Under Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelley stop-and-frisk has been a racist technology of control wielded by an unchecked police force. With large-scale popular mobilisations against police racism and violence, and de Blasio set to take over as mayor of New York City, reform of stop-
A movement isn’t called that for nothing. It has to move people. It needs lovers, and friends, and allies. It has to generate a cascade of feeling - moral feeling.
(Real) social democracy is not just unknown to several generations of voters, but it is contradictory to their individualist or ethnicized worldview. So far the analyses and prospects do not look promising.
In our current moment, we are witnessing a global, if contradictory, conversation about what public-ness might mean.
Freedom of Information requests to disclose TPP texts have failed on the grounds that they are a matter of “national security”.
Michigan’s political elite is pushing the city of Detroit—wellspring of industrial unionism, home of soul music—into bankruptcy. In the words of Marvin Gaye, “What’s going on?”
He sang of dirt, all the while insisting that life is love, a feeling so important that anyone with a heart wouldn't ever turn around and break the heart of others.
In current protest culture the estranged ideologies of anarchism and progressive populism are coming together around a critique of the neoliberal “corporate state” and a new imaginary of mass insurgency.
Every time the Gulf States’ rulers justify their support for violent rebels in Syria or the military regime in Egypt by appealing to the unalienable right of peoples to basic rights and representative governance, they legitimize the Arab Spring in the eyes of their own peoples, too.
The US drug policy is changing, pitting states against federal law. This essay explores this inner friction of contradictory drug legislation, and what it may mean for the international drug control regime, itself a result of US drug policy. (4,400 words)
