How Our Universities Have Been Turned into Corporate Marketing Centers

How Our Universities Have Been Turned into Corporate Marketing Centers | Alternet
Universities that once prided themselves as being centers of free thinking are increasingly dominated by corporate-think, turning their institutions into sales centers.

The Untold Story: How America Became a Dangerous Empire

The Untold Story: How America Became a Dangerous Empire | Alternet

Director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick offer a major reexamination of modern American history in “The Untold History of the United States.”

January 3, 2013

My Experience Working At A Marijuana Dispensary

My Experience Working At A Marijuana Dispensary

'Season of the Witch': America's Cultural History Born out of SF and the 1960s

'Season of the Witch': A Dive into the Tumultuous Era of Heroes, Hippies, Druggies, Deadheads and Psycho Killers | Alternet

David Talbot’s book, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love , is an amazing portrait and chronicle of the potent forces of political and social liberation that heated up in San Francisco, beginning in the late 1960s, and eventually boiled over, unleashing a shocking backlash that still feels hard to comprehend, today.

A Fuller Accounting for Goverment?

Debra K. Decker: A Fuller Accounting
Discussions about the economy and the fiscal cliff may be urgent but they are not the most important discussions we need to be having. We keep getting twisted and tied up by urgent matters because we don't address America's important underlying issues: what we want as a people and the role of government in helping us achieve that. These important issues are difficult ones to address -- made only more difficult by the lack of a framework for discussing them. To develop a framework, we need a fuller accounting.

Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror

Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror
Monday, 03 December 2012 11:06 By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed 


Lost in both the immediacy of the recovery efforts and the public discourse in most of the mainstream media were the abandoned fates and needless suffering of residents in public-housing apartments from Red Hook to the Lower East Side, to the poorest sections of the Rockaway Peninsula and other neglected areas along the east coast of New Jersey. These are populations ravaged by poverty, unemployment and debt. Even though inequality has become one of the most significant factors making certain groups vulnerable to storms and other types of disasters, matters of power and inequality in income, wealth and geography rarely informed the mainstream media's analysis of the massive destruction and suffering caused by Sandy.

War on Youth

War on Youth
Henry A. Giroux, History of Violence Project,  Annual Address

The critically acclaimed public intellectual Henry A. Giroux discusses the state sponsored assault being waged against young people across the globe, especially in the United States. For Giroux, what is no longer a hidden order of politics is that American society is at war with its children, and that the use of such violence against young people is a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis. 

Higher tuitions: Harbinger of a Hybrid University? | UT Watch on the Web

Higher tuitions: Harbinger of a Hybrid University? | UT Watch on the Web

From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education | Dissent Magazine

From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education | Dissent Magazine

The precedents for the crisis in higher education go back to the 1980s with Ronald Reagan's first blows against the California system and specifically Berkeley.  This is what has happened since.

The Hazards of Manhood

The Hazards of Manhood by Michael Schwalbe — YES! Magazine

Conventional wisdom has it that what capitalists exploit is the labor power of workers—the capacity to do work­—paying less for it than the value it creates. But it could also be said that what capitalism exploits, what it uses up, in the quest for profit is human bodies. This occurs in both the workplace and the marketplace. One way to enhance the exploit-ability of male bodies is to instill in them the desire to be men... the costs of nonconformity—social disapproval, exclusion, shame—lead most people, when it comes to gender display, to stick closely to the script.

Anarchism and Russian vs. American collapse

Is Anarchism an Idea Whose Time Has Come? | Alternet
  October 13, 2012 

Anarchist thinking appears to be gaining relevance and acceptance among a larger audience.

 

It seems that everywhere, these days, people are talking about anarchism. Now  Dmitry Orlov  joins the discussion with a 3-part series, “In Praise of Anarchy.” Utilizing primarily the work of the 19th century Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, Orlov argues that anarchy, rather than hierarchy, is the dominant pattern in nature, that hierarchical organizations ultimately end in collapse, and that the impending collapse of the capitalist industrial system presents an opportunity for the emergence of anarchism.

How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed

How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps | Alternet

The liberal arts stood at the center of a college education, and students were exposed to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions, foreign languages and cultures. Of course, something else happened, beginning in the late '50s into the '60s — the uprisings and growing numbers of citizens taking part in popular dissent — against the Vietnam War, against racism, against destruction of the environment in a growing corporatized culture, against misogyny, against homophobia. Where did much of that revolt incubate? Where did large numbers of well-educated, intellectual, and vocal people congregate? On college campuses. Who didn’t like the outcome of the '60s? The corporations, the war-mongers, those in our society who would keep us divided based on our race, our gender, our sexual orientation.

The Politics of Fear in America

John W. Whitehead: The Politics of Fear in America: A Nation at War With Itself

Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams. America is entering a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of the content of their Facebook posts, and law-abiding Americans are being subjected to the latest in government spy technology. 

Confessions of a Former Republican

Tomgram: Jeremiah Goulka, Confessions of a Former Republican | TomDispatch
Goulka’s is a tale of how one man left a party that, in recent years, has had, in Jonathan Schell’s pungent phrase, “a will to fantasy,” and embarked on a hard-won trip into reality. There are so many more such stories in our country.  Maybe someday some political convention will have the nerve to celebrate some of them.

Occupy 2.0: Strike Debt

Occupy 2.0: Strike Debt | The Nation
“Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent,” Occupy organizer Yates McKee has written: from the underwater and foreclosed-upon homeowners who were first pummeled by the economic crisis, to the millions of debt-strapped students who are in default or on the brink, to all those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, to workers everywhere who have been forced to compensate for more than thirty years of stagnating wages with credit card debt, to the firefighters and teachers who have had to accept pay cuts because their cities are broke, to the citizens of countries where schools and hospitals are being closed to pay back foreign bondholders. Given the way debt operates at the municipal and national levels, the issue affects us all—even those who are fortunate enough to be debt-free, as well as those so poor they don’t have access to credit. Debt is one of the ways we all feel Wall Street’s influence most intimately, whether it’s because of a ballooning mortgage payment or a subway fare hike or a shuttered clinic.

Academia Becoming a Profession Only the Elite Can Afford

Professors Making $10,000 a Year? Academia Becoming a Profession Only the Elite Can Afford | Alternet
One after another, the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but the most elite to enter. 

Dissenting history on America founded as Christian Nation

5 People Who Bravely Fought Christian Takeover of America | Alternet

Silencing the Canary?

Former DHS Analyst Daryl Johnson on How He Was Silenced for Warning of Far-Right Militants in U.S.

CIA Experients

How the CIA's LSD Mind-Control Experiments Destroyed My Healthy, High-Functioning Father's Brilliant Mind | Alternet

Atheist in America

4 Reasons Atheists Have to Fight for Their Rights | Alternet
In the U.S., atheists have laws protecting them. But laws aren't always obeyed, or enforced -- and fighting for legal rights can have dire consequences.