That Colossal Wreck


Former White House and current “busted-ass trash palace” prepping for America’s 250th anniversary
Image from Instagram

Abby Zimet
Jun 01, 2026
Further

COMMON DREAMS

Amidst the ongoing awful, we take wary solace in the modest routs newly inflicted on our wannabe Great Dictator. He lost yugely in multiple courts as judges reopened his bogus IRS suit, froze his slush fund, ripped his name from a D.C. landmark and, in Kenya, told him to take care of his own. Meanwhile, his trashy shitshow of a 250th celebration has devolved into “red-meat-for-the-rubes” blood sport and a dud of a concert after most of the low-rent performers bailed because, “Nobody wants the stink.”

The buffoon who would be king keeps trying and flailing to rise to the authoritarian task in a spiraling presidency in free fall. Seeking to regain control of the narrative, he continues lashing out in increasingly deranged ways: After months of courts blocking his efforts to get state voter lists to steal elections, his Postal Service has proposed a Hail Mary move of only sending mail-in ballots to voters registered with the feds; he’s proposed sweeping changes that would allow his toadies to kill NIH and other grants vaguely not “aligned with” his “priorities”; fighting for the dubious right to go after enemies like sacking James Comey’s daughter from a New York U.S. Attorney’s Office, he’s argued he has the power to fire anyone, even for pure political malice, which the latest court to shut him down called “a novel and breathtaking theory” about presidential power.


It's Time to Abolish Columbus Day


Purchased With Blood and Lies

To deflect from the stubbornly enduring issue of pedo bestie Epstein, he’s reflexively pivoted to his once-winning scapegoat of immigrants with maybe the most racist and “lamest shit ever”: A website declaiming, “THEY WALK AMONG US” of “millions of illegals who have arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society.” Complete with “alien arrest map” and more AI slopaganda - a UFO lifts a man over a wall as YMCA plays WTF - the text hisses that, for years, “Aliens (have) shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes (and) and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception — They do not belong here,” all until when one “bold” bigot had “the courage (to) call out the real danger Aliens pose” to every American family and community. Alas, notes Dem. Gov. Ned Lamont, “We are still looking for intelligent life in the White House.”

Other horrors go on. Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins - net worth $15 million - boasted thanks to $186 billion in long-term cuts they’ve “lifted” 4 million hungry people off SNAP benefits so they can now achieve “the American Dream”; though cuts were in the name of “fraud,” she admitted they “don’t have actual data” (in reality zilch) got people “kick (ed) down the elevator shaft.” “Testifying” before the House,Pam Bondi threw her deputy under Epstein’s bus, refused to answer questions and argued it was “not appropriate” to acknowledge survivors standing behind her. Bald mini-Nazi Stephen Miller sneered Texas’ James Talarico (cis, straight, meat-eating) was the Dems’ “first transgender Senate candidate.” When Dems retorted, “Shut up you ugly fuck,” Miller’s wife blasted “violent rhetoric.” Chill Talarico: “I’m an 8th generation Texan - I’ve been eating BBQ since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

Sadist Greg Bovino crawled out of his fetid cave to tell Nazis at a “Remigration Summit” in Portugal he is now “in battle” against MAGA cowards who have “lost their will” to deport brown people: “Mullin’s a great plumber...But a hundred million illegal aliens is not a leaky faucet.” Vietnam has had to exhume bodies from ancestral gravesites to make room for a shitty new Trump golf course and hotel supposedly at another site; one 72-year-old is “outraged” the U.S. paid him just $2,660 compensation for the grievous removal of his son and parents. Always classy, Trump also just posted more AI garbage, literally: He throws Colbert into a dumpster and portrays Obama’s presidential library as a giant trash can. And displaying their usual lofty priorities, Minnesota Republicans at their state convention held a moment of silence to honor...George Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin.

In glad contrast, many judges are holding the line against the darkness and stupidity. The law, and the justice it can bring, inevitably moves more slowly and quietly than the atrocities we’re daily bombarded with. But it is moving, and last week several judges took the ball and damn near ran with it toward MLK’s blessed arc of justice. In perhaps the least substantive but most killingly symbolic move, Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court in D.C. ruled the boy-king can’t just slap his name on the Kennedy Center when his fragile ego needs a boost. Rejecting a final, desperate board “argument” the removal of the world’s most despised name would render the Center “financially nonviable” (add many LOLs here), Cooper found “no competent evidence” and ruled the Center’s statute “makes crystal clear” no name can be added to it without Congress’ approval.

In his decision, a response to a lawsuit brought by much-abused Dem ex-officio Board member Rep. Joyce Beatty after Trump brazenly hijacked the Board and chairmanship in 2025 - prompting pretty much any sensible performers to abandon it - Cooper ruled the foul Trump stain must come off everything - building facade, website, materials - within two weeks. An unexpected cherry on top: Cooper also found the Board was “derelict in discharging (its) responsibilities to the Center” when it voted to close it for two years of Trump’s suddenly announced “renovations,” and no they can’t exclude Dem members, like Beatty from decisions, because democracy. Kennedy niece Maria Shriver offered a “Translation: ”Due to the name change...no one wants to perform there any longer, so it’s best to close it and build a new one so everybody will stop talking about that.“

Ever gracious, the world’s worst loser responded with a fuming, whining, 700-word tantrum. “There has never been a (boy-king) treated so unfairly by the Courts as I,” he wailed. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, and bring this failing Institution” - rust, rot, rats oh my! - back,“ he has ”no interest“ and will transfer said empty shell back to Congress. He also attacked both ”Trump-Hating Barack Hussein Obama Judge Cooper“ and his wife, a former Dem federal prosecutor, who ”probably told him to do so!“ Cooper ”has a total Conflict of Interest,“ he raved, ”and should be brought up on charges for not revealing these facts.“ God, still a prince among men. Former Rep. Joe Kennedy III: JFK ”would remind us it is not buildings that define the greatness of a nation. It is the actions of its people and its leaders...and our commitment to the rights of all.“

Now judges are also coming down hard on his “felon-to-felon” slush fund. A federal judge in Virginia just froze its scuzzy $1.8 billion until a June hearing; Judge Leonie M. Brinkema barred any action “pursuant to (its) creation or operation” because “taxpayer dollars should not reward blind, and sometimes violent, loyalty to a single politician.” Her ruling came as Democracy Forward filed another legal challenge charging “blatant abuse of power.” Too bad, so sad: Now MAGA cronies, including dozens of convicted Jan. 6 thugs since charged or convicted for serious new crimes - child sex abuse, rape, burglary, home invasion, death threats against officials, fatal DUI crashes - may have to wait for their payouts. Even then, state Dem lawmakers - New York and New Jersey Assembly members, Gavin Newsom et al - plan to slap 100% taxes on them, with the House and Senate to wisely follow suit.

Digging even deeper in the Southern District of Florida, Judge Kathleen Williams just re-opened Trump’s bullshit $10 billion lawsuit against himself - his DOJ vs IRS - after three dozen bipartisan retired judges filed a motion against his “fraud on the Court.” Friday, Williams ordered Trump to respond to charges his suit, from which he laundered his billion-dollar-plus payout and lifetime audit immunity, was “premised on deception” to “avoid judicial scrutiny of a lawsuit collusive from the start.” Even Kenyan courts are rejecting his outrageous schemes. After gutting international aid and facing an Ebola outbreak in DRC that’s killed hundreds, Trump moved to simply bar immigrants or Americans who might have it and send them to...Kenya? As they scrambled to replicate in days care the US built over decades, the day the clinic was set to open a Kenyan court blocked a plan that, like all his others, “raises grave constitutional concerns.”

Other woes, born of his boundless incompetence, beset him: At a DOJ rapidly spiraling down, the lead prosecutor for the absurd James Comey Seditious Seashell case just withdrew; experts agree it’ll never make it to court. His grifty, flaking, no-bid paint job on Lincoln’s Reflecting Pool - from sober grey to tacky motel pool blue - has soared from $1.8 to $13.1 million skimmed from National Park entrance fees and is getting trashed. Five countries from his Board of Peace (sic), which promised 20,000 troops to help “ease Gaza’s transition to a peaceful Jared Kushner theme park,” has delivered no troops, no money, nada. His beloved gazillion-dollar ballroom remains a rubble-strewn hole in the ground amidst “a busted-ass trash palace” after another judge ruled “no statute comes close” to giving him the authority to build it. And Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket exploded on its Florida launchpad; NYT Pitchbot warns of new layoffs at The Washington Post.

Finally, whaaa, nobody wants to come to his birthday party and “testament to his vision to celebrate America’s monumental 250th anniversary” with the lamest, trashiest, most corrupt and barbarous show on earth, even though after heedlessly turning the White House environs into a hoarders’ trailer park he then plastered the city with banners proclaiming, “We are making D.C. safe and beautiful” Maybe the whole, crude debacle, “our latest national concussion,” stems from the fact - just hear us out - a Malignant-Narcissist-In-Chief has made America’s anniversary “about one hideous thing - himself.” Starting with the grotesque call to mark the date by “watching men beat each other senseless in a cage on the same grounds where Lincoln walked.” It’s gladiatorial bread and circus - food and fun to dispel questions about empire - but “he’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.”

His UFC match, with day-trading on the side, will feature combatants pummeling each other often to bloody pulp in a “sport” so violent John McCain called it “human cockfighting”; many states banned it at its inception, though its almost non-existent rules now prohibit gouging out opponents’ eyes. It’s an unsettling but unsurprising choice from a long “violence-curious“ (except in Vietnam) bully who weirdly wears more makeup and hairspray than your average drag queen while urging supporters to beat up protesters, joking about extrajudicial killings, and injecting inane bing-bong noises into descriptions of missile strikes. Decades ago, he tried to create a mixed-martial-arts brand with a brutal fighter named Fedor the Russian: ”His thing is inflicting death on people.“ It became Affliction Entertainment - really - but crashed after two fights, because everything he touches, even that, dies.

As a ghastly arena rises on the White House lawn, Trump is clearly hyped by the approaching blood-fest: “I have never seen anybody want anything so much as people want those tickets.” So is his wife-slapping accomplice and $3-million donor UFC CEO Dana White, who admits, “It’s really big for the brand.” About 4,000 supporters will watch in person, with Trump as usual likely close enough ringside to be splattered by blood and sweat. Another 85,000 can watch on giant screens from the Ellipse, home to the Jan. 6 “rally.” The Pentagon is reportedly recruiting hundreds of troops to attend in uniform, but no fatties please; they must meet height and weight requirements to “look good on camera.” They also have to pay for their own travel. In another classy move, sharp-eyed observers note that renderings of the event show an American flag with just 48 stars.

At last count the other big event, a Freedom 250 concert kicking off a 16-day “Great American State Fair,” will feature just two stars - or more accurately two bargain-bin, has-been-or-never-were performers, the only survivors of nine originally announced of which seven quickly dropped out. (Oof. Was it something/everything he said?) They were Young MC, Flo Rida, Bret Michaels, Morris Day & The Time, The Commodores, Vanilla Ice, “real” Milli Vanilli Fab Morvan, Martina McBride and Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory. Full Disclosure: We haven’t heard of any of them. Michaels evidently won Celebrity Apprentice in 2010, McBride’s a four-time CMA Award winner who’s sold 23 million albums and performed for multiple presidents, Morvan’s the surviving member of a pretty pair of guys brought low by a lip-syncing scandal. Honestly, we dunno who the others are.

Within 48 hours of them being announced, most had cancelled. They cited “misleading information,” “divisive” or partisan politics, miscommunication; a couple said they’d never been contacted in the first place. Reportedly remaining are Flo Rida, Fab Morvan and possibly Freedom Williams, or, per Dean Blundell, “one nostalgia rapper, one lip-syncer with intellectual-property issues, and a guy ranting from a toilet” - that would be Williams, who filmed a seven-minute rant about “niggers,” “motherfuckers,” and how he doesn’t give a fuck about Trump or the rest of us but after the Internet told him to bail he thought he’d fuck them all and play. Despite a broad consensus that watching the entire show as planned would be akin to “staring into a septic tank for hours,” MAGA was pissed at the drop-outs, especially McBride, the headliner, railing she’d even performed for “the Obama regime.”

Trump was gracious about the changes. Just kidding. In “prime wallow,” he railed against “these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’...getting the yips,” and said he’s thinking instead about “bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar...the man who some say is the Greatest President in History” to give a speech at a “wild MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY” with “Only Great Patriots invited.” While even supporters griped another speech instead of a concert would be “lame and boring,” nobody knows what latest chaos will befall the event. What many of us do know is that all the detritus of this shameful historic moment - the names, arches, gimcracks, breaches, endless cruelties of a tyrant’s resolve to “impose himself on the world” must go. With a nod to Walter White, we look to Ozymandias, a poem “to outlast empires,” for hope and guidance.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.



Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Abby Zimet
Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
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Young Communists Grow Older

Paul Buhle

April 13, 2026

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Image by Hennie Stander.

Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party Volume One, Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements. Edited by Jay Shaffner, Paul Friedman, Cindy Hawes, Geoffrey Jacques, Timothy Johnson, Carol Pittman, Donna Ristorucci, Daniel Rosenberg, Jackie Saindon, and others, with an Introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley. New York: Punctum Press, 2026. 406pp, $27.00 (download free).

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If the Popular Front of the 1930s Wartime and the alliance of the US with Russia marked the high point of Communist activity and influence in the US and in much of the rest of the world, the Cold War and the revelations of Russia under Stalin’s rule seemed likely to finish off the comparatively weak CPUSA. But not quite. Pockets of highly skilled veterans and determined loyalists remained, even when alienated by a split in 1957 that left hard-liner Gus Hall in charge on his return from prison two years later. These hardy survivors would be found, especially, in support movements for peace and racial equity. They were admired locally in many places. for their expertise and determination. They continued to play a valuable leadership role in a handful of unions, more quietly.

From at least the early 1960s onward, as the Cold War eased and the Cuban Revolution triumphed, scatterings of young people on campuses and elsewhere found themselves close to the CP and the happier parts of its complicated history.

Who were they, these several thousand who mostly did not join the New Left? Many carried on the work of the parents, even when dad, mom or grandparents had been forced into silence by the persecution of the FBI. More than a few set themselves to blue-collar life around workplaces and remained there, something unusual for a generation that, by the thousands, left the campus determined to organize, but found themselves unable to sustain the effort.

Here is one part of the special status for contributors to this volume: the Popular Front mode of pushing liberalism to the Left, within the Democratic Party. This remained the singular way forward when more dramatic and overtly radical efforts failed. No matter how bad the leadership or politically reactionary the Democrats at any level, the vision of “peace and freedom” continued to have a lot to offer. The Global South struggle, meanwhile, held hope for a different, better world. Something that looked like a potential successor to the Popular Front revived hopes. Young Communists, whatever their failings, were on the job.

Red Lives, Volume One is the first by activists who grew up, so to speak, within, around, and just beyond the orbit of the CPUSA. The larger project helps to point up a curiosity or seeming inconsistency from the standpoint of outsiders. Historians, political scientists, and journalists who devoted many volumes to the CPUSA largely judged its leadership and formal views. They seemed to have had little understanding or interest in the lifeblood of the movement, the mostly ethnic networks of working-class groups that existed in fraternal societies, unions, and other associations, and did much of their good work in those circles. They also rarely appreciated the community impact of the Popular Front within the lower-middle class, disproportionately Jewish population, especially in the New York City metropolitan area, or sections of minority neighborhoods, or on almost every aspect of popular entertainment, music, theater, and film.

The stories in this volume stand in notable contrast to the memoirs of New Left leaders, who mostly became college professors. These reflect more mundane, often largely unseen political work, even when the work includes the Daily People’s World. The contributors’ activity is marked by highlights in their own lives, many captured in little black-and-white photos charming in their Retro feel. Nearly all reflect lives in and around the labor movement.

The lead essay, by poet and journalist Geoffrey Jacques, tells the story of a young African-American, raised in Detroit as a Catholic, finding his way to Global Books, a store run by Party supporters and full of literary treats. Global shared a neighborhood with the local version of Bohemia just south of Wayne State University. Jacques became a staff writer for the Wayne State student paper, discussed ideas with friendly professors, and fellow radicalized students. Writing on jazz, becoming part of the throng around current music, he celebrated with most of Detroit the election of Coleman Young as mayor in 1973. Old Communists still on the scene became his willing guides, as so much of the Movement collapsed in upon itself.

By the end of the 1970s, Jacques found himself involved in vibrant activities, with the occasional, gloomy glimpse of the Party leadership. By the early 1980s, joining the staff of the People’s World in New York offered a way….to leave Detroit! You might say that most other memory-stories here have that bildungsroman sense of growing up, learning about life, and, most of all, finding new worlds beyond home surroundings. A striking number, however, saw no need to leave New York: it had everything for them, most of all a place for their kind of labor Left.

For others, it might be leaving Philadelphia for Antioch and then Los Angeles. Thus, the story of Marian Gordon, whose father had been a steadfast Communist. Or like Joseph Harris, leaving Queens for Berkeley. Or Dave Cohen, learning about the Left only in college at UMass, mainly learning in factories where Communist expectations of “industrial concentration” had ceased, but life went on, especially for a youngster within the always-left United Electrical Workers.

Judy Atkins also came from “outside,” but within a New England where the CP maintained intermittent influence, thanks mainly to the helpful influence of oldtimers, no thanks to national Party leadership. Chris Townsend, an outsider to Party history and culture, drifted into the melange of old and young in Florida, where in the 1970s so many old-time Communists had retired. Shifting to New York State, determined to rebuild the Party “west of the Hudson,” she finally became the UE representative in DC.

Others gathered in, or remained within, their background: Greater New York. Here, they had a leg in with several unions, most importantly the health union 1199, for decades one of the brightest spots in labor. Thus, Marilyn Albert, one of the best-known of younger Communists, found her role within 1199 before its merger into SEIU in 1999.

Paul Friedman grew up in Queens, joining Student SANE in Flushing, New York, but found his destiny listening to MLK’s famous address to the crowd of a quarter million in DC. A decade later, working at Columbia University’s sprawling Medical Center, he struggled for unionization and finally joined 1199 as an organizer of the White Collar Division. Rafael Pizarro,by virtue of his father’s membership and then his own, may be the only contributor to announce that he rejoined the CP after a period of absence.

James Williams, the only one here to have been an early leader of SDS, is a particular sufferer from the downside of top CP leadership, having been the much-frustrated editor of Labor Today, a sometimes-monthly tabloid seeking to coordinate the remnants of CP influence in the labor movement. Terrible advice (or orders) from on high, because labor issues signalled so much importance (or prestige) drove him out. A frustrated Williams quit, becoming a social worker and one more ex-CPer personally bitter, not at the Party or its members… but only at its leadership.

Jay Shaffner, the lead editor of the volume, grew up within a corner of the Chicago Left that moved to the suburbs—in this case Skokie—without losing the sense of what being active in the Left really meant. (So did Paul Soglin, a non-communist son of a blacklisted Chicago teacher, and destined to become the progressive mayor of Madison for most of the fifty years after 1972). Schaffner grew up politically, within various causes and the Du Bois Clubs and the Young Workers Liberation League, increasingly aware of the Party’s self-damaging sectarianism. In 1974, he ran for the University of Illinois Board of Trustees on the CP ticket, speaking on nearly every campus, gathering more than 20,000 votes. He went onward to assorted roles, within the US and internationally, as the CP wound down.

Frank Emspak, the best-known contributor to the volume, was, in his college years, a leader of the short-lived National Committee to End the War in Vietnam, later a notable labor activist and thinker, and, in his last years, the founder-director of a national labor radio project. After his passing, the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, declared a Frank Emspak Day in town.

Excuse the reviewer for his own experience, from the 1970s to the first years of the current century. On the Brown University campus, one of its flagship settings, the YCL made little effort to publicize itself but did excellent work for peace candidates and within local Latino labor support groups, working within coalitions, taking no apparent credit as Communists. They may also have been the only successfully integrated political group on campus: Jewish, African American, and Latino.

We could ask for more, and presumably it is coming with the next two volumes. To take one example: Freedomways (1961-85), the most influential magazine or institution connecting the nonwhite community to the milieux around the CP, does not yet appear here, perhaps because it primarily involved older veterans. Much more could be made of the political world around Angela Davis, easily the most influential member of CPUSA from the 1960s to her departure in 1991. What we do have here, however, is rich enough for any history of the US Left. We await more.

Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.

Sail On, Sail On, Oh Mighty Ship of State

Robin Andersen

 April 3, 2026

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There’s a madman in the White House (or what’s left of it) who thinks he’s a king, and he’s threatening to send US Marines on a suicide mission to Iran, but 67 percent of the US people are against it. The reasons and goals were made up, as they moved through his fever dreams on “Truth Social” in the middle of the night. “We’ve already won the war,” the madman was reported to say. It was a “preemptive strike,” but no enemy strike was planned. The US left negotiations about to conclude and the war crimes started the very next day. US bombs hit a girls primary school leaving the parents to bury the bodies of their children.

At the gas pump a man connects the dots between the illegal war and our own depravations.

A Retired Major General says in disgust that the Secretary of Defense, a former Fox News TV personality who was kicked out of the National Guard, has no qualifications for the job. Pete Hegseth grabs the spotlight with delusional testosterone-fueled bluster staged to sound like war strategies, talking about the “stupid rules of engagement” he won’t follow. Instead, he instructs our “war fighters” to “hunt down” and “kill” our enemies. Shaking his head the Major General says, “Those are the words of a potential war criminal.” Hegseth is apparently unaware that he may be sending Marines to the “graveyard of the American Empire,” as former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich tells the Scheer Intelligence podcast.

Marco Rubio claimed US bombs were instigated by Israel, a state reviled the world over for its genocide of Palestinians that destroyed all the schools, the clinics, the hospitals, the mosques, the housing, the water, and the sanitation in the Gaza Strip. Then they hired influencers, (but didn’t pay them) to keep calling their slaughter in Gaza a hoax. Behind-the-screens Israel now destroys Lebanese villages just like they did in Gaza, and kills journalists and first responders, just like they did in Gaza, for the same reasons—to stop the truth from getting out.

US Marines are sent to retrieve a mysterious prize, because God’s chosen people, as Gideon Levy called Israelis, don’t have any soldiers to send. They are busy killing in the West Bank and torturing the doctors and nurses and even the children in their dungeons of inhuman hate.

“Through the Squalls of Hate’”

Francesca Albanese releases yet another report on the heinous crimes perpetrated against Palestinians, this time through Isreal’s widespread systematic and sadistic use of torture of thousands of prisoners kidnapped since October 7, who are beaten, raped and starved to death on a scale of brutality never seen before in the modern world. And the story of a Rabbi who was once a tank sergeant in Israel’s army, arrested for sexually abusing a child, is re-circulated online, but never makes it to corporate media. He was also known for having publicly spread the false claims about Hamas systematically raping Israeli women on October 7. Yes, every Israeli accusation is a confession, and they are the one who use human shields.

Islamophobia runs wild with the howls of right-wing politicians repeated by their favorite media outlets.

And the once high-value news source—rendered now as little more than a tired-grey shipwreck of a newspaper—recounts with grand illustrations the “exceptionally critical journey” of the sacred “oil and gas tankers,” and how their precious cargos proceed globally in a truly moving story. There were no moving headlines in the legacy press about the 18-month-old toddler whose legs were burned with cigarettes by Israeli torturers. We saw his small blood-soaked pants telling a story that should have been printed above the fold on every newspaper if the media’s mandate was still democracy.

Some independent commentators conclude that “we are the villains in this story.” Another posts warns that nuclear weapons are poised to wipe out the Middle East, and the Israeli death cult passes a far-right inspired death penalty law making it easier for them to execute Palestinians. Israeli police beat anti-war and anti-occupation protesters and judicial critics at HaBima Square in Tel Aviv.

Democracy is Coming, to the USA

Palestinian Pulitzer Prize winning writer Mosab Abu Toba, sings a heart wrenching melody accapela in Riverside Church overlooking the Hudson where MLK shouted out his opposition to the Vietnam War. Bruce Springsteen takes the stage and thrills as he sings The Streets of Minneapolis, just after the wise Angela Davis reminds those in the pews celebrating Democracy Now! that protests are a form of resistance that gives us the feeling of our own power. They are rehearsals for the revolution about to be born.

Patti Smith sings “People Have the Power,” with her arms spread out in a holy gesture as a writer belts out the song and passes out postcards of where to see the film, Steal this Story, Please.  Within a week in the USA, 9 million people would protest against the mad king in what was left of the White House.

Robin Andersen is Professor Emerita of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, writes regularly for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Al Jazeera Arabic, and serves as a Project Censored judge. Her latest books include Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression and Investigating Death in Paradise: Finding New Meaning in the BBC Mystery Series.