Democracy Now, August 13, democracynow.org
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Civilian destruction in Tehran from the recent bombings; almost 1000 Iranians were killed, nearly all of them civilians with no connection to Iran’s nuclear program. Photo by Calla Walsh, used with permission
On June 21, 2025, “pro-peace” President Donald Trump announced to the world that the United States had (illegally) bombed Iran. After decades of bloodlust, Israel had finally gotten the war in Iran that it desperately craved.
Israeli prime minister and the butcher of Palestine, Benjamin Netanyahu, attacked Iran without any legal or moral basis. Israel’s violence against Iran, which eventually grew into the “Twelve-Day War,” was surely conducted with America’s permission, if not direct coordination. Israel would not dare cross its political master, the world’s leading supplier of weapons and political aid to the apartheid state in the Middle East. Continue reading
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Ms Rachel with Rahaf, a three-year-old war amputee in the US for medical treatment. Image from Democracy Now, August 13, democracynow.org
Ms. Rachel, as she’s known to many, is the stage name of Rachel Griffin-Accurso, part of a new generation of children’s educational programming creators that have moved off of television and onto streaming services. Stars like Blippi and shows like Cocomelon appeal to children who haven’t entered school yet, and these shows appear to have wide interest as streaming services like YouTube continue to reshape the media landscape. Griffin-Accurso’s rise has led to a deal with Netflix to license her YouTube channel “Songs For Littles” as a “curated compilation” of her videos, according to Business Insider. Her story is however much more humble. As a music teacher and early childhood educator Griffin-Accurso had turned to YouTube as a home in 2019. Six years later, as of August, 2025, she has 16.5 million YouTube subscribers (which nets her an estimated monthly earnings of $99,000 to $1.6 million, according to social media tracking website Socialblade).
A notable part of Ms. Rachel story’s is that Griffin-Accurso’s videos focus on supporting language learning with children by employing songs and sign language. According to a Washington Post profile, when Griffin-Accurso’s son was diagnosed with a speech delay she decided to make the quality content that she felt lacking in children’s media. The early videos have a very clear “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, with flat digital backgrounds and animations, stains on the performer’s shirts, and bad hangnails in closeups. This is in part because Griffin-Accurso has a unique story about how her videos and channel took off during the 2020 COVID lockdown. A recent Post article on YouTube content creators explains that while early videos were simple, she now has a professional team that helps give the show polish. Newer episodes (like the potty-training special from May) have fully choreographed songs, full sets, and new cameras. These are the kinds of productions that helped her secure collaborations with Sesame Street’s Children’s Television Workshop and Australian children’s music group The Wiggles. Continue reading
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Dueling Definitions of Antisemitism
Consider two definitions of antisemitism. The first holds that antisemitism refers to hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against individual Jews. It can be manifested in various forms, including negative stereotypes, violence, and social exclusion. The second holds that antisemitism is hostility against the Jewish people. Are these two definitions the same thing, or are they different? What are their implications for understanding the relationship between anti-Israeli and antisemitic sentiment? Is one definition preferable to the other?
These are not merely academic questions. Students have been arrested and expelled from universities, faculty have been fired, university presidents have been forced to resign, and citizens have been denied due process as a result of the way antisemitism is defined. In this essay I will show why the first definition is to be preferred to the second. Continue reading
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A sketch by participant Anastasya Elissevah from Ken’s August 2 Cape Town workshop to produce a manifesto for a just city with urban movements occupying abandoned buildings and land there
This article is a distillation of a recent conversation with UIUC-based urban justice educator Ken Salo and his Cape Town, South Africa-based comrade Bevil Lucas by the Public i’s Rick Esbenshade. Ken and Bevil are veterans of the 1976 student- and worker-led struggles against white-monopoly capitalism in apartheid South Africa, and now work with movements of the urban poor resisting displacement and dispossession by black-elite-managed neoliberal capitalism in South Africa. Their current collaboration centers on an intergenerational political educational project, the Humane Urbanisms Project, that aims for working-class activists to situate their daily struggles for dignified livelihoods and decent housing as rooted in earlier struggles against politically and economically polarizing and privatizing Cape Town. Their collaboration works to uncover and amplify the resistance stories of movements occupying vacant public land and abandoned buildings as strategies for survival and dignified urban livelihoods. Their Cape Town project is a local node within a larger transnational network of land and housing justice collectives in the Global South that includes the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and our local FirstFollowers reentry project. Bevil also works with Reclaim the City to build city-wide connections with shack dwellers, as in the Intlungu YaseMatyotyombeni Movement, via shared projects to address gender-based violence, childcare, after-school homework support, gardening and food sovereignty, building cooperative movements, and “every aspect of people’s lives.” These projects allow Bevil to repurpose skills learned as an advocate for workers’ rights in international trade union networks like the International Labour Research and Information Group. Similarly, they allow Ken opportunities to repurpose skills honed as a veteran [Brazilian educational philosopher] Paolo Freire-inspired political educator working to recover the humanizing and emancipatory epistemologies of the urban oppressed in the Global South. Continue reading
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GEO organizers promote the RA unionization drive. Photo by Sandra Voskoboynikova, used by permission
The research assistants (RAs) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have officially joined GEO, the Graduate Educators Organization (GEO Local 6300 IFT/AFT AFL-CIO) at UIUC. The organization now represents teaching assistants (TAs), graduate assistants (GAs), pre-professional graduate assistants (PGAs), and RAs on the UIUC campus.
On May 15, 2025, RAs submitted their formal unionization interest petition to the GEO, the culmination of a campaign that began in September, 2024. On July 10 they held their official election and voted “yes” for union representation by an overwhelming majority—over 95 percent asked to be included in the membership of the GEO at Illinois. On July 22, the Illinois Labor Relations Board officially recognized GEO as the representative for RAs at the university. This was a history-making effort that represents both the first successful effort to unionize RAs at the university and the cementing of GEO’s efforts to represent all graduate employees. Following the successful election, the GEO has officially become one of the largest unions of higher education employees on a single campus in the country, and is now the state of Illinois’s second-largest educators’ union. Continue reading
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Potter’s field in Eagle Pass for unidentified bodies found along the border area. Photo courtesy of Witness at the Border delegation, March, 2025
This past spring I traveled with Witness at the Border to the border town of Eagle Pass, TX. I wanted to take a firsthand look at ground zero of the latest domestic militarization project dressed up as a national security measure. Eagle Pass had been in the national headlines since December, 2023, when a local group erected a field of crosses to represent the 700 lives lost that year due to increasingly lethal border barriers. One month later Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott flipped the script and sent the Texas National Guard to occupy the city’s riverfront park and protect Texans from an “immigrant criminal invasion.” It was a direct challenge not only to local efforts to humanize the global immigrant crisis, but to the Biden administration. Abbott’s charge that the President had failed to safeguard the nation made for good election-year headlines, and the scaremongering fed into Republican anti-immigrant bombast throughout the 2024 election season. And Abbott’s National Guard deployment has now been imitated by Trump in Los Angeles, CA and Washington, DC.
When I arrived at Eagle Pass in March I expected to find the river with its barbed-wire-coil shoreline, the cemeteries for the unidentified whose bodies had failed them in the arid scrubland or the river, the infamous Wall, and the general air of military occupation—but what I didn’t expect were the Kickapoo. Ultimately it was the sign for the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino on the outskirts of Eagle Pass that led me to rethink the place of the current war on immigrants in US and global history. Continue reading
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This essay is adapted from and expands on an earlier article by the same title published in the Fall 2024 issue of Justice Rising.
Media lie at the heart of many crises facing us today, from the rise of fascism to growing inequality to the ever-worsening climate crisis. Increasing numbers of people intuitively understand that our media institutions are failing democracy. This critical awareness can help create opportunities for structural reform. But too often our indictments focus on individuals—corporations and media owners—who consistently allow profit to trump democracy. This criticism is justified and necessary—after all, media and tech oligarchs are a key part of the problem. But it’s insufficient if our goal is to fundamentally change our media at a structural level.
To build the media we need will require a more systemic critique, one that acknowledges that capitalist logics—profit imperatives that exclude entire communities, extract our attention and personal information, and censor our news media—are at the root of the problems we are dealing with today. From news deserts to digital redlining, run-amok commercialism is a major cause of what ails our information and communication infrastructures. The market’s hidden hand is driving journalism into the ground and amplifying all manner of mis/disinformation throughout our media systems. Continue reading
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Champaign Police Officer Nicholas Krippel stands closely behind a man, who later filed a complaint against him for being threatening and discourteous.
Screenshot from Champaign Police Department bodycam footage
This story was originally published by Invisible Institute and IPM Newsroom on May 12. It has been edited for length and style. A full version, as well as more about the history and present of the Champaign Citizen Review Subcommittee, can be found here.
In 2021, shortly after she became the chair of Champaign’s civilian police review board, Alexandra Harmon-Threatt sat down to review records from investigations into civilian complaints that had been filed earlier that year.
In one case, a man had accused Champaign Police Officer Nicholas Krippel of being physically and verbally aggressive toward him and making physical contact without cause during a response to a verbal disagreement.
“Officer Krippel got in my face, in my space,” the complainant said. “His vest actually touched my skin, that’s how close he was to me.”
The man said Krippel had escalated the situation: “He only told me to stop talking and shut up, but he [said] nothing to the dude that threatened me.”
Harmon-Threatt’s review of bodycam video confirmed, in her mind, that both of these allegations had merit. But when she read Champaign Police Department (CPD)’s report, she found that it contradicted the evidence. Continue reading
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Friday Forum + Conversation Café
Fall 2025 Series
Please join the University YMCA and Diversity & Social Justice Education for our Fall 2025 Friday Forum + Conversation Café series. We will hear from community leaders tackling our most pressing public concerns through an unwavering pursuit of social justice.
All presentations are open to the public and free on Fridays at 12 PM in Latzer Hall at the University YMCA. Free lunch is provided. Continue reading
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The Queers for Palestine float won “Best Themed Float” at
the Champaign-Urbana July 4 parade. Photo by Paul Mueth
In March, community organizers from Champaign-Urbana launched a local campaign to demand an end to Illinois’s investments in corporations supporting Israel’s genocide against the people of Palestine, including Illinois’s direct purchase of Israel Bonds. The local effort joins a statewide campaign, led by organizers in Chicago, that has been demanding divestment for the last year. The campaign for divestment includes a wide variety of people and organizations across the state, representing both Palestinians and allies.
Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians are sustained through US financial and military support. At the federal level, the Biden and Trump administrations have jointly provided Israel over $20 billion in support, violating the Leahy Law, which prohibits arms sales to countries blocking humanitarian aid. At the state level, investments by the Illinois State Board of Investment (ISBI) include stock in companies that are complicit in Israel’s genocide, including Boeing, Caterpillar, and others. These companies provide technologies used to enact state violence, such as the militarized Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes and bury civilians alive, and Boeing aircraft used to drop bombs on refugee camps. Continue reading
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This article is the first of a two-part analysis of the relation between unions and immigrant workers. In an upcoming issue, the focus will be on campus unions at UIUC and their efforts to protect international students and undocumented workers.
Since the country’s inception, immigrants have been the backbone of free labor in the United States. Until recent decades, organized labor’s relations with immigrant workers have been decidedly mixed. This article offers a brief historical overview of these relations and a more detailed discussion of unions’ current efforts to support immigrants, documented and undocumented, and their communities.
In or Out: The Past Record of Organized Labor’s Attitudes and Treatment of Immigrant Workers
Not surprisingly, a critical component of unions’ past relations with immigrant workers was racism and ethnic prejudice among union leaders and members, but another important component, often intertwined with racism, has been the structure of unions themselves, namely the distinction between craft and industrial unions. Continue reading
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This year the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Engineering Open House 2025 was expecting 40,000 visitors April 4 and 5. Designed to showcase the talents and research of students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields, the theme this year was “The Age of Innovation.” In this era of increased government surveillance and record-breaking military budgets, we should be asking ourselves “just what kind of innovation do you mean?”
The links between the university system and the military-industrial complex are well understood. In fact, the list of corporate partners available on the Grainger College of Engineering website includes military aerospace giants like Raytheon and Boeing. No surprise then that the college’s Aerospace Engineering page lists Northrop Grumman as one of the top employers of UIUC graduates. The weekend’s 2025 “Age of Innovation” first-place award went to a project called “Pilot your Drone: Air Traffic Adventureland.” UIUC’s aerospace engineering program ranks number six in the country. Thus it is small wonder that student-led groups like Illini Unmanned Aerial Vehicles bring together students from different fields such as computer, mechanical, and electronics engineering, as well as computer science and finance. It is this link specifically—the one between engineering and computer science as it relates to the military-industrial complex—that has not been as well investigated on campus. Continue reading
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With the Trump-era onslaught and so many problematic circumstances to deal with in the power-production and -distribution system, the nuclear-power issue perhaps seems not necessarily top of many people’s and organizations’ concerns. Both at the national and the local level, however, there are reasons to be very disturbed about what is going on in the higher levels of corporations, universities, and governments. Locally the contract between Nano Nuclear and the U of I to build a Micro Modular Reactor (MMR) in the heart of CU requires attention and community engagement.
Corporations have been rushing to build MMRs, primarily to power data farms dedicated to both artificial intelligence and crypto mining. There are many competing design concepts, some of which incorporate molten salts or liquid sodium as an intermediate heat-exchange system. The former is merely highly corrosive; the latter is corrosive and explosive on contact with air or water. The Gates Foundation seems to favor both. However there is no established small-reactor design that has had regulatory scrutiny. Continue reading
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The roaming marauders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with masked faces, gallivanting around in armored vehicles and unmarked cars, are terrorizing communities across the United States.
Los Angeles, a California city with sanctuary laws meant to protect immigrant communities, is under a military siege: mothers, children, neighbors, and friends disappeared by unnamed, badge-less goons in military uniforms, with Marines and National Guard troops violently suppressing dissent.
ICE and the militant agencies supporting their kidnappings are fit for a dystopian alternative-history novel, not the streets of our country. Continue reading
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US bases in the Middle East. Of the nearly 1200 overseas military sites operating in the world, the US has nearly 900 while Iran has one—yet the US accuses Iran of military adventurism. Source: World Beyond War Report, 2025
For decades Iran has been the gremlin in the American global imagination. US officials claim that Iran is the main source of instability in the Middle East, allowing them to dismiss any opposition to US or US allies’ policies as products of Iranian scheming. The US-Israeli attacks on Iran in June, however, marked a dramatic escalation in the long-running US shadow war on Iran. Although the White House proclaimed that “Operation Midnight Hammer” successfully averted a global nuclear crisis, the reality is that the crisis was as invented as the long-standing assertion that Iran is the master agent of disorder across the region. America, not Iran, is the rogue state here.
The June strikes killed hundreds, half of whom were civilians; prompted retaliations against a US base and Israel; and nearly ignited a regional war. They also caused less quantifiable, but equally profound, damage to US and global security. Most pointedly, they make future nuclear crises more likely. Iran can rebuild its reactors and research programs in a matter of months if it chooses to, but we cannot rebuild the trust needed for international cooperation in non-proliferation so easily. Continue reading
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US Bases in the Middle East. Source: World Beyond War
For decades Iran has been the gremlin in the American global imagination. US officials claim that Iran is the main source of instability in the Middle East, allowing them to dismiss any opposition to US or US allies’ policies as products of Iranian scheming. The US-Israeli attacks on Iran in June, however, marked a dramatic escalation in the long-running US shadow war on Iran. Although the White House proclaimed that “Operation Midnight Hammer” successfully averted a global nuclear crisis, the reality is that the crisis was as invented as the long-standing assertion that Iran is the master agent of disorder across the region. America, not Iran, is the rogue state in the view of much of the world. The regime change that we are most likely to see as a result of the Israeli-U.S. “war” on Iran is the end to the Western dominated post-WWII global order.
The June strikes were heartless and irresponsible. They killed hundreds, half of whom were civilians; prompted retaliations against a US base and Israel; and nearly ignited a regional war. While it is unclear how much damage they caused within Iran, they caused profound damage to US and global security. Most pointedly, they make future nuclear crises more likely. Iran can rebuild its reactors and research programs in a matter of months if it chooses to, but we cannot rebuild the trust needed for international cooperation in non-proliferation so easily. Continue reading
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The June 17 incident (top), and the van (bottom) that the workers were kidnaped from by ICE
This article appeared on the author’s Substack on June 24, 2025. It has been lightly edited for style.
At least eight men were taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in East Urbana in the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 17. My sources in the Latino community have not been able to track down any of them. Likely young men with no families, they appear to have barely left any trace behind. There’s just a photo of a maroon van with long ladders on top. A contractor confirmed they were roofers who had been whisked away by ICE. Another source said they were being driven toward Springfield, which is the direction others have been taken by ICE.
There was a social media post made by a community member with photos of the maroon van surrounded by unmarked ICE vehicles. Red and blue lights are flashing. It happened around 7 a.m. The news spread like wildfire in the immigrant community. The post got more than 500 shares on Facebook. Continue reading
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Champaign has had LPRs in place since 2022; here is one at the intersection of Kirby and Prospect Avenues. Photo by Alen Romero
Objection! Question is irrelevant. We ask the wrong question, and we are being given the wrong answer. We still haven’t answered the question the Champaign County jail consultant, the late Dr. Alan Kolmonoff, posed to us back in 2013: “What do we want to use a jail for?”
What data proves that the more spent on jails, police, prosecutors, arrests, and surveillance equipment leads to crime prevention and an overall drop in incidents of crime simply because we’ve built a bigger mousetrap? It’s been stunning that in the 50 years of a racialized drug war, the School of Social Work, the College of Law, the Political Science Department, the Police Training Institute, the College of Education, and the College of Psychology at the University of Illinois have all been nearly silent and lent little wisdom to solving our local problems.
We must stop our unrealistic expectations of law enforcement. As much as we wish it so, law enforcement simply cannot prevent crime, even with automated License Plate Readers (LPRs).
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