intellectuals of his time, has died at the age of 94. He lived his life on the left as an activist and analyst offering his interpretation of the most important events in Latin America and especially in Mexico. As Tony Wood writes in the recently published Adolfo Gilly, Paths of Revolution: Selected Essays, a book that provides an excellent overview of his career, “Adolfo Gilly has lived many lives: leftist militant, journalist, political prisoner, public intellectual, historian.” And, we might add, led them all well. While he began as a Trotskyist revolutionary, Gilly later became a supporter and advocate of mass movements political and social from below, but throughout his life maintained his humanistic, democratic, and radical ideals..

Bad River Band logo

AT A MAY 18th hearing on an emergency motion filed by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, U.S. Western District Court Judge William Conley stated that it was only a matter of time before the Enbridge Line 5 crude oil pipeline, running across the Bad River Band’s territory, would be shut down. Conley has ordered a shutdown and decommissioning of the pipeline within three years. He has also ordered Enbridge pay the Band a $5.1 million penalty for trespassing, when it ignored the fact that the easement was not renewed in 2013....

HUGO BLANCO, THE Peruvian revolutionary, peasant leader, former member of parliament, fighter for the rights of indigenous people and for the environment, has died after a short period of acute illness.] He was born on November 15, 1934 in Cusco, Peru, in the Indigenous heartland, and he constantly returned there....

MAAN Workers Association has joined the protest movement for democracy and is collaborating with numerous organizations to bolster the ongoing protest and work towards the replacement of this perilous government....

Police Lies Facilitate Racist Violence(1)

Photo: Oregon Public Broadcasting

BENJAMIN SMITH IS going to die in prison. On April 18, Benjamin Smith was given a life sentence after pleading guilty to murder, attempted murder, and assault following his shooting of a group of unarmed women in Portland's Normandale Park. Every indication is that the February 2022 attack — ...

Tortuguita, forest protector shot dead by Atlanta police. Tennessee IWW

WHAT IS ATLANTA’S “Cop City”? Why are people protesting?

Protests began in 2021 when the city announced plans to open Cop City – officially called the Public Safety Training Center (PSTC).

The large police training center, to be constructed on forest land owned by the city, has garnered national attention from Democratic and Republican supporters of “fighting crime” by giving police more weapons and powers. The Biden Administration is behind hiring tens of thousands of cops with little community oversight....

IN HIS CLASSIC "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Karl Marx amends Hegel's quip on history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce (1986 97). With the former Philippine dictator Marcos's son in office, will farcical acts be the spectacle for the next six years? Imagine the sons of Somoza, Trujillo or Batista returning to their banana republics -- that would indeed be "the tradition of all the dead generations" acting as toxic "nightmare on the brain of the living."

The oldest U.S. neocolony, the Philippines, was then plundered....

A DECADE AFTER the U.S. Supreme Court banned mandatory life without parole (LWOP) sentences for justice-involved children under age 18 ("juvenile lifers"), Michigan appellate courts are course-correcting years of arbitrary sentencing outcomes which have been an affront to the rule of law.

LWOP sentences are often referred to as a "death in prison" or "death by incarceration" sentences because a person who receives the extreme punishment is condemned to die in prison unless her/his sentence is commuted by the Governor, which is unlikely to occur in most cases.