Why The Odyssey?
Edward Curtin If you spent one to two years when you were 16-17 years old and full of wild physical and sexual energy assiduously translating Homer’s The Odyssey from the…
Trump Administration Comes Clean About Canceling Grants for Political Reasons. Congress Won’t Do Anything, Voters Need to Respond.
Austin Sarat ScheerPost When the Congress of the United States appropriates funds for a particular purpose, it is the president’s job to expend those funds as directed by Congress. Seems…
From McCarthyism to MAGA: The Long History of Silencing Dissent
Joshua Scheer For much of American history, moments of political crisis have been accompanied by campaigns to silence dissent. From the Palmer Raids and McCarthyism to COINTELPRO, governments have repeatedly…
The Democratic Establishment’s Medicare for All Problem Comes to Michigan
From Gavin Newsom in California to Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, the debate over Medicare for All continues to expose the tension between campaign promises, corporate influence, and the political power…
Trump Was the Symptom. Corporate Impunity Was the Disease
Joshua Scheer For decades, Americans have been told that rising crime, political polarization, and Donald Trump’s ascent are separate crises requiring separate solutions. Political scientist Marie Gottschalk argues they are…
Trump’s Phantom Enemies
The Trump administration is laying the groundwork for blacklisting and criminalizing all left-wing, progressive, anti-war and anti-imperialist dissent. Chris Hedges ScheerPost The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of…
Why Do We Love Sad Songs?
Edward Curtin By Edward Curtin and Sophie Michel “A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” – A Chinese Proverb The…
Bought, Not Seized: How the Third-Party Doctrine Turned the Fourth Amendment Into a Commodity
The Department of Homeland Security is preparing to spend $125 million on access to a vast commercial database containing personal information on millions of Americans—including names, addresses, Social Security numbers,…
One Judicial Opinion Should Be Required Reading Before the Midterm Elections. It’s Portrait of the Trump Administration Is Deeply Disturbing
Austin Sarat ScheerPost Judges write like judges. The opinions they produce are for lawyers, law professors, and other judges, not for ordinary citizens. Reading them is hardly a pleasant or…
Becoming the Stranger
The road to fascism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “Nation of Strangers,” was constructed over the last six decades of neoliberal assault. We have arrived at the terminus. Chris Hedges…
The Fate of Democracy May Soon Rest With Mike Johnson and John Thune. Where Is Mike Pence When We Need Him?
Austin Sarat ScheerPost It looks like President Trump’s tirade about alleged vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system and the problem of non-citizen voting is a prelude to the chaos that…
AI Abundance, Part 5: Meaning Beyond Work
Ellen Brown Discussions of artificial intelligence typically begin with the question, What happens when the machines take our jobs? For thousands of years, work has been the means by which…
Screwing in a Mirror While the World Smokes
Edward Curtin We were screwing in a mirror when we realized our mistake. Since the handyman was unavailable, we had to do it ourselves. Certainly it was very pleasurable to…
Commoning, Thresholding, and the Concrete Fantasy: Lessons from France
Ida Susser Over a decade ago two innovative movements mobilized in France to take on the neoliberal assaults on the commons and the public good. The Nuit Debout was an…
Silence Belongs to the People
Jeffrey Wernick ScheerPost Many people ignore the Ninth Amendment. James Madison wrote it, and he wrote it to answer an objection he had raised himself. During ratification, Madison and Hamilton…