Salon.com > Matthew Cunningham-Cook

Amnesty now!

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:37:00 +0000

In the aftermath of Occupy, the Left in the United States is adrift. Without a wider structuring project, most of us have either receded from activism or delved entirely into local struggles. On the national horizon, major goals seem nonexistent: many of the bigger demands thought possible by the Left at the beginning of the Obama administration have now been shunted to the side, and the expansive social transformation evoked by many in Occupy, while still in the embers, is not manifested in large daily protests.

One of the most consistently newsworthy developments in this lull, however, have been the Dream Activists: young undocumented immigrants seeking to enforce the United Nations-declared universal human right to a nationality. And certainly, the mass deportations of the past decade – 1.5 million and counting under Obama – have been one of the greatest, and largely unnoticed, moral affronts of our time.

Understanding Christopher Dorner

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 23:26:00 +0000

Bradley Manning: imprisoned, tortured. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo: lost her career at the Environmental Protection Agency. Karen Silkwood: died in a suspicious car accident. Gary Webb and Deborah Jeane Palfrey: committed suicide, the former having lost his career, the latter under threat of a 55-year prison sentence. Adrian Schoolcraft: involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward.

This isn’t a country that necessarily holds whistleblowers in the highest regard.

5 key facts missing in the media’s ongoing quinoa debate

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, an opinion piece by Joanna Blythman at the Guardian blared “Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?” In it, she argues that the high price of quinoa, driven almost exclusively by Western (although not necessarily “vegan”) demand, is making the nutritionally valuable foodstuff difficult for ordinary Bolivians and Peruvians to afford.

PETA’s Mimi Bekhechi was quick to issue a response, pointing out (correctly) that meat consumption is a key driver of a host of ecological and social ills, among them world hunger and global climate change, but failing to dispute the core argument at hand – that is, that Western demand is pricing out poor folks.