Left voices, unfiltered, unedited, Ungagged.
“COVID-19 rocked the world in a way few other events could. International structures long taken for granted crumbled as nation states struggled to confront this novel virus and the chaos it brought. Everything from supply chains to migration policy to the reliability of scientific institutions came under fire, but no sector has taken more blows […]
“Each decade we declare that we buried class- each decade the coffin stays empty.” Richard Hoggart, 1989 introduction to George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. Lately, rather than sitting down to BBC Breakfast or Sky, I’ve been watching the previous nights American chat shows; Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel or Seth Myers, or news from CNN or […]
Anti-racist scholar and activist Tim Wise came to Olympia for a two-part lecture series on February 26th, 2020. Wise’s arrival was part of a speaker series organized by Shawna Hawk of the Women of Color in Leadership Movement. It began two years prior with Dr. Joy Degruy, author of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and continued the […]
2020: The (second) Year Without A Summer Seattle University student AJ sat in her apartment on Seattle’s Broadway stretch on the evening of June 6th. She had heard coverage of protests heating up in the area, but as a counselling student, her studies had to take center stage that day. Sharp noises rose in the […]
writes: Today (Sunday 7/6/2020) will see Black Lives matter demonstrations in Scotland. I have tried to convince Back Lives Matter activists to move away from doing physical protests and to go online. Although they all have listened and have taken on board what we’ve said – one of the events did move online – the […]
On April 9th, following months of wrangling and political machinations, the campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S President ended when Senator Bernie Sanders made the surprising decision to drop out of the race. The decision came after the Supreme Court refused to suspend physical voting in the Wisconsin primary elections due to the Covid-19 […]
Browsing social media recently I came across one blogger who claimed that Covid-19 will be America’s Chernobyl. That seems a bit like hyperbole. Chernobyl, as history records, became a central part of Gorbachev’s Glasnost campaign which eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union (helped of course by the industrial level of corruption among […]
You hardly have to join many dots to understand that the policy of the British government was never not herd immunity. But the fact that it still is ‘targeted herd immunity’, despite and even including the lockdown measures, seems to be less understood. Rather than considering the lockdown as a complete u-turn from the British […]
In late May, a forthcoming budget of The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) leaked into the public eye. Among the more shocking aspects of the budget was a drastic reduction in allocations for organizing, from 30% of the total budget down to a mere 10%. The report indicated this money […]
…Quote – Paulo Friere. https://ungagged.podbean.com/mf/play/kuu2t6/Pod_1_take_2_Mixdown_1.mp3 On this Podcast… PLEASE SUPPORT US – we need to pay bills. A cup of coffee keeps us ungagged! Paypal.me/ungaggedleft On this Podcast: George Collins – Interview with Shawna Hawk Part 1: Media Island and claiming space for the empowerment of women of color. Part 2: Reparations and […]