Adventures of a Gonzo Journalist
Posted in Archive, Journalism, and MintPress News
The Green Party held its convention in Houston last weekend & officially nominated Dr. Jill Stein and running mate Ajamu Baraka for its presidential ticket.
Sonali Kolhatkar of Rising Up With Sonali interviews Kit O’Connell about the 2016 Green Party Convention, which he covered for MintPress News.
Posted in Archive, Journalism, and MintPress News
Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, has ambitious plans for her first 100 days in office.
“First thing we do is cancel student debt, working with the Fed,” Stein told MintPress News in an exclusive interview. “We will be fighting for that from day one.”
Stein would also immediately begin to implement her “Green New Deal” to redirect resources from the military-industrial complex into an economy based on renewable energy. She hopes her plan would put a stop to America’s endless energy wars.
“As the commander-in-chief, the president can also start a peace offensive in the Middle East to end these catastrophic wars for oil that are only making us more endangered rather than more safe.”
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
Controversy is swelling over a policy platform published by a coalition of Black Lives Matter activists that includes calls for the United States to economically divest from Israel.
“The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” The Movement for Black Lives noted in its policy platform. Published last week, the document was co-signed by over 50 black civil rights organizations.
Among other demands, the coalition is calling for the U.S. to redirect investments in policing, prisons, and the military-industrial complex — including the over $3.1 billion offered in foreign aid to Israel annually — into services that benefit black people and other oppressed Americans, such as health care, education, and treatment for mental illness.
Posted in Journalism, Life, and MintPress News
As the Green Party’s Presidential Nominating Convention convenes in Houston, there’s renewed attention on the party’s presumptive nominee, Dr. Jill Stein, and increased interest in third-party alternatives to the American two-party duopoly.
On Saturday, MintPress News will be at the University of Houston, where Stein and her running mate, human rights scholar and activist Ajamu Baraka, are expected to accept the Green Party’s nomination for president and vice president.
Polls consistently show that Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the political status quo. Just 9 percent of U.S. residents voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the primaries, according to The New York Times. In a poll conducted in May by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, some 90 percent of voters expressed a lack of confidence in the American political system, while 40 percent said that the two-party system is “seriously broken.”
Posted in Archive, Journalism, and MintPress News
An independent news outlet is demanding accountability from the mainstream media over inaccurate reporting during last month’s attempted coup in Turkey.
At the time this article was being written on Wednesday afternoon, reporters from Newsbud, a crowdfunded outlet focused on media integrity, were en route to New York in hopes of directly confronting officials at NBC News over a report that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been denied asylum in Germany during the failed coup attempt.
Though widely reported in the media, Newsbud’s founder Sibel Edmonds reported that the rumor originated at NBC. Writing on July 21 on Boiling Frogs Post, the temporary home of Newsbud, she wrote:
Posted in Austin, Journalism, Occupy Wall Street, and SXSW
Wheelchair Sports Camp is one of the better-known bands in the “krip hop” movement, led by Kalyn, a self-described “MC/beat-maker/activist/educator/shit-talker.” Their music combines electronic sounds and hip-hop beats with live jazz instrumentation, and, of course, Kalyn’s rapid-fire words. Sometimes funny, sometimes experimental, I’ve enjoyed every performance I’ve seen since I first caught them in 2012 at Occupy Austin’s ambitious “Occupy SXSW” mini-festival.
After seeing Kalyn perform again at this year’s SXSW, I asked her to answer a few questions by email.
I’m looking forward to their upcoming album, “No Big Deal,” which Kalyn mentions below.
