LA Progressive

New Nuclear Weapons? Not for the U.S. Dick Price of the LA Progressive has a conversation with Bill Astor about our nuclear arsonal. It's always the right time to stop building more weapons of mass destruction To prevent the apocalyptic consequences of yet another nuclear arms race, the US should act to decrease “investments” in new nuclear weapons while cutting current arsenals by negotiating and...

The main executive leadership of the Democratic Party is the Democratic National Committee (DNC). It is generally responsible for the affairs of the Democratic Party including planning how to support Democratic Party candidates running for local, state, and federal office across the nation. The election to choose the next chairperson of the DNC is anticipated to take place on February 1, 2025. But...

As the rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Syria Liberation Committee) seized Damascus, Syria’s capital, on December 7, 2024, the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad boarded a flight to Moscow , Russia. It was the end of the rule of the Assad family that began when Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) became president in 1971, and continued through his son Bashar from 2000—a 53-year period of rule. Ha...

If we have learned anything about Donald Trump over the past decade, it’s that even his most outlandish threats against democracy should be taken seriously. This applies not only to his promises to exact revenge and retribution on his political opponents and critics, but also to his expressed interest in serving a third term (or more) as president. Trump has been musing about serving three terms f...

Henry Giroux joins Dick and Sharon in a conversation about neoliberalism and its impact on education. Henry believes that for decades, neoliberalism—a predatory form of capitalism—has waged a relentless war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and eroded the common good. Disguised in the rhetoric of freedom, it elevates market logic to the status of a governing ideology, insisting t...

Bernie Sanders and others in the political class believe that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and that, as a result, the working class has abandoned the party. Then, Trump duped the working class by appealing to hate, the most primal of instincts. Which resulted in many working-class voters joining Trump. For reasons that do not make sense since, unless one looks deeper, the w...

The Democratic Party is dead. The Republican Party is dead too. It died a while back, but nobody knew it because before anybody could check its pulse, a collection of crazies assumed its identity and rallied behind The Great Orange Father. But everybody knew the Democratic Party died because on election day, after a flamboyant, dramatic swoon, it crashed to the ground — says Mark Fancher, attorney...

Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and political and historical sociology. Her research pursues three complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression. The second excavates twentieth-century Black antic...

It’s the day after election day, USA 2024, and Dick and Sharon are weary. They’re weary of the pervasive misogyny coloring the current political landscape—a hue that now stains even the nation’s highest offices. They’re sick of the unapologetic, gendered vitriol aimed at figures like Vice President Kamala Harris, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Dick longs for a by...

Marianne Williamson ran for president of the United States in 2020 and 2024. In this interview with Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive, Marianne speaks frankly about her experiences on the campaign trail but more specifically, with the DNC. Please subscribe and share. For more information, go to https://www.laprogressive.com Get full access to LA Progressive at laprogressive.substack...

Although I, like all rational people, would love to be spared another four years of Trump misery, I realize that spiritual warfare cannot be waged without injury, or at least inconvenience. Those are the words of attorney, writer, and guest of this podcast, Mark Fancher In writing his latest piece in the LA Progressive, Mark makes it clear that there are times when compromise is not an option. He...

Paulo Freire and the Necessity of Critical Pedagogy is the topic of this discussion with Henry G "Today, as education comes under attack by neoliberal and authoritarian regimes worldwide, Paulo Freire's ideas are more vital than ever," says Henry Giroux a professor who currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Departmen...

These days, it's almost impossible to have a civil conversation with anyone of a different political view.  But contrary to what you might believe, learning to talk to someone who holds deeply ingrained opinions that differ from yours without the conversation quickly devolving into an argument or nasty fight is possible, but it takes time and possibly training. That is the topic of the conversatio...

Former judge Bill Blum chats with the LA Progressive about the ways in which the Supreme Court has supercharged the nation’s gun violence epidemic. He tells Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive that the Supreme Court has left our schools, streets and communities soaked in blood. He says we'd be wrong if we justed pointed the blame at the National Rifle Association and their lackeys in ...

Henry Giroux is an American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. Henry Giroux sits with Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive and explains how liberal education streng...

Today, John Kiriakou is an author and a journalist but not long ago, he was a CIA counterterrorism officer and a senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was in this roll that John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppos...

Professor Richard Wolff sheds light on the role that racism has played as an essential tool for maintaining the capitalist order. Says Wolff, "U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class." He explains how and why this "feature" has served to keep us all locked in to the inefficient, contradictory system....

Rick Wolff has a written new book, "Understanding Capitalism". Professor Richard D. Wolff has written this book in an effort to provide clear and concise answers to questions that thousands have asked him over and over as he engaged in speaking engagements across this country. Richard D. Wolff is a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professo...

Cornel West, the public intellectual, author, and professor, announced his bid for the presidency of the United States and selected Dr. Melina Abdullah as his running mate long before Kamala Harris took on the mantel. Mainstream media tends to focus exclusively on the Democratic and Republican candidates while ignoring the other parties. This conversation with Dr West addresses the focus of his ca...

Security for war criminal Netanyahu was more extensive than what was provided for 32 heads of state for the recent NATO anniversary in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Congress invited the war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on July 24, thereby solidifying the complicity of the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. government in the genoc...

What is it about white men, especially older white men, finding it so hard to surrender the spotlight, pass the torch, and stand down? Joe Biden did the right thing. Finally. But it took Nancy Pelosi's hammer and tongs—and the eventual capitulation of his consiglieri,  Ricchetti and Donilon , to get him to do it. Biden is hardly alone. A 78-year-old egomaniacal Donald Trump can't get out of the wa...

The American Ballet Theatre (ABT) honored my uncle, Leopold Allen at two events in New York City. ABT said, "As we come to the end of Pride Month, we want to pay tribute to a member of our community who made way for a more inclusive world in ballet and beyond. A legend, a light, a trailblazer—✨Leopold Allen✨, ABT’s first resident Hair and Makeup Supervisor, was a fixture in the Company for over...

Now that President Biden has voluntarily chosen to drop out of the presidential race and has also endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The game has changed. Almost immediately upon hearing the news, close to 45,000 Black women participated in a call that helped raise a record $81 million for the Harris campaign in less than 24 hours. All of this new energy could attract a bunch of new voters. Ev...

Law Professor Daria Roithmayr has spent her career trying to understand the unyielding persistence of racism in the United States. She found a clue when she discovered, by happenstance, a book that discussed how Microsoft established dominance by not playing by the rules, what followed for Roithmayr was deep research that resulted in her book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in What...

The LA Progressive chats with Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University's Costs of War Project . In a piece written by Mazzarino and published by the LA Progressive, Mazzarino makes the case that war-induced hunger and insufficient medical care indirectly kills more civilians than direct violence. She says that many war stories end with hunger wreaking havoc on large portions of a populatio...