John Tarleton

Jan 19, 2025 | indypendent.org | Renée Feltz |Peter Rugh |John Tarleton

On January 11, 2018, immigrant-rights leader Ravi Ragbir reported to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in Lower Manhattan for a regularly scheduled check-in. Ragbir’s 2001 conviction for wire fraud and his subsequent activism made him a target for deportation. He was accompanied up to the building’s front entrance by 250 supporters including faith leaders and several city council members determined that he not be removed from the country.

Dec 4, 2024 | indypendent.org | John Tarleton

The Democrats have done it again. For the second time in eight years, the party of cosmopolitan neoliberalism has lost to the party of patriarchal, white-supremacist neoliberalism. This time, President-elect Donald Trump, 78, can barely speak in coherent sentences as he rages about his desire to avenge himself. In this period between the election and the inauguration, we wait and wonder like a patient waiting for their cancer biopsy to come back. How bad is it going to be? Are we doomed?

Nov 30, 2024 | jacobin.com | John Tarleton

Early on a cold, gray morning twenty-five years ago this month, a modest procession of about eighty left a church in downtown Seattle heading for the nearby convention center. They walked quietly, each lost in a moment of personal reflection. Above them bobbed several brightly painted paper-mache monarch butterflies attached to long metal wires, a visual cue for anyone who became separated from the group.

Nov 25, 2024 | indypendent.org | John Tarleton |Gage Skidmore

Matt Gaetz was a congressman under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sex trafficking minors who Donald Trump nominated to be Attorney General, the nation’s top law enforcement official. He was best known to his peers for showing off photos from his sex parties on the floor of the House.  Pete Hegseth is a weekend host on Fox & Friends with white-nationalist tattoos. He is Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, which has an annual budget of more than $800 billion per year.

Nov 5, 2024 | indypendent.org | John Tarleton

Most Democrats in Congress have supported Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and the expansion of the war into Lebanon. Somehow Dan Goldman has managed to be even worse on the issue than most of his colleagues, despite representing New York’s 10th congressional district, a +30 Democratic bastion in Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. Goldman is certain to be re-elected to a second term. But peace activists in his district are trying to put him on notice with a write-in campaign.