September Issue Front Cover

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Public i

FIFA WORLD CUP: “FOOTBALL UNITES THE WORLD”—AGAINST US

Cartoon by Osama Hajjaj, used with permission

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Did the Trump-Infantino World Cup Ruin the “Beautiful Game”?

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Richard Esbenshade

President Donald Trump poses for a photo with FIFA President Gianni Infantino at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. on Friday, December 5, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Ahead of the 2026 football (soccer) World Cup, there was much doom and gloom among commentators and fans across the globe. Extortionate ticket prices and onerous visa requirements in place in the US, where the great majority of matches would be played, made it impossible for the vast majority to even contemplate attendance. The expansion of the tournament from 32 to 48 national teams, combined with the wear and tear on top players during their increasingly packed and lengthy club seasons, had many worrying that the quality of play would be diluted, producing a lackluster experience. The crude farce of FIFA President Gianni Infantino creating the “inaugural FIFA Peace Prize” for Donald Trump, to curry favor by assuaging Trump’s ego after being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, encapsulated the ethical gutter that the governing body of world football had sunk to. Critics such as Lefty sports journalist Dave Zirin warned of a “joyless World Cup.”

FIFA has a long tradition of bedding down with dictators and authoritarian regimes, who could use the ever-increasing prestige and attraction of the game—and, often, manipulation of conditions of play—to reap legitimacy at home and abroad. The 1934 World Cup was awarded to Benito Mussolini’s Italy; the Italian team’s victory was celebrated as a victory for fascism. The 1978 event was held in Argentina in the midst of the military junta’s “dirty war,” and that national team’s triumph was sullied by allegations of match-fixing. More recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, under sanction for the 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine, hosted in 2018; as did the repressive petro-state Qatar in 2022. Thousands of migrant workers paid with their lives building the stadiums for the latter (see Janice Jayes’s article “Labor Abuse as Product Placement at the World Cup” in the December 2022 Public i, in which she discusses the term “ballwashing” for such reputation-cleansing). Continue reading →

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Divestment and Reflection: 40 Years Since the University of Illinois Anti-Apartheid Protests and Arrests

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Susan Lacy-Ryan

The protest shantytown erected on the UIUC Quad in spring, 1986. Photo by the author

Former members of the Divest Now Coalition (DNC) gathered in Champaign on June 6, 2026, to mark the 40th anniversary of student-led divestment protests at UIUC. The reunion brought together former student activists, community members, and others to reflect on the campus movement against apartheid in South Africa.

The event opened with former UIUC student and DNC activist Lawrence James raising his fist and leading the chant, “Amandla!” The audience, without prompting, answered, “Ngawethu!” Many had chanted those words, along with other anti-apartheid slogans, during protests and meetings in the mid-1980s. “Amandla Ngawethu,” a phrase from isiZulu and isiXhosa, is commonly understood as “power to the people.”

The reunion centered on April 10, 1986, when 60 people were arrested and charged with trespassing after demonstrating at the Illini Union during a board of trustees meeting. Participants were calling on UIUC to divest from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa. Continue reading →

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South Africa: A Report Card

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Teresa Barnes

This is an edited version of a talk given at the Illini Union, June 6, 2026 at “Divestment and Reflection: 40 Years Since the University of Illinois Anti-Apartheid Protests and Arrests.”

Colonialism poured poison into the soil of South Africa for 400 years. The poison was the idea of the legitimacy of racial hierarchy. In daily life that meant convincing people that race is real, that white people are good and deserving humans, while black people are only fit to be like livestock—used and managed. And in that line of thinking, the strong (white people) have a duty and a right to dominate (and probably to despise) the weak (black people).

South Africa’s first one-person-one-vote democratic elections were held in 1994, and have been held every four years since then. Given 400 years of poison in the soil, what has grown? We have to expect that the things that will grow out of that soil will be twisted and deformed for quite some time. Continue reading →

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The Sanctuary Movement: Still a Model for Shaping Policy from the Grassroots Up

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Janice Jayes

The late Father Tom Royer with refugees hosted by CUECOS in 1984. Source: papers of Father Tom Royer

The Urbana-Champaign community has a long history of making national and even global matters topics of local debate. Apartheid in South Africa, the US war in Vietnam, and nuclear proliferation are among the many issues that galvanized residents in past decades. This legacy isn’t just for local history buffs, however; it’s a reminder that policymakers revise stances when pressure from tens of thousands of community movements across the US works to educate the public and channel concern into campaigns for change. Today’s locally rooted campaigns against surveillance technology, data centers, and US complicity in genocide in Gaza continue in this tradition.

The National Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s

One issue with a long history of local activism is the rights of immigrants and refugees. In the 1980s Champaign-Urbana joined other cities across the country in organizing a Sanctuary campaign to draw attention to the interrelated issues of human rights in Central America and civil rights here in the US. At the time the US was in the final grip of Cold War fever. While many analysts questioned the ability of the Soviets to sustain their own system, let alone undertake global expansion (the USSR did in fact break up just a few years later, in 1991), the Reagan presidency fanned fears of Communist expansion on the election trail; and, once in office, doubled down on military aid to Central America. The counterrevolutionary militias Reagan funded to undermine the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the authoritarian governments he bankrolled in the rest of the region became the US’s first line of defense against the so-called cancer of Communism. Continue reading →

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Recent Local Wins for the Growing BDS Movement

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Bryan Maxwell

Activists celebrate the passage of an ethical divestment policy by the Urbana City Council in June. Photo by the author

Almost three years into Israel’s genocide in Palestine, the US federal government continues to double down on support for Israel. Despite Israel ranking last in global perception surveys for three years in a row. Despite over 60 percent of all Americans opposing Israel’s actions. Despite the UN adding Israel to the list of countries committing sexual violence in war zones, Israelis violently detaining a member of Congress, and Israel kidnapping and torturing Americans on a humanitarian trip in international waters.

But despite our government’s failure to do the right thing, the movement to end the genocide continues. Electoral organizing has had recent successes removing pro-Israel members of Congress from office. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed last month won Michigan’s primary for US Senate, which would be the highest office claimed by the movement. El-Sayed calls for a full arms embargo on Israel. Continue reading →

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The Anatomy of a Defeat: Why the United States Lost the War on Iran

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Behrooz Ghamari

This article previously was published in Italian in il manifesto on June 27.

From the first shots targeting the Islamic Republic’s leadership, the United States and Israel waged an illegal war against Iran that was doomed to fail. Articles 1 and 2 of the United Nations Charter prohibit the violation of another country’s sovereignty. But the US–Israeli alliance clearly recognized that the European nations and their Gulf-state allies would remain silent on this clear breach of international law. Indeed, in the early days of the war, not only did these nations remain silent on the aggression against Iran, but they also successfully ratified UN Security Council Resolution 2817, sponsored by Bahrain and championed by France, condemning “the deplorable armed attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran” against the territorial integrity of the Gulf states. The resolution made no references to the US–Israeli attacks on Iran, and the fact that Islamic Republic’s attacks targeted the American military bases in those countries.

This war was undertaken with a certain imperial arrogance, born out of a profound misreading of the Iranian situation. The US and Israel, like many of their allies, assumed that Iran had neither the capacity to resist the military campaign nor the diplomatic currency to muster political support around the world. They were wrong, and their misperceptions are worth detailing. Continue reading →

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Bad News from Venezuela

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Alen Romero

On July 28, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry summoned Iranian Ambassador Ali Chegini to deliver a formal note of protest against a comment made by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in a video circulating online, in which he said Iran was “not Venezuela” when referring to negotiations with the United States. How are we to interpret these comments on the Left in the United States? The political lessons arising from Venezuela are contentious, but increasingly clear and relevant to anti-imperialists. I will take up my dictum from a previous article as a starting point: in no way are Latinos allowed to determine their own destiny.

The Bolivarian Revolution

Alan McLeod’s Bad News from Venezuela provides a clear framework for interpreting Venezuela news in the mainstream media: “[I] found a pronounced to overwhelming tendency for all newspapers to present the country, its economics, and politics in an extremely negative light, presenting minority opinions on highly contested and controversial issues as undisputed facts . . . and displaying an overwhelming aversion to the Venezuelan government and its project.” What project? To the reader whose starting point is this article, that’s the Bolivarian revolution, led by firebrand President Hugo Chávez, which aimed to take oil revenues from the world’s largest proven oil reserves to fund social benefits like education, food sovereignty, community health care, low-income housing, the return of indigenous land, and land reform in the service of agricultural and rural development. In short, Chávez wanted to use Venezuelan money to benefit Venezuelans, instead of Americans. Continue reading →

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Immigration Protection Campaign on Campus

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Xenia Osterhout and Emma Walters and Jon Hale

On May 1, International Workers’ Day, a crowd of around 200 students, campus workers, and Champaign-Urbana community members marched from the Alma Mater statue on the UIUC campus to the Swanlund Administration Building just up the street. They carried with them a petition with over 950 signatures—mostly from undergraduate and graduate students—calling on the University administration to enact a slate of policies that would provide proactive protection for international and noncitizen students and scholars from illegal and inhumane threats from federal immigration enforcement.

The May Day march marked the high point of an ongoing public pressure campaign by several labor unions representing workers at UIUC, that had begun in late January, 2026, during the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “surge” in Minneapolis and ensuing mass mobilizations against it. A member motion from a steward at a general membership meeting of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO Local 6300, representing most graduate workers at UIUC) proposed that GEO launch a campaign to secure a specific set of protections for international and noncitizen students and workers at UIUC; the proposal passed with the unanimous support of attendees.

Continue reading →

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UCIMC Statement on the Indictment of Representative Ammons

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center

The Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center’s mission is to foster the creation and distribution of media and art that emphasizes underrepresented voices and perspectives, and to promote empowerment and expression through media and arts education. Over the past 26 years, the UCIMC has brought hundreds of thousands of residents to events in downtown Urbana, supported hundreds of emerging artists, and incubated dozens of community-based projects.

Recently, several news sources published stories about a federal indictment of Representative Carol Ammons where the UCIMC was mentioned.

In response, we would like to share with our community the following context.

In 2021, UCIMC received a grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) for a Non-Profit Incubator to strengthen the capacity of local organizations working to alleviate the impacts of poverty and violence in Champaign County. We are grateful to Representative Ammons for her advocacy in addressing this and many local needs.

UCIMC was selected for this grant based on our longstanding experience in operating a fiscal sponsorship program that has supported the development of over 60 organizations. The majority of the Non-Profit Incubator grant funds were pass-through funds to support organizational capacity building for seven emerging nonprofit organizations over 12 months. These participating organizations received training and support through five modules: Statutory Requirements, Nonprofit Leadership, Digital Marketing, Grant Writing, and GATA (Grants Accountability and Transparency Act) Certification. Contracted experts supported each module. The program was successful and all seven organizations completed the program with good standing as formally recognized 501(c)(3) organizations.

As part of the Digital Marketing Module, UCIMC chose to contract with Tatianna Ammons to support incubator participants in creating and improving their websites and digital marketing. Tatianna Ammons was selected due to her experience in the subject area. The selection of Tatianna Ammons was transparent and approved by our board of directors; her selection was in no way influenced by Representative Ammons. UCIMC paid Tatianna Ammons a total of $9,990 to support seven organizations over the course of the grant, and she completed all work to satisfaction. UCIMC submitted her work for reimbursement, no issues were flagged by DCEO, and UCIMC successfully administered the grant. We are grateful to Tatianna for her support in the success of the program.

As the story unfolds, the UCIMC encourages our community to remember that the US Constitution guarantees due process with the presumption of innocence. UCIMC is a non-partisan community-based organization that supports human rights for all residents.

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September Issue Back Cover

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Public i

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Summer Issue Front Cover

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Public i

SOLIDARITY WITH CUBA!

“Carlota y Fermina,” original artwork by Lili Bernard. Carlota and Fermina were two enslaved Yoruba women who led a slave rebellion in 1843 Matanzas, Cuba. Used with permission of the artist

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Cuba Si, Bloqueo No

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Bryan Maxwell

The crisis of Trump’s second term in the White House is increasing the suffering of communities at home and abroad. In few places is this crisis felt more severely than for those living in Cuba. The people of Cuba are enduring food shortages, lack of medicine, and power grid blackouts, all driven by US sanctions that the Trump regime has made more cruel.

The current US sanctions are some of the worst Cuba has seen, largely due to the cutoff of oil shipped from Venezuela. Venezuela was one of the last countries willing to ignore US sanctions on Cuba, and this vital flow of fuel ended after the illegal kidnapping of Maduro by the US government. The current sanctions are especially harsh, but are only an escalation of the economic warfare Cuba has endured for more than 60 years. Continue reading →

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The Zionist Lobby and Repealing Illinois’s Anti-Boycott Law, HB2723/SB2462

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Dua Aldasouqi

President Harry Truman was the first world leader to recognize the theft of the Palestinian lands of 1948 as Israel; he did so eleven minutes after its creation. When discussing the topic, he’s quoted to have said, “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents,” and referred to the Zionist pressure as “unwarranted interference.”

The Zionist lobby in America has been alive and well since before the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe that led to the violent displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians—half the population at that time—and the massacre of more than 15,000 in the time leading up to the creation of Israel and shortly after. The largest Zionist lobbies in America today are Christians United for Israel, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. There are many other prominent and almost as large organizations, like J Street, Zionist Organization of America, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism, and Republican Jewish Coalition.

We see the lobby’s effect in how Palestinians specifically and Muslims more broadly are dehumanized in the US, how misinformed Americans are on Palestine, and how much of our tax dollars are used to fund the Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestine.

Today, though, we are at a point of no return. Continue reading →

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Data Centers in Champaign County: A Conversation with UIUC Computer Science Students

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Amy Young

A data center in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Photo by Geoffrey Moffett, used under free Unsplash license

What do computer scientists think about data centers coming to Champaign County?

I recently had coffee with three computer science (CS) students at the University of Illinois. I was intrigued that they are being expertly trained in CS, while having a critical stance about the proposed data centers in Champaign and nearby counties in Illinois.

Bhavana Bheem and Andrea Watkins are graduate students. Samuel Gerstein is graduating this month with a BS in CS.

In my view, these three students are quite atypical, because Bhavana, Samuel, and Andrea are intentionally informed about the impacts of data centers: water use, pollution, and massive amounts of waste heat. They also talk publicly about the harms of AI in education and in daily life. Continue reading →

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Can the Hungarian Regime Change Show Us the Way?

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Zsuzsa Gille and Richard Esbenshade

Young Hungarians on election night, April 12, across the Danube River from the Parliament in Budapest, anticipating Tisza’s victory. Photo by Péter Ungár, used with permission

The May 9 transition of power to new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party after their landslide April 12 election victory has many who believe in the rule of law thrilled with the potential development of a model for a democratic transformation—one that could serve as a model here, and across the world. US leftists and progressives might be skeptical of the former member of the right-wing Fidesz Party (see Richard’s article on the election campaign in the April Public i) who sent Trump buddy Viktor Orbán packing after 16 uninterrupted years in power. But there is much hope to be gained in examining his initial steps toward dismantling an entrenched “illiberal” autocratic system.

Despite Fidesz’s heavy use of the full toolkit of underhanded measures afforded to it by entrenched authoritarian rule—threats and scare tactics, Russian-facilitated AI manipulation, media restriction, electoral tampering, targeted economic enticements, and the like—Tisza won 141 of the 199 seats in Hungary’s parliamentary system, more than enough for a two-thirds supermajority that allows it to push through constitutional changes to undo the damage done to the rule of law, civil society, human rights, all of the country’s basic institutions, and international relations. Turnout was a record 80 percent, with a massive mobilization of younger voters, some two-thirds of whom voted for Tisza. Tisza got over 55 percent of the vote overall, to less than 40 percent for Fidesz. Continue reading →

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Gaza Denialism and the Wider War

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Janice Jayes

In the early months of the war on Gaza US foreign policy paid less attention to the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians than the possibility that the war might spread into a regional conflagration. The US administrations (first Biden’s, then Trump’s) spent more time silencing condemnation of Israeli actions by bullying universities and international organizations, bribing foreign governments with sweet trade and military deals, and arresting critics at home than it did addressing its role in enabling the Israeli violence. This passed for “statecraft” and was celebrated in Washington as successful containment of the crisis.

This is the latest chapter in the hallucinatory worldscape the US has built for itself, where US aggression is reframed as defense, atrocities are dismissed as exceptions, and where US proxies, assassinations, and ethnic cleansings are never acknowledged. Maintaining the accompanying fiction that Gaza was successfully managed requires not only denial of the ongoing genocide but also of the regional destabilization unfolding. Gaza is not the cause, however, but one battlefield of the “wider war” that has been here for decades and now spills across new geographical, technical, and cultural fronts with dangerous new norms for all. Continue reading →

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Epstein’s Global Role

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Paul Mueth

If someone updated Israel Shahak’s seminal 1982 book Israel’s Global Role: Weapons for Repression, they would no doubt have to add an extra chapter for Jeffrey Epstein’s activities. Or perhaps an entire extra volume would be needed.

With that as a caveat, I’ll survey some aspects of the nefarious dealings of Epstein and his cohort. This will include the Iran-Contra episode; a little about marketing Israeli surveillance technology to variety of countries, particularly in West Africa; and his money laundering and illicit money transfers, which go beyond the disgusting human trafficking that is commented on by the corporate press. Continue reading →

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Latrelle Bright, Changing the World through Theater

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Janice Jayes

Scene from a performance of Quantum Voyages, which premiered in 2018 and was reprised in 2025

Latrelle Bright came to UIUC in 2009 as assistant program coordinator for Inner Voices Social Issues Theatre. Over the following years she worked to bring underrepresented voices and perspectives before area audiences while directing shows at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, the Station Theatre, and Parkland College. Bright also pursued innovative partnerships, such as The Water Project (2017), with the Prairie Rivers Network; and Quantum Voyages (2018), with Smitha Vishveshwara and the University of Illinois Physics Department. In 2020 Bright became a teaching professor in the UIUC theatre department. Along with Vishveshwara and Rebecca Wilftong from Physics, and Stephen Taylor from Music, she co-founded a campus-wide,  interdisciplinary community,  CASCaDe—Collective for Art-Science, Creativity and Discovery, etc.

Bright’s creativity was interrupted by a diagnosis of breast cancer, and she passed away September 21, 2025. She is survived by her husband, Rex Bennett; her mother, Anita Johnson; her stepchildren, Maxwell and Yekaterina; and her artistic legacy in the community and among her students. Below are remembrances from colleagues and co-creators. Continue reading →

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Summer Issue Back Cover

Posted on 06/28/2026 by Public i

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