Watch: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood
Peter Moskowitz talked about his book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, in which he discusses the future of American cities. In his book, Mr. Moskowitz looks at gentrification in Detroit, New Orleans, and New York and the impact on residents of these
Enlightening conversation between Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about the meaning of resistance, the Clinton legacy and its disastrous effects on Black communities, how celebrity spills into politics – it’s not just the Trump brand but also the glossy Trudeau and Obama brands, the need to build local movements (with specific, well-articulated platforms) and to be wary of any kind of *crisis* that will surely be used to shut down protest and effect unpopular change.
Please listen!
Be one step ahead of the devil…..
In the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United decision, it’s become commonplace to note the growing political dominance of a small segment of the economic elite. But what exactly are those members of the elite doing with their newfound influence? The One Percent Solution provides an answer to this question for the first time. Gordon Lafer’s book is a comprehensive account of legislation promoted by the nation’s biggest corporate lobbies across all fifty state legislatures and encompassing a wide range of labor and economic policies.
Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey as the director of the FBI has caused a firestorm around the country but for the wrong reasons. Rather than framing Trump’s actions as another example of the unravelling of a lawless and crooked government, the mainstream press has largely focused on the question of whether Trump or Comey is lying. Even worse, the debate in some quarters has degenerated into the personal question of whose “side” one is on regarding the testimony.
There is nothing new about evil; it has been with us since time immemorial. But there is something new about the kind of evil that characterizes our contemporary liquid-modern world. The evil that characterized earlier forms of solid modernity was concentrated in the hands of states claiming monopolies on the means of coercion and using the means at their disposal to pursue their ends, ends that were at times horrifically brutal and barbaric. In our contemporary liquid-modern societies, by contrast, evil has become altogether more pervasive and at the same time less visible.
Liquid evil hides in the seams of the canvas woven daily by the liquid-modern mode of human interaction and commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human interaction and commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human cohabitation and in the course of its routine and day-to-day reproduction.
Evil lurks in the countless black holes of a thoroughly deregulated and privatized social space in which cutthroat competition and mutual estrangement have replaced cooperation and solidarity, while forceful individualization erodes the adhesive power of inter-human bonds.
In its present form evil is hard to spot, unmask and resist. It seduces us by its ordinariness and then jumps out without warning, striking seemingly at random. The result is a social world that is comparable to a minefield: we know it is full of explosives and that explosions will happen sooner or later but we have no idea when and where they will occur.
— Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Liquid Evil
In an essay for Prison Radio, the nation’s best known political prisoner described President Donald Trump’s “tweets and utterances” as “a daily cascade of craziness.” “Not since Watergate have we seen such a fury for the hide of a president,” said Mumia Abu Jamal. “This smells of corruption, of capitalist greed and excess, and of imperial arrogance on a grand, global scale. This feels like the beginning of the end.”
