What's in a (School) Name? Honoring Oklahoma’s Progressive Roots

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Saturday March 23, 2013 · 12:00 PM PDT

2013/03/23 · 12:00

It has come to my attention that Edmond Public Schools is searching for a name for the new school at 2300 N. Pennsylvania Avenue. The names we give to public schools both reflect and shape our values. A society that really wants to celebrate the life of an important figure – to keep his or her memory alive – does so publicly and permanently.

ZakkFlash

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Saturday March 23, 2013 · 11:57 AM PDT

2013/03/23 · 11:57

Unchanged: Progressive Disillusionment in the Age of Obama
– Dr. Zakk Flash, 15 November 2012

Four years ago, tens of millions of people of all backgrounds came together to elect the first African American president. Women, youth, LGBTQI people, and people of color went out in historic numbers to vote for Barack Obama. His election was heralded as tremendous symbolic blow against entrenched political and ideological racism in the United States. The campaigns and the election of 2012, however, have been far different: President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney failed to get an estimated 94 million voters to the polls.

ZakkFlash

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Saturday March 23, 2013 · 11:54 AM PDT

2013/03/23 · 11:54

Animals in circuses spend up to 11 months of the year traveling. For thousands of hours, over long distances, they may be chained, transported in vehicles that lack climate control, and forced to stand or lie in their own waste. Performing animals such as elephants, lions, and tigers endure years of physical and psychological suffering in traveling acts.

ZakkFlash

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Thursday April 19, 2012 · 7:28 AM PDT

2012/04/19 · 07:28

May 1st is recognized worldwide as International Workers’ Day, a holiday originating in response to the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 in Chicago, where workers fought for the establishment of worker protection measures, namely the eight hour workday. However, while the rest of the world marks May Day as a celebration of the working class, the United States is left with Labor Day—a banker’s holiday hurriedly passed through Congress by Grover Cleveland in an attempt to appease the outrage generated by the murder of railway workers at the hands of United States Army troops during the Pullman Strike.

May Day, along with notions of radical worker action, has largely been ignored in the United States in recent years. But the time for complacency has passed.

ZakkFlash

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Thursday April 19, 2012 · 7:26 AM PDT

2012/04/19 · 07:26

May Day 2012 - A Declaration of Solidarity from Occupy Oklahoma

ZakkFlash

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Thursday April 19, 2012 · 7:20 AM PDT

2012/04/19 · 07:20

Under a president deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, the will of the authoritarian tyrant caste is being written permanently into American law.

H.R. 347/S1794, otherwise known as the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” passed unanimously in the House and receiving only three negative votes in the Senate, makes it a felony—a crime defined by the federal government as punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year—to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.” The law makes no exception for demonstrators who unknowingly gather outside of federally-designated free-speech zones; you may not have willfully or knowingly done anything other than exercise your free speech and free assembly rights, but if you “in fact” “[impede] or [disrupt] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions,” you’re going to prison. And since Obama’s ink dried on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and America was declared a battleground, you could be held indefinitely.

ZakkFlash

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Wednesday February 29, 2012 · 10:18 AM PST

2012/02/29 · 10:18

Gaunt figures wander like the dead through streets and alleyways, worn clothing hanging from emaciated bodies, their rough faces frozen in an image of utter desolation. Foodstuffs are sold at exorbitantly high rates by monopoly agro-business; those who can’t afford to buy food starve almost immediately, while those who can scrape together the funds succumb to slow death from the poisons within. Old folks, little children, widows, and former national heroes—all these are thrown from their homes while those houses are left to rot, shiny new locks gleaming on the door. The entire time, plutocrats sleep in virtual fortresses, hidden in gated communities while people starve in the streets.

This is the nature of the other Civil War. This is capitalism’s uncivil peace.

ZakkFlash

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Thursday February 16, 2012 · 8:48 AM PST

2012/02/16 · 08:48

The recent wave of protests sweeping the United States under the banner of Occupy Wall Street—and elsewhere around the world under other monikers, like the Indignant Citizens Movement, ¡Democracia Real YA!, and the various blossoms of Arab Spring—has captured the imagination of millions on the egalitarian Left and libertarian Right. Inevitably, thankfully, it has also ignited fierce debate about the nature of sociopolitical and economic inequality and of democracy itself. But as the cogs of corporate media seek to bewitch us with the specter of political gameplay, they also scheme to pacify the lonely rage of societies under fascist colonization by using an ancient tactic: divide and conquer. We are left to feed on one another like jackals.

Our strength—as the surveillance state well knows—lies in our solidarity.

ZakkFlash

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Thursday February 16, 2012 · 8:38 AM PST

2012/02/16 · 08:38

Chris Hedges has written some of the most insightful analysis of the U.S. war machine in recent years. His 2009 book The Empire of Illusion was an exploration of how exhibition has eclipsed truth and meaningful connection in American society. His acknowledgment of the ease in which one can buy into such spectacles is a small part of why it was so odd to read his article on Truthdig attacking both anarchists and black bloc tactics entitled “The Cancer in Occupy.”

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What's in a (School) Name? Honoring Oklahoma’s Progressive Roots

Unchanged: Progressive Disillusionment in the Age of Obama

Banning Big-Top Brutality

May Day: A Radical Strike into the Belly of the Beast

May Day 2012 - A Declaration of Solidarity from Occupy Oklahoma

United State of Emergency: Outlawing Dissent

The Other Civil War: Capitalism's Uncivil Peace

A Principled Stand on Diversity of Tactic: Avoiding Uniformity of Failure

Hedging Our Bets on the Black Bloc: The Impotence of Mere Liberalism