Seattle Diary: 25 Years After

Twenty-five years ago this week, the streets of Seattle erupted into the kind of militant protest rarely seen in the US. Over the course of five days, thousands of street activists counterpunched the global managers of neoliberalism in the face at their own confab, humiliated Bill Clinton and took the ruling class entirely off guard. The battle in Seattle became a kind of operational template for the popular protests of the both the right and left that followed in its wake: Code Pink’s anti-Iraq war demos, the Occupy Movement, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter and, even, MAGA. The populist right certainly absorbed more lessons from the Battle of Seattle than the liberal elites of the Democratic Party–to their peril and ultimate doom. More

Get the Hell Out of My Way

Right now, a multi-billionaire regime is being set up by electing just one man, and this done by popular vote, by those Rand would call masses of mud. You need only scan those President-Elect Donald Trump has given key governmental positions: Private Predators, on and offline, with an animus to laws and the bureaucracy that enforces them. This subjugation of the many by the few comes as no surprise as such has always been part of “winning” in “The American Dream” as well as the force behind “American Exceptionalism.” Egalitarianism has always been the soft and fuzzy dream of useful idiots, in the eyes of the Winners. More

A Win for Renters

With over 2,300,000 renters in New York City, it’s a good bet most of them had to pay exorbitant brokers’ fees to land their apartments. Those brokers charged a fortune – natch, because with a 2023 city rental vacancy rate of 1.41 percent, they could set their fees sky high. But on November 13, the city council approved a new law with a veto-proof majority to make landlords fork over those fees. According to the New York Times that day, “the fee is typically more than one month’s rent, and right now the median rent is roughly $3,4000.” So up-front costs to get a new place in Gotham were often over $10,000. How ‘bout them apples? More

How Animal Agriculture Threatens Freshwater Supplies

Agricultural runoff from barnyards, feedlots, and cropland carries pollutants like manure, fertilizers, ammonia, pesticides, livestock waste, toxins from farm equipment, soil, and sediment to local water sources. According to a February 2022 article by the Public Interest Research Groups, the factory farming industry is one of the leading causes of water pollution in the United States. The animal agriculture industry is also a front-runner for water risk, which makes it an environmentally unsustainable practice. More