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Featured Column

Voices From the Inside Out: Wisconsin’s prison system on trial

January 24, 2019
Prisoner Robert Taliaferro looks forward to what a new governor in Wisconsin may mean for prisoners, especially prisoners of color, who have suffered under Governors...
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Editorial

Editorial: Brazil under Bolsonaro’s heel

Marxist-Humanist Editorial that takes up Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, including his attack on the landless workers movement, on the environment, on those who are...
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Page 2
Review: ‘Lesbian Revolution’
Adele reviews “The Lesbian Revolution: Lesbian Feminism in the UK 1970–1990,” by Sheila Jeffreys, the first book documenting the history of British Lesbian feminism.
Women World Wide
5.5 million women formed a 400-mile-long “wall” the length of India’s Kerala state for women’s freedom; Zimbabwe’s first all-woman anti-poaching squad; the opening of “Free Women’s Land,” a village built and occupied by women and children in the war zone of Syrian Kurdistan: and a remembrance of the founder of the field of African-American women’s history, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn.

Page 3
Chicago teachers win first strike against charter schools
Chicago teachers speak for themselves, explaining why they fought and won the first strike against charter schools.
Predatory lending
A Detroit, Michigan, resident reports on the harm that predatory lending is doing to the city and its residents.

Pages 6-7, Readers’ Views
Readers’ Views, Part 1
Readers’ Views addressing: challenging fascism across all borders; charter teachers strike; pitfalls of bourgeois politics; women on the march; prison strikes big and small; and the racist criminal injustice system.
Readers’ Views, Part 2
Readers’ Views regarding: Thought-diving into revolution in permanence; murky waters; the Church and oppression; why read N&L; and voices from behind bars.

Page 8
Review: ‘Always Color Outside the Lines’
Review of Robert Taliaferro’s wonderfully illustrated book, “Always Color Outside the Lines: Freedom for the Artist Within”–a book that shows his philosophy of art and his expertise with different media and techniques.
Pondering the idea of freedom
Prisoner Faruq ponders the idea of freedom as an idea that has its own development and, if grasped, will help transcend capitalist relations.
Three years after Ashker vs. Governor of California
Pelican Bay Prisoners speak of third anniversary of the landmark agreement in the class action lawsuit that ended indefinite solitary confinement in California prisons.

Page 9
Review of ‘55 Steps’
A review of the movie, “55 Steps,” directed by Bille August, which tells the story of Eleanor Riese, a mental health patient, and her court case, which won the right for California’s acute, competent mentally ill patients to have informed consent about their medications.
Queer Notes
Protests in Tunisia against non-implementation of Transgender human rights bill; Brazil’s new president threatens crackdown on homosexuality and same-sex marriage; new Tunisian documentary “Subutext” about homosexuality, poverty, illness and drugs in Tunisia’s slums; and a Chicago protest against Antwan Haywood being thrown out of the Powerhouse International Ministries supposedly over the way he was dressed.

Page 10
Prisoners endangered
Families of prisoners and supporters rallied in front of the California Department of Corrections and rehabilitation’s (CDCr) headquarters against the CDCr-induced violence that many of their loved ones are experiencing.

Page 11
The Cuban Revolution: a great divide
The Left press and many others have been commenting on this important date: Jan. 1, 1959, the day that Fulgencio Batista was overthrown. The great difficulty is that the focus has been far too narrow…
Youth in Action
Peking University Marxist Society students protest to support their detained club president; student workers at Grinnell College vote to be represented by a union; and a movement against climate change started by three Australian high school girls has spread to students in Japan, the UK, U.S. and Belgium.
Handicap This!
A roundup of actions around people with disabilities: Secretary of Education’s drive to rescind federal guidelines ensuring that disabled and minority students not face unfair discipline; Japan’s plans to use the 2020 Paralympic Games to make Tokyo hotels and public transportation more accessible; the insufficiency of Social Security Disability Insurance; and how charter schools are less likely than public to respond to enquiries regarding disabled students.

Page 12, World in View
Yemen torn by poverty, imperialism
Yemen’s civil society organizations, representing the revolutionary hopes of 2011, have presented humane terms for a peace agreement. The state powers and non-state actors dependent upon them have their own ideas.

Web only:
No to U.S. Intervention in Venezuela! No to 21st Century State-Capitalism! Yes to Self-Determination of Venezuela’s Masses!
Maduro’s authoritarian rule must not give a green light to intervention from without, or to supporting a coup from within. That cannot be allowed to cover up the way that the attempt to construct socialism from the top down was no substitute for a social transformation from below.
Review: ‘Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator’
Review by January of “Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator” by Greg Jaczko.
Detroit celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Participant report from Detroit’s 16th Annual Martin Luther King Day Rally.
Tlahuelilpan deaths not accidental
The horrendous tragedy in Tlahuelilpan, Mexico, when an oil pipeline explosion killed over 100 people, has shaken all of Mexico.
Detroit women rally to fight for our freedom
Participant report of how women in Detroit celebrated the Women’s March by highlighting diverse women fighting for fundamental changes and challenging racism, sexism, and capitalism.
Capitalism’s failures, and the struggles against it
We post this Dec. 24, 2018, commentary by Mohammed Elnaiem as a discussion article which begins: “On these holidays, we mourn for the Kurds in Syria who hopelessly fear an upcoming Turkish invasion, we mourn for the yellow vests in France who rise up in an empire built on colonial wealth but which continues to make destitute its working and unemployed poor…”
Michigan post-election voter suppression
Report from Detroit about the Michigan legislature passing bills to reverse the results of the election, and about plans to oppose from below the suppression of democracy.
Rally to end war in Yemen
Rally in Chicago calling for end to war in Yemen, including U.S.-supported Saudi military campaign. 44 blue backpacks represent children killed when the Saudi coalition dropped a U.S.-supplied bomb on a school bus packed with children.