Computer prodigy Aaron Swartz should have been celebrating his 28 years over the holidays. Yet nearly two years ago, he tragically took his own life. He was the target of a merciless witch-hunt by the Department of Justice, ultimately choosing death over 35 years behind bars for the crime of releasing information. As someone who transformed the way we all use … Read More
Housing discrimination against African-Americans, also known as redlining, has long been a form of institutional racism in the post Jim Crow era. Under the Federal Housing Act, federal loans were systematically denied to African-Americans, which helped create ghettos and further segregated blacks from whites. Ferguson is just one example among many which employed the practice. The latent effects of racism are rooted … Read More
After more than 1,800 deaths, $108 billion in damages, and almost a decade of recovery efforts, Hurricane Katrina is now remembered as the single most devastating natural disaster in US history. There were more than 50 failures in levees, leading to 80% of New Orleans being flooded. In particular, the construction of the lower ninth ward levee was called into … Read More
MINT PRESS NEWS – Less than a year ago, the city of Oakland, California, took what privacy activists considered to be a major step toward a surveillance state. In July 2013, the Oakland City Council unanimously approved the implementation of the Domain Awareness Center (DAC), a surveillance hub that would combine public and private cameras and sensors from all over California’s eighth-largest … Read More
(A quick note to US readers: left and right in this piece do not refer to the American liberal-conservative spectrum – both of which are considered neoliberal – but to the broader left-right spectrum as traditionally conceived, ranging from far-left communism/socialism to far-right fascism.) It’s been an eventful few weeks for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), also known … Read More
