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6 days ago | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
The news that Trump ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reopen Alcatrazreminded me that years ago, after visiting the island soon after it became a national park in the company of two Weather Underground fugitives, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, I wrote a story about our adventure. I was worried about their safety and changed their names. They weren’t worried.
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1 week ago | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
“The Vietnamese national character is rapidly changing. Our value system is falling apart. Gangsters are making incredible fortunes on the black market.”–Professor Hoang Ngoc Hien, Hanoi intellectual, 1995“We’re getting wonderful cooperation from the Communist Party. What we need now is more accountability on the part of the Vietnamese.”–Bradely Babson, Director, World Bank, Hanoi office, 1995.
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1 week ago | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
“The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific, or against some European combination!”– F.
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2 weeks ago | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
Think of San Francisco artists and you’re likely to think of Ruth Asawa, whose work is currently on exhibit at SFMOMA, and Wayne Thieibaud, who had his first show in SF in 1960 and whose work is now at the Legion of Honor.
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3 weeks ago | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
That great slumbering beast, the Columbia University alumni, has finally awakened. Over 4,000 graduates from all the many schools of the institution, including Law and Medicine, the Teachers College, General Studies and Business have signed a petition that calls on the university to defend academic freedom in the wake of the recent attacks by the Trump administration and the abrupt cancellation of grants for research on cancer treatments, Alzheimer’s disease and more.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
They did not come to the Civic Center in San Francisco on April 5, 2025 to speak truth to power. They know that power doesn’t listen to people, not the powerful but vulnerable demigods in the White House. They came to acknowledge one another, to build a community in the open air and to air their grievances. It was a defining feature of the crowd that numbered in the thousands that no two signs were identical just as no people were identical and no two people dressed identically.
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2 months ago | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
Paul McCartney heard rumors of the wild goings-on in the Haight and visited on April 4, 1967. At the Fillmore Auditorium, he listened to a rehearsal by the Jefferson Airplane. At Marty Balin’s and Jack Casady’s apartment and along with his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, he played an acetate (a type of phonograph) of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” album, which would be released later that year.
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Feb 3, 2025 | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
The old men and women in Stacy Torres’s new book, At Home in the Big City: Growing Old in Urban America, (UC Press; $29.95), are not like the original members of the Grey Panthers, the organization founded by Maggie Kuhn in 1970, when Black Panthers defied racism and injustice and created role models for both the young and the old. Torres’ old folks, all of them New Yorkers, don’t stage dramatic protests against ageism and don’t lobby elected officials to protect social security.
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Jan 20, 2025 | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
A day before Donald Trump’s inauguration and the same day that—thousands of miles away— hostages were released in Gaza, the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco pulled out all the stops to honor the memory and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was January 19, 2025, a day to remember for many days to come. There were sermons and songsful, music on a piano, an organ, and a guitar and praying, too.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
counterpunch.org | Jonah Raskin
Almost all novels, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to One Hundred Years of Solitude and today’s mass market best sellers, are political whether the author intends them to be political or not. Some, like Gore Vidal’s Burr and Lincoln, are more overtly political than others. As literary critics have long noted, novels tend to evade the conscious control of writers, and sooner or later politics and power struggles rear their beautiful or ugly heads.
