Image by Lorie Shaull via Flickr
Dandelion Salad
February 27, 2023
Behind The Headlines on Feb 22, 2023
Over 800,000 police walk the streets of America every day. If you look at what police REALLY do with their every hour on-duty, we could easily replace 99% of them. Here’s how.
Image by Tony Webster via Flickr
by Robert C. Koehler
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
February 2, 2023
America, America … God kicks thee in the head.
The twisted irony here — the irony of the brutal murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee last month — is that his killers were the ones hired and trained to keep the city safe. Instead, they created half an hour of hell for the young man, kicking and beating and tasing him to death a short distance away from his mother’s house, after a random, and perhaps unjustified, traffic stop.
Image by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jette Carr via U.S. Secretary of Defense via Flickr
by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy, Nov. 21, 2022
November 22, 2022
Here’s a video of John Oliver denouncing FIFA for putting the World Cup in Qatar, a place that uses slavery and abuses women and abuses LGBT people. It’s a video about how everyone else glosses over nasty truths. Oliver drags in Russia as a past World Cup host that abuses protesters, and even Saudi Arabia as a possible host in the distant future that commits all sorts of atrocities. My concern is not just that the U.S., as one of the planned hosts four years hence, gets a pass on its general behavior. My concern is that the U.S. has far outdone FIFA this year, and every year, in Qatar. The U.S. has put six things into that horrific little oil dictatorship, each of which is worse than the World Cup.
Image by Lorie Shaull via Flickr
by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy, Sept. 27, 2022
October 1, 2022
What would we do in a world lacking police, prisons, surveillance, borders, wars, nuclear weapons, and capitalism? Well, we might survive. We might sustain life on this little blue dot a little longer. That — in contrast to the status quo — ought to be sufficient. We might, in addition, do a lot more than sustain life. We might transform the lives of billions of people including each person reading these words. We might have lives with less fear and worry, more joy and accomplishment, more control and cooperation.
Image by Backbone Campaign via Flickr
by Liberation Staff
LiberationNews.org, Sept. 22, 2022
September 25, 2022
Democrats in the House of Representatives today passed a police funding bill aimed at further distancing themselves from the movement against racist brutality that burst onto the scene in 2020. While many Democratic Party politicians cynically attempted to position themselves as supporters of the movement when it first emerged, now they are showing their true selves – loyal supporters of the cops.
Image by Bob Bob via Flickr
by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea’s Newsletter, Sept. 18, 2022
September 19, 2022
The United States is considered the longest standing “democracy” by bourgeois thinkers because it’s never actually been a democracy, and has survived so long by undemocratically suppressing its proletariat. The jingoists who say it’s a republic and not a democracy are at least being honest about the nature of the social order they support. The USA was designed to be a modern version of Rome, an empire that only represented the interests of those who most directly benefit from the violence against the oppressed nations. Those being the rich, and the social base that’s bribed to align with the interests of the rich.
Image by Brett Weinstein via Flickr
by Liberation Staff
LiberationNews.org, Aug. 30, 2022
August 31, 2022
President Biden gave a major speech in Pennsylvania Tuesday on crime and policing as part of the roll out of his “Safer America Plan” – and his ongoing effort to slander and distance himself from the historic 2020 mass movement that shook the racist foundations of this country. “When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not defund the police, it’s fund the police” Biden proclaimed in his speech, positioning himself in opposition to a core demand of the movement for Black lives.
Image by Brett Weinstein via Flickr
theAnalysis-news on Aug 22, 2022
According to William I. Robinson, the COVID pandemic has further intensified the structural crisis of global capitalism and has caused numerous uprisings and revolts around the world, which global elites are trying to suppress via militarization, police repression, and surveillance.
Image by Susan Melkisethian via Flickr
by Will Griffin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
July 7, 2022
“Since the dawn of capitalism, the capitalist class has had to keep an eye on the working class in order to keep them in check. This surveillance has been around for a long time but the story of the modern surveillance state begins about a century ago.”
Image by Jürgen Telkmann via Flickr
by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea’s Newsletter, June 30, 2022
July 2, 2022
In front of us, something is unfolding that we don’t want to properly see, but that we subconsciously recognize. The warning signs for a fascist crackdown in America have been here for years, if not decades. It’s now that they’ve become too big for much of this country’s complacent left to ignore. We’re accelerating towards a level of direness which people living under fascism so often can’t perceive at first, until the reality of their situation has finished creeping up onto them. By George Jackson’s definition of fascism, which is when capitalism forcibly maintains itself through reform, we’ve already been living under fascism for generations. With the Supreme Court’s decision and its ramifications, this is becoming more visible to more people.
Image by David Bacon via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
TheRealNews on Jun 24, 2022
Chris Hedges speaks with Robert Cox, the former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, about his campaign during the Dirty War in Argentina to report on the disappeared and the essence of journalism.
Image by brent granby via Flickr
Dandelion Salad
Originally published May 1, 2016
The Laura Flanders Show on Apr 26, 2016
Author and professor Peter Linebaugh discusses his new book, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. Later in the show filmmaker Avi Lewis discusses worker-owned factories in Argentina, and Laura focuses on the intersectional feminism of 19th Century Anarchist Lucy Parsons.
Image by Henk Sijgers via Flickr
by Howard Zinn
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Previously published August 2, 2010
April 2, 2022
I thought it would be good to talk about the FBI because they talk about us. They don’t like to be talked about. They don’t even like the fact that you’re listening to them being talked about. They are very sensitive people. If you look into the history of the FBI and Martin Luther King—which now has become notorious in that totally notorious history of the FBI—the FBI attempted to neutralize, perhaps kill him, perhaps get him to commit suicide, certainly to destroy him as a leader of black people in the United States. And if you follow the progression of that treatment of King, it starts, not even with the Montgomery Bus Boycott; it starts when King begins to criticize the FBI. You see, then suddenly Hoover’s ears, all four of them, perk up. And he says, okay, we have to start working on King.
Image by Geoff Livingston via Flickr
Dandelion Salad
Originally posted Oct. 27, 2020
goingundergroundRT on Oct 26, 2020
We speak to William Robinson, author of The Global Police State. He discusses how capitalism’s crises have fuelled the rise of the global police state, the drastic inequality and poverty that has become a theme of modern capitalism which necessitates the global police state, whether there is class warfare on the poor, the growing industry of militarism and oppression and much more!
Image by Chad Davis via Flickr
by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Nov. 26, 2021
December 20, 2021
This is part three in a series on U.S. collapse and the potential for civil war. Read part one for how I think propaganda factors into this instability, and part two for the role that I think neoliberalism has.
Dandelion Salad 