Category: Activism

  • Victor Tan Chen analyzes Barack Obama’s economic plans and what they might mean for the near-poor in America.

  • Bill Ayers will discuss the reissue of Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist with Chris Cuomo on tomorrow's Good Morning America. (UPDATE: link to story) Beacon Press had planned to publish a new edition of Fugitive Days with a new afterword in April 2009 after reverting the paperback rights from Penguin books in April…

  • In the final presidential debate, the South American country of Colombia briefly became a central theme in the U.S. election campaign. Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia, analyzes the presidential candidates’ positions on Colombia and free trade.

  • Some people will yawn at hearing that Saturday was the beginning of the 27th Annual Banned Books Week. The story is the same every year, isn’t it? Hundreds of titles are challenged in schools and libraries around the country. In 2007, the number was 420. This is fewer than the year before, but the number…

  • Four and a half years ago, during the halftime show for the 2004 Super Bowl, Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson set off a heated national debate about televised decency when Timberlake pulled off part of Jackson’s bustier and revealed her right breast.

  • Amy Goodman and two producers of Democracy Now! (Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar) were arrested yesterday in St. Paul while covering the Republican National Convention for the show. All three have been released, but the video of Goodman’s arrest and reports of the rough treatment of Kouddous and Salazar are disturbing. Goodman served as…

  • Roughly a month ago, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in United States v. Williams that upheld the consitutionality of the Prosecutorial Remedies and other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003 (The PROTECT Act). The 7-2 decision is the latest in a disturbing line of Congressional actions…

  • For Pride Month, Beacon Broadside invited Pat Griffin, director of It Takes A Team! Education Campaign for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Issues in Sport, to discuss the issue of homophobia in sports. Dr. Griffin is the author of Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbian and Homophobia in Sports and co-editor of Teaching for Diversity and Social…

  • I chuckled to myself wondering what William F. Buckley, the author of the landmark conservative tract God and Man at Yale, might have thought of this year’s Baccalaureate Service at Dartmouth College. In addition to Christian hymns and Bible readings, there was a Native American prayer offered in the Yuchi language, and recitations from the…

  • Almost 35 million Americans – 11.3 percent of the population – were classified as food insecure or very food insecure (a term that used to mean “hunger”) by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2006. Not coincidentally, this is almost the same number of Americans who live at or below the nation’s official poverty level…