
In These Times
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In These Times, an independent, nonprofit magazine, is dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice, informing movements for a more humane world, and providing an accessible forum for debate about the policies that shape our future.
In These Times
1y ago
The following is an excerpt from The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (2023, Verso Books). It has been edited for length and clarity.
Griselda Triana is a Mexican journalist, and human rights activist whose husband, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, was slain by a drug cartel on May 15, 2017, in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. Valdez was the cofounder of the media outlet Riodoce, which investigated corruption and crime, and wrote about the bloody drug war. He paid the ultimate price—a grenade was thrown into his office in 2009. He had receive ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
The former president of the United States, now running for reelection, assails “the ‘Thugs’ from the Department of Injustice,” calls Special Counsel Jack Smith a “deranged lunatic,” and casts his prosecutions and his bid for the White House as parts of a “final battle” for America.
In a Saturday speech to the Georgia GOP, Donald Trump characterized the entire American justice system as deployed to prevent him from winning the 2024 election. “These people don’t stop and they’re bad and we have to get rid of them. These criminals cannot be rewarded. They must be defeated.”
Trump is demanding onc ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
BOSTON—In February, after five years of organizing under the radar, members of the nascent Harvard Academic Workers officially went public with their intent to unionize.
The road to going public wasn’t always straightaway. In January, as the group of non-tenure-track teaching and research employees moved closer to announcing their drive, union member Kara Fulton and her fellow organizers were having as many feelings of discouragement as they were elation. “It felt like we were kind of working on our own,” she said.
But then, later in January, other workers from across the Harvard campus and ot ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
Delilah Rivera went to work her early morning shift at Starbucks in Hamilton, New Jersey, on Wednesday like she regularly does, but soon noticed her asthma getting significantly worse. She asked her manager to close the store or shut down the drive-through, where the smoky air would enter, but says they refused.
So Rivera and her colleagues—who are unionized with Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)—took action. On Thursday, she says they delivered a letter to their manager, alleging that their “safety [had] been ignored in favor of keeping the drive-through open” and demanding that their manager ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
The 2020 protests that took place in the immediate wake of Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd were a historic call for America to reckon with its racist, oppressive system of state-sanctioned police violence. Three years later, rather than a reckoning, that same system, along with the political and business elites propping it up, are giving us “Cop City” (ie, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, the Atlanta Police Foundation’s 85-acre, $90-million police militarization and training complex where law enforcement from around the US and beyond will, among other things, train for urb ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
Vincent Quiles, a 28-year-old father and union organizer in Philadelphia, is part of a fledgling labor effort to support the months-long protests against construction of the notorious Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, popularly known as “Cop City.”
For Quiles, this also means speaking out against his former employer: Home Depot.
When he was fired from a Home Depot store in northeastern Philadelphia in February, Quiles was already struggling to support his toddler son on his salary, which he says never felt like enough, given the meager benefits. He says he was forced to lean on his “very ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
Back in March 2021, after passing the American Rescue Plan, Democrats congratulated themselves on a job well done. The $1.9 trillion stimulus package was hailed as “a remarkable, historic, transformative piece of legislation” by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Her colleague, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), called the law “momentous,” proclaiming it to be “more comprehensive in helping working families… than anything Congress has seen or accomplished in a very long time” and predicted that it would “go down as one of the most sweeping federal recovery efforts in histo ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
In early April, Missouri Republicans voted to cut all public funding for libraries as part of their state budget proposal.
Leading the move was Cody Smith, a top Republican lawmaker and chair of the state’s budget committee, who made no attempt to hide the fact that he was retaliating against librarians because they dared to join the ACLU in suing the state over a Republican-led book ban. Smith said, “I don’t think we should subsidize the attempts to overturn laws that we also created,” even though the ACLU is entirely funding the lawsuit.
Indeed, Republicans forced Missouri’s librarians into ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
In 2017, the public lost 1,470 acres of wilderness-quality land at the base of Mount Sopris near Aspen, Colorado.
For decades, people had hiked and hunted on the Sopris land, yet the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) handed it over to Leslie Wexner, former CEO of Victoria’s Secret and other corporations, at his request. The so-called “equivalent terrain” he offered in return was no match for access to trails at the base of the 13,000-foot mountain.
This ill-considered trade reveals how land management agencies pander to wealthy interests, do not properly value public land, and restrict opportuni ..read more
In These Times
1y ago
po • lit • i • cal hob • by • ism
noun
1. The act of leisurely reading about politics for the purposes of, say, online
debates and armchair discussions, rather than actively working for change.
"What [political hobbyists] are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football." —Eitan Hersh, Political Science Professor at Tufts University
So I shouldn’t read the news?
Read the news! But we often treat reading the news as a form of political participation itself, when it’s at best a gateway to participation. A 2016 study found, for example, that most da ..read more