JONAH RASKIN / BOOK REVIEW / Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

Posted on February 26, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground. By Zayd Ayers Dohrn; W. W.Norton & Company, 2026

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 26, 2026

On July 26, 1982,  the 23rd anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, a young mother wrote to her young son to tell him, “When you meet new people, grown ups, you must say hello and look at them.” She added — as though to say it wasn’t only a matter of good manners — “it is a way of respecting people and being part of the human community.” That letter might not seem unusual. My own mother expressed the same sentiments to me when I was a boy. But the July 26th letter was unusual. 

It was written by Bernardine Dohrn who was behind bars, having been held in contempt of court for failing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating radicals. Bernardine wrote the letter to Zayd, the older of her two sons, who was named after Zayd Shakur, the Minister of Information for the Bronx Black Panther Party, shot and killed in 1973 by New Jersey cops.  

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was then four years and already a veteran of the Weather Underground, the clandestine organization whose members mostly evaded capture by the FBI for a decade and who planted and set off bombs in the US Capitol, The Pentagon, the headquarters of ITT and police stations from coast to coast. 

In case you don’t remember or perhaps never knew, Zayd’s parents had been charismatic stars of Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) who helped to forge Revolutionary Youth Movement  (RYM) I, which morphed into Weatherman and then into the Weather Underground. 

In his new profoundly personal and yet intensely political memoir, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, Zayd offers a history of what’s been called the “Long Sixties,” the era of sex, drugs, rock and rebellion that began in 1955 and that came to an end in 1975. 

At the same time, Zayd presents a narrative about his own biological family, their friends and allies and that includes a complex portrait of his parents, Bernardine and Bill, who aimed to make a revolution in “Babylon,” as the Panthers called the U.S. and also to live life to the fullest, and squeeze  joy from every moment. 

The title for Zayd’s book, which might well be called explosive, comes from a song by the Jefferson Airplane, the rock band that Bill befriended and that their lyricist Paul Kanter reciprocated with songs like “Diana,” an anthem for weatherwoman Diana Oughton who died in a bomb blast in an Manhattan apartment building in March 1970 that also ended the lives of Teddy Gold and Terry Robbins. The full title for the song includes the words, “Hideous” and “obscenity,” which don’t exactly fit Weatherman or the Weather Underground, though some actions bordered on the obscene and the repulsive.

I don’t accept all of Zayd’s accounts of the underground, especially his account of what was called in code “The Big Top.” I lived in the Weather “safe house” on Amity Street in Brooklyn in 1971. I watched the fugitive who made the explosive devices that went off in the Capitol. 

I saw him connect wires safely. I saw the team get into their red Volvo with the bomb and set off for Washington, D.C. I heard the story of what happened next — the failure of the bomb to go off and the return of the team who added a small booster bomb that triggered the first big bomb. Kathy Boudin was not involved, though Zayd suggests that she was. I won’t name names.                         

When Zayd asked Bernardine about The Big Top, she said,  “I’m not going to tell you who put it there, And I’m not going to tell you who worked on it.” If he had asked me, I’d have explained what I just explained. I also watched a fugitive burn in the fireplace the wrappers for the sticks of dynamite used in the explosion.                    

But I would echo Zayd’s assertion that “the first few years in the underground would wind up being some of the weirdest, wildest, and most fun parts of my parents’ story.” They were the most fun part of my Weather underground years.                                            

Teachers now, as in the past, often urge students to ” write what you know.” Zayd has taken that advice to heart and made it his credo. He probably knows more about the Weather Underground than anyone else alive today. His mother, now 84, was recently diagnosed with dementia and is, as she has said, “on the road to Alzheimers.”

Her memories of her years underground are frayed. Bill’s memory is selective; ditto for most of the members of the organization who have in the interest of survival intentionally erased memories. Some matters are best forgotten.                                             

Zayd lived the underground life as a child and as a boy. He understands its machinations better than anyone I know. Bill explained to him that going underground was a “state of mind.” He added that it’s what exists “on the fringe,” and that there are right wing as well as leftwing undergrounds.                                                   

 Zayd has interviewed everyone who could be interviewed, read almost all of the books and articles on the subject and thought deeply about it for more than a decade. More than 10 years ago, he wrote and produced an 11-part podcast about his parents and their comrades titled Mother Country Radicals, with the subtitle “A Family History of the Weather Underground” produced by Crooked Media.                                                                                                   

That podcast anticipated some of the same material contained in Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, though it’s not as in-depth and doesn’t have what might accurately be called the “soul searching” of the book. There isn’t an action, a gesture or a political statement by Weatherman and the Weather Underground that Zayd doesn’t interrogate. He accepts nothing at face value and always goes behind the scenes.                                                                                 

But if he seems eminently suited to write about mother country radicals he’s also very much an odd man for the job. “I could never quite reconcile my own resistance to a mass movement with my radical upbring,” he writes. “I’ve always prefered solitude to the crowd.” With that attitude, there would be no crowds and no revolutions.

A few pages on, Zayd expresses what might be called heresy in some radical circles: “too many revolutions have led to repressive regimes.” And he offers a quotation from Frederick Nietzsche who said, “Beware when fighting monsters, lest you become a monster.” In these pages, Terry Robbins appears as a young idealist who became a monster.                                                                        

Probably the words that appear more often than any other words in the text are “contradiction” and “contradictions.” Zayd sees them, along with paradoxes and ambivalences, almost everywhere he looks: in himself, in his family and in the revolution itself.                

 The last 100 pages of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young can be rough going. Zayd describes the implosion in the Weather Underground, the rise of an internal ideological sect that denounced Bernardine and Bill, followed by Bernardine’s denunciation of herself that included a confession about her “counterrevolutionary actions.” Her comrade, Kathy Boudin, told her, “If you go above ground you’re a racist.” Ouch. In the fall out, The Ayers- Dohrn family cracked up and was nearly destroyed.                                           

 It’s painful to read how Bernardine’s ideological foes broke her down; painful to read that she agreed to denounce herself and her friends and in writing. In hindsight she observed, “It makes me sick that I wrote that.” Her worst enemy wasn’t Hoover and the FBI but her so-called revolutionary sisters. So Zayd’s book is a cautionary tale about the dangers of movements and ideologies, though it’s also a plug for honorable family ties and legacies.                                          

I knew Zayd before he knew me. That was in the late 1970s before his parents surfaced, and when they visited me in Sonoma County and we went swimming and sunbathing at a neighbor’s pool. When Bill changed Zayd’s diapers I asked him how he liked it. “I love it,” he said. Zayd wasn’t always sure that his father loved him unconditionally.                                                                                           

At times, Bill seemed to love the revolution more than he loved his own flesh and blood. That sounds like my Ukrainian-born socialist grandfather Aaron who, it was said by his own children, would rather take the shirt of his own back and give it to a stranger than clothe my mother and her sister. Ah, yes, contradictions! Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them.                                         

Please please do read Zayd’s exciting, thoughtful book which explores the undergrounds, both Black and white, of the Long Sixties, and that explores the terrible beauty of the revolutionary movement that rose and fell and that will rise again.   
 

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ROXANN WEDEGARTNER / BOOK REVIEW / From the Octagon: People, Places, News, Views by Allen Young.

Posted on February 14, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer

By Roxann Wedegartner / The Rag Blog / February 14, 2026

Royalston, Maine, resident, author, and journalist, Allen Young, is at it again. His latest book, From the Octagon – People, Places, News, Views, is an informative, delightful, easy-read collection of fifty-nine profiles, articles, and opinion pieces from his days as a reporter and columnist at the Athol Daily News, along with his writings for the Rag Blog out of Austin, TX. The Rag Blog is, in its publisher’s words, “… the latest in news and views from the progressive front.” It’s founded and produced by “old friends” of Allen’s from his Underground Press days. I confess that I know a couple of those founders as well. Decades ago, before moving to Franklin County, I was a journalist in Houston, Texas, writing for the Houston Chronicle and friendly with what passed for progressive activists.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve known Allen personally for many years and consider him a friend and colleague. Now that all the confessions are out of the way, let’s get to this latest book.  OK, one more confession. When I first moved to Franklin County, I covered eastern Franklin County towns, school districts, and Orange District Court as a reporter for The Recorder. Many of the people and places in this book are also familiar to me.

The Octagon featured in the title and pictured on the book cover does not refer to the geometric shape we know, but rather to Allen’s handmade octagon-shaped house, located at Butterworth Farm, an intentional community in this remote Worcester County town. Allen’s office, or writing lair, is on the top floor of the house, where most of his writing takes place. The stories are compiled into four sections, starting with People and ending with Views. Again, not the beautiful views that this part of Massachusetts is known for, but rather Allen’s opinions on everything from the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant to Drag Queens and the proper siting of solar arrays to Ethel Rosenberg, an American woman who, along with her husband Julius, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and executed by the United States government in 1953. Allen’s parents were also active in the American and International Communist movement. Coincidentally, as a college student in New York City, he visited family friends who lived in an apartment building across the hall from an apartment where the couple who adopted the Rosenbergs’ two boys, now Robert and Michael Meeropol, lived.

The bulk of the book is devoted to his profiles of eastern Franklin County and North Quabbin residents, each with their own great story.  The People section is my favorite part of From the Octagon, People, Places, News, Views. I think of it as a book of life lessons taught by everyday people living among us.  Some of the captivating stories include At Ninety-four Jerry Chaisson is Still Drumming, which tells of a nonagenarian drummer, Jerry Chaisson, and his much younger millennial friend and musician, Ethan Stone. Together, they performed monthly music sessions at the senior center where Jerry lived with his wife, Jerry on drums, and Ethan, a recording artist, playing songs from days gone by. Another story, Athol’s Last Iceman Shares Some Memories, features Ronald Legrande, whose family once operated the Athol Ice Company, which harvested large cakes of ice from local ponds and delivered smaller cakes to homes for “ice boxes,” which were early refrigerators cooled by placing the ice in a compartment below the food shelves. Ron and other local teenagers often helped with the ice harvest. As electric refrigerators became standard, these ice companies closed.

Additional familiar names may resonate with residents, such as Michael Humphries from Warwick and Northfield—a furniture designer and cabinet maker known for using locally sourced, unique wood in his creations; Gene Bishop and Herman Goldfarb are remembered as doctors and peace activists in Remembering Gene Bishop and Herman Goldfarb, Two Doctors and Activists for Peace; Larry Buell, profiled in At Seventy, Petersham’s Larry Buell Maintains His Environmental Vision; Abbey Plotkin, honored in Abbey Plotkin: Her Good Heart Gave Out; and two artists: Susan Marshall of Orange and Sonja Vaccari of Royalston, featured in Is a Muralist a Contortionist? An Acrobat? Read About It Here.

In the Places section, readers are presented with several accounts detailing Allen’s travel experiences. For example, A Visit to Provincetown provides insights into his journey by fast ferry with his sister, offering both a personal perspective and a concise history of Provincetown’s transformation from a predominantly Portuguese fishing community with a substantial maritime industry into a significant Massachusetts tourist destination inclusive of gay men, lesbians, and heterosexual visitors alike. Additionally, Monkeys, Birds, Beaches, People, and Planes: A Trip to Costa Rica narrates his activities as a 69-year-old traveler among younger companions in their twenties and thirties, engaging in river rafting, wilderness camping, and zip-lining.

Another noteworthy entry is Small Monuments Found in Many Places, which examines the origins of various “unexpected plaques and structures throughout the Quabbin region.” This article caters to readers interested in uncovering the histories behind local historical markers. Specific examples include Orange’s Peace Statue in Memorial Park; the plaque in Hardwick identifying the Hardwick Fair as the oldest in the United States; the Athol History Trail, which features signs commemorating significant past events such as Indian-Settler conflicts, the Sentinel Elm, and the Underground Railway; and Barre, MA’s prominent Civil War Monument.

In News, there is A Peek into the Massachusetts Legalized Cannabis Business, about the early days of the legalized cannabis business in the North Quabbin, juxtaposed with A Deadly Disease Hits the North Quabbin: Heroin Addiction, about two physicians, Ruth Potee, MD and her husband Stephen Martin, MD who have committed to “combatting a deadly disease that destroys people’s lives”. It profiles their work in their capacity as local physicians in the North Quabbin and Franklin County, treating heroin addicted patients and fighting the opioid epidemic. Workers Credit Union’s Rich History Linked to Immigrants recounts the history of this credit union founded in Fitchburg, with a branch in Athol, and its ties to North Quabbin’s Finnish Community. It contains a surprising account of its beginnings as a radical financial institution. Rarely are the parts of a published book, such as Acknowledgements orAbout the Author, interesting to readers. However, I would also encourage you to read these sections.I will end this book review where it began, with the author’s Dedication, his idea of who the ideal reader would be, which states: “for people everywhere striving for community, social justice, peace, democracy, and a healthy planet Earth.”  Enjoy!

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DAVE ZIRIN / CULTURE / Bad Bunny Steals the Show

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer

Bad Bunny in Los Angeles, California, on October 11, 2019. Photo by Glenn Francis of www.PacificProDigital.com

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / February 10, 2026

Cross-posted with permission from Edge of Sports.

The past year in Stephen Miller’s America has been unbearably bleak. When masked thugs with “blanket immunity” kidnap five year olds and murder nurses, it tends to darken the national mood. But international mega-star Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (a.k.a Bad Bunny) took the stage during the Super Bowl halftime show and gave the best possible response to Miller’s dystopic dreams: a burst of unbridled joy and a dizzying celebration of love, labor, and the power of living our everyday lives despite hardships, all performed in a lyrical language that Miller, in every possible way, lacks the capacity to understand. 

People should view Bad Bunny’s singular performance as the second part of a political two-step aimed at the white-nativist heart of this racist regime. Part one was a week ago, when, after winning the Grammy for album of the year, Bad Bunny began his acceptance speech by saying, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say: ICE out,” to rapturous cheers. It was an ingenious first step, teeing up the halftime show as a future instrument for broadcasting the anti-ICE fervor hitting red and blue states alike. 

Then came step two: bringing the technicolor beauty of Puerto Rican culture to the Super Bowl stage. In a time of monsters, Bad Bunny was posing an alternative world: a place where laborers are seen and celebrated, where hurricanes and their victims aren’t forgotten, and where community—not atomization—fuels society. In the swirl of his irrepressible music, sung only in Spanish, and an elaborate set design that conjured the Caribbean in rich and playful detail, Bad Bunny refused to step into our dismal world. Instead, he brought us into his. 

I saw the game in a bar, where the people watching around me initially seemed more interested in the halftime show because of the controversy around Bad Bunny’s selection as a performer—the prospect of his Spanish-only music had predictably enraged right-wingers and prompted them to launch a counter halftime show, which spectacularly failed. In 30 seconds, though, many were standing and dancing, everyone locked into every move on the stage. When Ricky Martin came out as a surprise guest, you could feel the room swoon. At the end, everyone rose in an actual ovation.

The performance was so dense with meaning that, during the fourth quarter, people around me turned to discussing what part of the show they connected with the most—and not only because that was more fun than debating whether the Patriots were going to punt again. 

For me, the most powerful moment was when Bad Bunny name checked, one after the other, every country in the Americas: a bold, delightfully unsubtle statement against white ethnocentrism and USA puffery. When Bad Bunny said during his Grammy speech,“We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans,” the “we are Americans” part had rankled some in immigrant rights circles because it seemed to differentiate the foreign-born. Bad Bunny’s rapid-fire listing — which pointedly did not ignore Cuba or Venezuela — could be seen as a response to that, telling Trump’s cruel regime that “America” is more than just the United States, it’s a region that goes from the top of Canada to the southern tip of Chile. The United States is a part of a community of nations — though it hasn’t been acting like it, instead targeting fishing boats of other members of this community and blasting them out of the sky like some fascist Death Star.

Bad Bunny’s performance will launch a thousand term papers intent on decoding every last moment, including when he gave a Grammy to a young child who had been watching from a staged living room seemingly set in Puerto Rico. Such a scene was particularly resonant knowing that, earlier in January, a five-year-old boy from Minnesota named Liam Ramos had been abducted from his school by ICE and sent to a Texas detention center. Immediately after the show, people began debating online whether or not the child on stage was Ramos himself. He wasn’t, but it speaks to how deftly Bad Bunny pulled off his two-step that masses of people thought so.  

In response, of course, Trump had a racist temper tantrum. Perhaps he was offended by a billboard in the background—in English, for his benefit—that read, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” For this cowardly regime, it’s now a political act just to acknowledge the cultural power of Puerto Rico, to speak a beautiful language, to sing, and to dance, and to live in peace. 

During this show of shows, it was difficult to not think about a more serious moment at a recent Bad Bunny concert in Chile. There, the artist led the crowd in a song by legendary Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, who was something like the Bob Dylan of Chile, and whose songs of protest were known around the world. Shortly after the 1973 coup, Augusto Pinochet’s thugs mutilated his guitar-playing hands before the dictator had him  publicly executed. Perhaps Jara’s most famous song was “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz.” Bad Bunny had the entire crowd singing this 60-year-old song. For those who don’t know what it means, the title translates to “The Right to Live in Peace.”

One of Pinochet’s early orders was to paint over the vibrant, revolutionary murals of Chile, covering them in grey. Bad Bunny’s performance was an act of protest against such evil. It was the revenge of the muralistas. And not a moment too soon. 

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bad-bunny-super-bowl-half-time

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MARIANN GARNER-WIZARD / REMEMBRANCE / Robert “Bob” Pardun, beloved prairie radical

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Alice Embree

By Mariann Garner-Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 27, 2026

Published 2001 by Shire Press

Robert Pardun was born June 30, 1941 and passed away January 16, 2026 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease.  The following is an excerpt from the cover of Robert Pardun’s book, Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties.

Robert Pardun was born in Kansas and raised on the edge of the prairie in Pueblo, Colorado. As a graduate student, he was a founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter at the University of Texas in 1964, became a regional SDS organizer, and then an SDS national officer in 1967-1968. This put him in the SDS national office at the height of the antiwar movement. After the collapse of SDS, he spent 1971-1976 on a commune in the Ozarks. Robert has been a math instructor, metal worker, and served as associate producer of the SDS documentary, Rebels with a Cause. [It is also the history of the vibrant and innovative SDS chapter at the University of Texas, one of the Prairie Power strongholds, where the cultural and political rebellion were united]…

The following was written by his long-time friend and colleague in Austin SDS and other ventures, Mariann Garner-Wizard, who now lives in Belize.

I met Bob in spring of 1965, when I first started meeting people in the UT Austin chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Bob was an SDS campus organizer and I was a freshman newbie.

At Easter there was a peace vigil outside then-President Lyndon B Johnson’s ranch. I didn’t go; I went home to see my family. Easter morning, flipping through the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, there was a picture of Bob, who I’d still barely met, sitting on the ground chatting with some other students. Bob was a nice-looking man, slim, with short pale hair and a nice, neat moustache. I pointed him out excitedly to my mom, “Look, Ma, I know this guy. He’s really smart and nice.” My mother, who rarely judged anyone, much less from a newspaper photo, adjusted her glasses and raised her eyebrows and studied the image. “Hmph!” she finally said. “He looks like a Communist to me!”

Needless to say I was totally indignant!

Back in Austin in the fall, after I’d started living with George Vizard, we visited Bob and Judy’s little bungalow in the back yard of a small house on King Street. I think Judy was at work when we got there but came in later. She was and is a tiny beauty, with great strength at her core.

What struck me most about Pardun’s house, however, was not the coffee, or the intelligent conversation that I tried to just take in, or how neat and clean and efficient-looking it was for the tiny space they shared; it was the books! Books by the dozens, big hardbound books to flimsy booklets, all arranged on cinder-block-and-board shelves against the walls, with more radical and socialist and anarchist literature than I knew existed, including the complete works of V.I. Lenin. Yes, Mama was right; Bob was the first conscious natural-born communist I ever knew. 

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ALICE EMBREE / REMEMBRANCE / Glenn Scott inducted into Texas Labor Hall of Fame

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer


By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / January 27, 2026

[Cross posted from Alice Embree’s Substack]

On January 24, 2026, Glenn Scott from Austin was inducted into the Texas AFL-CIO Labor Hall of Fame.  It was icy cold outside, but warm hearts honored a woman who ran a marathon in her life as a labor organizer.  I was asked by Glenn’s partner to make some remarks at the event.  I’m sharing them because Glenn embodied the spirit we need during these dark times – the sustained effort, pacing, and endurance of a marathon runner.

Glenn Scott was an organizer. She was born in Fort Worth in 1948. Her father died when she was nine. Her mom, Eula Mae, raised Glenn and her brother with Social Security as the primary source of income. She attended Texas Tech where she got a degree in Latin American Studies and met her partner for life, Richard Croxdale. After a stint teaching school in Fort Worth, she and Richard moved to Austin. I met them fifty years ago.

Determined to get information about women’s history into Texas schools, Glenn founded People’s History in Texas in 1975. She reached out to Latane Lambert who had a long labor history. Latane became her mentor and helped Glenn contact women who were involved in the historic strikes of pecan shellers and garment workers in the 30s and 40s. People’s History in Texas gathered oral histories and produced a documentary about them.

That work inspired Glenn’s long career in labor organizing – something she could do well in both English and Spanish.

She started in 1982 organizing for AFSCME. Then, with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, she organized hat and clothing workers and boot makers all over Texas. It began her trademark love for union-made hats and boots.

After working with the Texas AFL-CIO Workforce Transition Project, Glenn started organizing with the American Federation of Teachers in 1996. Louis Malfaro remembers standing with Glenn at a union table outside a school. No one was coming to the table. Glenn went marching into the school and returned with a long line of teachers and staff. She was involved with the merger of AFT and the National Education Association that formed Education Austin. In 2007, AFT National drafted Glenn as rep, sending her to organize in special hot spots all over the country.

In 2011 she began working with the National Nurses United in El Paso. When the Ebola crisis came to a Dallas hospital in 2012, she saw the doctors on the news in Haz Mat suits and the nurses in uniforms that didn’t protect them. She immediately organized a press conference to make sure nurses received the protective gear they needed.

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MICHAEL MEEROPOL / ECONOMICS / Are there signs of serious problems in the economy?

Posted on January 17, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer
Paul Krugman / Wikimedia Commons.

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2026

The following is a version of a commentary delivered over WAMC-FM by Michael Meeropol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Western New England University on January 9, 2026. This version is expanded and revised for The Rag Blog as of January 17, 2026. Meeropol, Rag Blog host Thorne Dreyer and co-host Alice Embree will discuss the commentary on the air on KOOP 91.7-FM and streamed on KOOP.org Friday, Jan. 23, from 2-3 p.m.

So which is it? Is the U.S. economy doing extremely well and we are about to have a “great” year in 2026? Or are there signs of serious problems in the economy, especially for middle – class and working-class people who are not in the top ten, five or one percent of the population in terms of income and wealth?

Well, it just so happens that the substack economist, Paul Krugman, came out a few days ago with a summary of the year with a full analysis of what Trump’s economics have meant to the U.S. economy. This has given me much more important data to share than I had when I recorded this commentary and submitted a version to the WAMC-FM website. Thus, we can actually say this is exclusive to The Rag Blog.

For the full Krugman presentation, one needs a subscription but here is the link:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/one-year-of-trumponomics

First, Krugman gives us the year-end jobs report which either was very weak or completely flat [meaning no job creation for the whole year!], depending on what kind of revisions there are to the data over the next few months. If it wasn’t flat, it was the weakest job growth in over a decade except for the year of the pandemic when there was a terrible loss of jobs.

Krugman then goes on to explain two things — why has unemployment risen so little AND why does it “feel” like the economy is in such bad shape? This probably has to do with the fact that there seems to be what Politico calls a “frozen” labor market: In this situation there are no mass layoffs and jumps in unemployment. Instead, businesses have cut back on hiring which means new entrants into the labor force (recent college graduates for example) as well as people looking to change jobs are facing few job opportunities.

[For details see “The US labor market ground to a halt in 2025. The risk in 2026 is that it “cracks.” It was a tough year to be looking for work — and the job market is not expected get much better,” available at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-us-labor-market-ground-to-a-halt-in-2025-the-risk-in-2026-is-that-it-cracks-140026614.html]

First of all, the reason measured unemployment hasn’t jumped is because all the deportations have reduced the number of people actively looking for work. Meanwhile, those who are looking for work are having a hard time finding jobs and the result is a serious decline in consumer confidence. Krugman’s evidence of this is the fact that long-term unemployment — the number of people who have been unemployed for 15 weeks or more — has risen much more than total unemployment.  And the public understands this. “The Conference Board, which conducts a monthly survey of consumers, reports a measure called the “labor market differential” — the difference between the number of people saying that jobs are “plentiful” and those saying jobs are “hard to get.” While this measure turned upwards during the last quarter of 2024, it has turned sharply downward since then.” [Krugman]

And overall Consumer Confidence has declined for most of 2025: It reached a low point in early 2025, rose a bit through July, and has been falling ever since.

Now let’s check out the stock market. So far this year, the main index (the S and P 500) has produced a 16% rate of return. That means that if you owned $1 million worth of stock on January 1 of this year, you would have an extra $160,000 of wealth after December 31. Though lots of people own some stock (I owned some in my retirement account for most of my working life) very few people own enough stock for the proceeds to be a significant part of their income: 10% of Americans own 93% of all stocks, while the bottom half owns only about 1-2%. 

So, no matter how you slice it, claiming that a booming stock market means we are “all” doing well is garbage.

Krugman goes further and notes that the improvement in the stock market is based on about seven individual firms that are heavily invested in developing artificial intelligence — which may or may not turn out to be a dangerous bubble rather than evidence of real successful company growth.

In fact, the run-up in the stock market is part of what is being called a “K – shaped” economy. The top part of the letter “K” represents the tremendous successes of the billionaires and others who are heavily invested in the stock market (that top ten percent). The lower part represents the difficulty that the middle class and working class has keeping their heads above water. So, if you are claiming “the economy” is doing great because you are focused on the top ten percent, you are right. To understand what is happening for the rest of us, we need much more information about many different trends.

[For details on stock ownership see: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-93-033623827.html]

Or consider this set of facts: On Christmas Eve, MSNBC’s Ron Asana pointed out that the top 20% of the households account for 63% of consumption spending; the bottom 80% for 37%. 

What about national statistics — Gross Domestic Product, Investment, Incomes of full-time workers? The growth rate in GDP was lower in 2025 than in 2024. Now it is true in moments of candor members of the Trump Administration refrain from asserting the blatant falsehood that the economy is the “hottest” it’s ever been, etc. etc. Some even spent most of 2025 assuring us that 2026 will be a “boom” year — which of course it might be — As Yogi Berra once said — “It’s difficult to make predictions, especiallyabout the future!”

But so far, there is no indication that the U.S. economy as a whole is booming. In the following diagram it is clear that the U.S. economy WAS “booming” — but that was 2024 when Joe Biden was president. In 2025, there has been a slowdown which is not surprising — the uncertainties created by Trump’s tariffs, the mass deportations which in some industries is reducing the labor force, the meat-axe approach to cutting government activities all have slowed growth. No recession — but a definite slowdown in growth

For the actual numbers in visual form, see

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual

The behavior of investment during 2025 doesn’t give us any clues. It went up in the first quarter of 2025 only to fall in the next two quarters. In other words, Trump’s rhetoric about how rotten the economy was in 2024 is false and his rhetoric that 2025 was the “hottest” economy is also false.

[The following data is presented by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — abbreviated FRED. Folks can click on the link and then restrict the data to the last five years to see the trend. Investment did not “boom” in 2025.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A006RE1Q156NBEA]

But to move from “the economy” to the people living in it, I consider the real income of full-time workers a very important measure of well-being. (“Real” income takes the actually numbers in your paycheck and relates them to the ability of that paycheck to actually buy goods and services. “Median” is the best way to judge the wage of the TYPICAL worker. If you take an average, it can be tilted because of the very small number of super-rich individuals. If Bill Gates walked into a room of 99 people all making $50,000 a year, the “average” income would suddenly shoot up but $50,000 would still be the typical income. The numbers that follow relate to a base year which is why they seem rather low — the important thing is not the absolute number but whether we can see any trend.)

The weekly real median wage averaged $370 for 2024 (reaching a high point of $375 at the end of the year.) In the first quarter of 2025 it fell back to $373 and inched upwards to $376 in the second and third quarters — virtually no growth at all. For details see:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm

What’s going on?

First, the high-tech sector has invested heavily in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. Many businesses believe that increased use of AI will permit the replacement of many workers.

We can actually hear that happening when we call doctors’ offices and a voice that identifies itself as a “virtual assistant” (clearly an AI system) asks how “she” can direct your call. A human being used to be the person who answered that phone call and then directed the call — now It’s a machine. With the “promise” of AI, many businesses are reluctant to increase their labor force when they might not need that many people in the not-so-distant future.

The following is from the New York Times from last October:

In one particular area that was supposed to improve as President Trump’s tariffs took hold, there is nothing good to report. If you are a voter who wanted more factory jobs, you must be disappointed. If you promised the voters that there would be many more factory positions, you failed. This year [2025] factory jobs are down by 58,000. Nothing new. In Trump’s first term they fell by about 200,000 between January of 2017 and January of 2021. Seems like there is a lesson in here somewhere.

And look at the long-term trends. Although the non-farm labor force has grown by more than 20,000,000 since January of 2014, the total number of jobs in the manufacturing sector has not moved much. In 143 months beginning in January of 2014, total jobs in the factory sector have always been between 12,000,000and 13,000,000 except for five months in the spring and summer of 2020 when they fell below 12,000,000 for a while. Overall, no long-term increases even though the economy is much bigger today. 

“Amazon Plans to Replace More Than a Half Million Jobs with Robots.”

(Karen Weise, New York Times, October 21, 2025)

[For more details see https://www.dollarsandsense.org/jobs-factories-and-inequalities/?ref=dollarsandsense-newsletter]

Thus, Trump’s tariffs have not created a surge in manufacturing jobs. Instead,they have created a great deal of uncertainty within the business sector. So far, American importers have been able to “eat” the tariffs because they built up significant inventories in anticipation that these tariffs will increase their costs. However, it is unlikely that they will be able to sustain this into 2026 and therefore, the tariffs will probably start to push prices up.

On top of all this, there is a very important intangible. As I mentioned above, the uncertainties created by those Trump tariffs and the failure of the Trump Administration to knock inflation down dramatically has dealt a blow to consumer confidence — and this is despite the fact that the average rate of inflation for 2025 has fallen from 2.9 percent in 2024 to 2.7 percent.

In other words, in answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this broadcast, there remains great uncertainty. The economy could start chugging along – it could remain in a kind of stasis with slow growth and slowly rising unemployment as inflation remains the same or slows further — or it could experience a surge in prices and an increase in unemployment.

Based on the analysis by Krugman of the 2025 statistics, I think the chance of a strong 2026 is very slim. In my oral presentation a few weeks ago I was more equivocal than I am now. I think the best the economy can hope for would be to muddle along but it might be much worse. The most important take-away from the experience of 2025 is that the economy has not done what Trump predicted and it is not doing what he claims it is. In other words, public opinion that believes the economy is in lousy shape is probably correct.

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CARL DAVIDSON / POLITICS / SUMMING UP THE YEAR 2025

Posted on January 16, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer

A turning point for Trump and the Left

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / January 16, 2026

Carl Davidson is the editor of Carl’s Left Links Newsletter, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers. Carl is a former leader of the American New Left and a past Vice President and National Secretary of SDS (the Students for a Democratic Society). Carl was a guest on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer and Alice Embree on Jan. 16, 2026, discussing this article and its implications.

We opened the year 2025 with a stark assessment of the political terrain. Trump and the far-right clique around him were taking the Oval Office and key cabinet positions. We made a point, correctly, of defining this clique as fascist, but reminded everyone that taking high offices was not the same as consolidating fascist rule across all 50 states and 100 major cities.

We went further than simply using “fascism” as a nasty label. Our current fascism was not a carbon copy of Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. It was something more important, a “fascism with American characteristics.” We followed that up with a summary of the counter-revolution of 1876, the Jim Crow years of lynching and terror in the South and Southwest, the hidden stories of plots to overthrow FDR, the sizable pro-Nazi “America First” campaign, and postwar McCarthyism. We described how a Second Reconstruction reversed much of that, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, followed up with a strong antiwar movement and Black Power election campaigns. Then the 1970s ended with violent repression, and the careful organization of the ‘New Right’ that led, step-by-step, to Trump’s MAGA bloc.

In brief, we took the first step in Sun Tzu’s Art of War: Know your enemy. The next step was to know ourselves. Again, we had a brief summary, we were a small left represented by AOC’s Justice Democrats, but operating within a wider anti-MAGA progressive trend. We also pointed out that progressives were still a large minority — but so was Trump’s MAGA bloc. In addition to the White House, Trump held the Supreme Court and both Houses of Congress, but with very thin margins.

We thus had a good assessment of the terrain. But the future is always open and full of surprises. Trump immediately had Elon Musk take center stage, with his DOGE unit slashing away at critical government programs. But on Feb. 5, 2025, Team Trump (and the rest of us, to be frank) faced a big surprise, the first “50501” elemental rising of anti-Trump millions emerged across the country. “50501” initially meant fifty anti-MAGA protest actions at fifty state capitols on one day. It turned out much larger than anyone had expected, including those who did much of the local organizing, Indivisible, Working Families Party, and Bernie’s “Our Revolution” people.

The second 50501 elemental rising arrived in June as “No Kings Day.” It drew even more millions and knocked the wind out of Trump’s ridiculous military parade for himself in D.C., which was sparsely attended. In this No Kings round, local progressive Democrats and some of the socialist left joined together to build turnout and shape sets of demands.

Trump was unfazed. At the beginning of July, Trump and his anti-immigrant henchman Stephen Miller announced a major upgrade of ICE, from a relatively small arm of the Department of Homeland Security with a $9 billion budget, to a paramilitary force with a $170 billion budget, larger than most standing armies in the developed world. Trump’s “Brown Shirts” proved to be an accurate label for the new ICE project.

A national opposition voice emerged within two weeks, the “Good Trouble” protests set for July 18 in memory of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) on his birthday. Mass rallies took place in 1200 cities, but with subdued media coverage. ICE ran rampant for months, and Trump tried to get the National Guard and the U.S. Army into the fray as well. But the second “No Kings Day” arrived on Oct 18, with even more millions turning up everywhere, aiming for a “Blue Wave” in whatever elections are taking place in November. Thus, Election Day saw the incredible victories of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson as mayor of Seattle, both of them democratic socialists, as well as other regular Dems taking down MAGA people elsewhere.

We can thus fairly say that 2025 was a turning point year. Trump still has his MAGA bloc of about one-third of the electorate, but the luster has worn off. Even his MAGA base is troubled by what they are seeing with MAGA dragging teachers out of schools and seizing workers at Home Depots. They were expecting roundups of “the worst of the worst,” but saw Latino neighbors and friends in hiding or being mistreated. Reality didn’t match the political advertisements. Mass resistance in a wide common front, moreover, forced the military out of Los Angeles and has held them at bay elsewhere.

Trump now has power but not respect. Once a commanding force in both the Republican Party and the broader arena of American life, Trump’s grip loosened amid mounting legal challenges, rising scandals around the Epstein files, waning support from party leaders, and a shift in the electorate’s priorities. Rather than guiding the national conversation, Trump’s voice was increasingly sidelined. This has opened space for new debates and a realignment of party power. It also signals exhaustion from MAGA’s polarizations and spectacles.

Amidst this power shift, the intensification of ICE raids in 2025 cast a long shadow over communities nationwide. With stories of abrupt detainments and families torn apart, the raids underscored the enduring complexities of America’s immigration debate. Add on the debacle in Gaza and threats of war in Venezuela, and these actions reignited public discourse on civil rights and government accountability, galvanizing both criticism and calls for reform.

The unexpected emergence of the No Kings Risings, alongside the leadership of Mamdani, AOC, Bernie and other Justice Democrats, offers us a beacon for future progress in 2026. Mass action campaigns captured the imagination of a new generation seeking alternatives to entrenched power structures of either party. Mamdani’s articulate vision and DSA’s organizing prowess helped transform frustration into constructive activism, suggesting that real and lasting change is possible. Let’s work on building the organizational infrastructure for a Third Reconstruction, and let’s hope the new year holds new pleasant surprises to help us on our way.

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MICHAEL MEEROPOL / ECONOMICS / Inflation, unemployment, and President Trump’s speech

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Thorne Dreyer

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / January 1, 2026

The following is an expanded version of a commentary delivered over WAMC-FM on , by Michael Meeropol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. It has been edited for The Rag Blog. Meeropol will be featured on Thorne Dreyer’s Rag Radio program on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed at KOOP.org, Friday, January 23, at 2 p.m. to discuss this article and larger issues it raises. They will be joined by Rag Blog associate editor Alice Embree.

Inflation and unemployment are considered the “twin problems” for the macro-economy in the United States. In 2024, the Democrats lost to Donald Trump because inflation had increased to close to 9 percent in 2022 (the rate for the entire year was 8 percent).

This was after a period of over 40 years when the inflation rate averaged less than 3 percent — and only topped 5 percent once in the late 1980s. Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve Chairman, identified the years after 1980 as “the great moderation.” Thus, the big inflation increase of 2022, even though it was followed by a decline, came after over 40 years of very moderate inflation. This had a tremendous impact on the typical citizen, even though on average, wages rose more than prices in 2023 and 2024. (In other words, real wages — the amount of goods and services one could purchase with the money in your paycheck — continued to rise in both 2023 and 2024.)

[For details of the course of real wages earned by the median worker, see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

On December 18, Trump gave a virtually incoherent speech that was so full of lies it would take quite a long time to disentangle them. But the first and most deadly lie was that the economy in 2024 was “dead” and that he had inherited the highest inflation rate in 48 years. He then claimed he had revived the economy and brought inflation down dramatically. Now just ELEVEN MONTHS after he took office the “dead” US economy is the ”hottest” in the world — more – the “hottest” it had EVER been! Interestingly enough, he did not claim to have reduced prices across the board — which he had promised during the campaign. Such a reduction is quite different from reducing the rate of inflation.

(To clarify that difference — if prices in general come down that is deflation —a price reduction on average across the board. If the RATE of inflation comes down instead of prices going up 4 percent, they might go up, say, three percent — but they are continuing to rise not fall at all!)

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BRUCE MELTON / CLIMATE CHANGE / Climate Change Review 2025

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

Occidental Chemicals CO2 air capture unit in the Permian Basin about to begin operations.

The Science of the Effects of Warming

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / December 31, 2025

The good news is real, but a bit less in quantity than the bad news unfortunately. Our climate continues to crash, and the current U.S. administration continues to dismantle climate pollution regulations. The bad news first, then the good.

2025 SUMMARY


The global temperature jump in 2023 and 2024 has not significantly dissipated…


The 2025 temperature globally will be the second or third warmest after 2023 and 2024 that exceeded the dangerous 1.5 degree C threshold. El Nino was partially responsible, and the new global cooling sulfur limits in shipping fuels and China too, but the 0.5 degree C jump cannot be explained by these two things alone. Some say the rest is from a peak in the 11-year solar cycle, but this is only a few percent of total warming forcing. The Hunga Tonga eruption in 2022 put a record amount of water vapor in the stratosphere causing warming, but the net effect considering cooling from volcanic sulfates is now considered to be neutral. Less cooling cloud formation from fewer sulfates is also in the mix but this warming is included in the cooling from sulfur regulations in shipping fuels, China and etc.

What is missing is warming from increased natural greenhouse gas emissions from degrading and collapsing Earth systems like tropical forests and permafrost, and from less snow cover and alpine and arctic greening via trees growing up in tundra, sticking up above the snow where they can absorb sunlight and create nine times more warming than snow. In total, the near tripling of the warming rate seen in the last several years is not expected to diminish, ever, until we reduce greenhouse gas concentrations back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our world’s systems.

Rhode et al., October 2025 Temperature Update, Berkeley Earth, November 19, 2025.
https://berkeleyearth.org/october-2025-temperature-update/
2025 on course to be joint-second warmest year, with November third-warmest on record, Copernicus Climate Service, December 9, 2025.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2025-course-be-joint-second-warmest-year-november-third-warmest-record
Hansen et al., Global Warming Has Accelerated Are the United Nations and the Public Well- Informed, Environment, Science an Policy for Sustainable Dev, February 3, 2025.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494?needAccess=true
Hausefather, Global Temperature Analysis: What are the causes of recent record-high global temperatures? Carbon Brief, October 12, 2025.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-what-are-the-causes-of-recent-record-high-global-temperatures/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Near-future warming…

Warming is expected to continue its significant acceleration that began in the mid 20-teens with 2027 seeing 1.7 degrees C warming above normal. Hansen et al., Global Temperature in 2025, 2026, 2027, Columbia Climate School, December 18, 2025.
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2025/
GlobalTemperaturePrediction2025.12.18.pdf

Total Earth system sequestration has flipped from increasing to decreasing because of natural feedback emissions…


Natural sequestration of CO2 by our Earth systems has begun to decline. This marks a tipping point of extreme importance. Not only does it tell us that our natural systems are degraded, and that this degradation cannot be stopped unless we restore our climate’s temperature back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our Earth systems so they can self-restore, it tells us that climate change will now accelerate faster, even if human-caused emissions do not increase, because fewer greenhouse gases are being absorbed by Earth systems, creating more warming than from the emissions alone. Forest degradation from insects and disease across the world, declining ocean and soils absorption, and increased permafrost thaw have flipped Earth’s natural greenhouse gas sequestration systems from an increasing to a decreasing rate.

What this means is that, if our Earth systems were sequestering greenhouse gases at the same rate they did in the 1960s, the annual atmospheric growth rate would have been 1.9 ppm CO2 per year. Instead, the annual growth rate is 2.5 ppm CO2, and this is the 2010 to 2020 average. This decline is quite meaningful already at 0.25 Gt per year of lost CO2 sequestration and the increase will only increase further, and nonlinearly, as current feedbacks grow and new ones begin to emit. It is also very important to note that the decline will very likely be steeper than the increasing sequestration rate before the tipping point in 2008. This is because of feedbacks increasing in number as we warm farther away from the evolutionary boundaries of our old climate at about 1 degree C warming above normal, and increased warming almost always means nonlinearly faster and more extensive feedbacks.

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JONAH RASKIN / BOOK REVIEW / Levitating the Pentagon

Posted on December 29, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer


Levitating the Pentagon, and Other Uplifting Stories: A Life of Activism By Nancy Kurshan; Three Rooms Press; 2025

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / December 29, 2025

Nancy Kurshan might have carved out and published a big chunk of her own story soon after the dramatic protests at the Pentagon in 1967, and in the wake of the 1969-1970 Chicago Conspiracy Trial. If she had done that, her book would have appeared in print at about the same time that those two Yippie classics became best sellers: Jerry Rubin’s Do It! and We Are Everywhere and Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of it and Woodstock Nation. 

Kurshan wisely waited decades to provide her account of the rambunctious Sixties and Seventies, a time when she was in the thick of the anti-war movement and a driving force in righteous causes against racism and injustice that afflicted Black, brown and Native American communities. She seemed to know intuitively which way political and cultural winds were blowing, how to ride ideological storms and keep her wits about her. 

The first hundred or so pages of her memoir, Levitating the Pentagon and other Uplifting Stories — which has just been published by Three Rooms Press — describe her membership in Yippie, her relationships with Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and their ilk, along with her exhilarating moments in Hanoi, Moscow, and Havana. Plus her birth in 1944 to parents who belonged to the American Communist Party and who helped to shape her world view from an early age. 

Three Rooms Press also published Judy Gumbo’s memoir Yippie Girl. The two books, Gumbo’s and Kurshan’s, complement one another.

Kurshan’s memoir might have stopped at the end of the 1970s. After all, as she writes near the end of her story, “Born a Red Diaper Baby who morphed into a Yippie, and joined the Weather Underground, I love the life I’ve lived.” She wisely doesn‘t stop with her membership in the Weather Underground and its offshoot — The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. With passion and clarity, Kurshan explores her participation in the 1990s in the movements that aided political prisoners and decried the inhumane conditions that existed behind bars. She also recounts her personal life: her romantic relationships with other radicals; marriage to fellow activist, Steve Whitman, their family life together and her children. Howie Emer, with whom she had a long, trusting relationship — and a largely unsung, longtime radical — is the father of her children.

In an interview with author Pat Thomas, who has written about Jerry Rubin, the Black Panthers, and Allen Ginsberg, Kurshan says, “I don’t think I was a natural Yippie.” (That interview with Thomas appears near the end of her memoir.) Granted, she didn’t appear before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) as dramatically and as effectively as Abbie and Jerry did when they were in costume. Abbie in a shirt made from an American flag. Jerry dressed as an American patriot circa 1776 and later as a member of the Viet Cong and later still as Santa Claus. 

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DANIEL ACOSTA, JR. / HIGHER EDUCATION / Ideological Warfare at the University of Texas

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

Daniel Acosta, Jr.

Make UT Great Again (MUGA)

By Daniel Acosta, Jr. / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2025

The University of Texas is facing an existential crisis because of its decision to appease the Texas governor and legislature by providing a more ideologically diverse curriculum to UT’s current programs. According to UT’s Provost, “our university leadership is having constructive behind-the-scenes discussions with the White House on the Trump Compact.” He further says that UT “aligns with the principles of conduct that they (the White House) want” (see the October 28th Chronicle of Higher Education interview of Provost William Inboden).

Certain UT colleges have been targeted for restructuring to bring their curricula more in line with what the President and Provost want the colleges to offer the students (i.e., a more optimally structured academic mission). The Provost states that “we will in time be announcing reforms and restructurings in the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Natural Sciences and others.” His plea to everyone on campus is: “Wait until we have something announced, and then we have that discussion.”

And so it goes. Cryptic messages to the public and the faculty on how UT will become great again with limited debate with those people most involved in higher education on campus — the faculty and students. Of course, an ideologically diverse curriculum is not the same as promoting a faculty and student body that are culturally and racially diverse. That is not allowed in the great state of Texas.

I returned to Austin in 2019 to spend my retirement years with my family. Although UT has had three different presidents in the last six years, UT still remains one of the best public universities (see the 2026 U.S. News & World Report). so why do the UT president and provost proclaim that our great state university “has lost its way” and needs to regain the public’s trust? Is “Make UT Great Again” the new slogan for this new UT administration, instead of the current one — “What Starts Here Changes The World?

Fifty years ago I was the second Mexican-American PhD professor on the pharmacy faculty since the founding of the College in 1893. Today there is only one Chicano professor. The number of Black and Hispanic tenured faculty at UT is embarrassingly low, compared to the other top 10 public universities.

The Presidential leadership team of VPs and deputies consists of seven white men and six white women. Out of the 15 active deans of colleges (plus three interim deans who are not included) there are seven white men, four white women, two Hispanic men, one Hispanic woman, and one Asian woman. Diversity has never played a role in the leadership of the University of Texas for over 170 years. So why is everyone now complaining that DEI had lowered the quality of education and research at UT?

I left UT after 20 years as a tenured professor and director of the toxicology training program because I was told I wasn’t suited for a higher administration position. I finished my career as the dean of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and later as the Deputy Director for FDA’s major research center — The National Center for Toxicological Research.

My wife and I helped fund a graduate student endowment in pharmacology and toxicology at the College of Pharmacy to assist students attend scientific conferences. I reached out to the new dean of pharmacy to establish an endowment to attract more Hispanic faculty to the college. But my efforts to improve the diversity of faculty and students at the college have been blunted by state regulations which hamper attempts to add more diverse and well-qualified individuals to the faculty.

[Acosta is retired and lives in Austin. He’s Dean Emeritus of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and former Deputy Director of FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research.]

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LARRY PILTZ / VERSE / Save The Futures

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer

Save The Futures

By Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog / December 11, 2025

To save our futures
we’ll need supplies of sutures
to stitch tightly up with courage
the scourges
violent urges
to bind the wounds and spare the dirges
caused by those who sow reckless harm
they’ve chosen their dharma karma and smarm
We’ve been intentionally riven
by people driven
to bring suffering
we’ll need lots of wound closure
lots of buffering
and infinitely less exposure
to those cruel inhumane
and savage false savants
and their callous affronts
those bloody dilettantes
who are truly the insane
Tyrannical persecutors lust
with the imagination of rust
fascists prizing precious hates above all else
these false idols and false gods
those proud zealous clods
obsessed with their fearful inadequate selves
to them it’s oppression or bust
They are the retread undead
grievances are what they’re gladly fed
and it’s our bodies they’d snatch
if they could would kill our souls
these unmitigated assholes
those sons of hitlerites
these daughters of spite
these generations of vipers
fascinated by obvious lies
dazzled by windshield wipers
and painfully frazzled by truth
it doesn’t take a sleuth
to think them down to size
look them in the eyes
and try not to laugh
at those whose dumb wrath
seek a bloodbath
If only it were only graft
and venal corruption
and not a fully unhinged
fascist disruption
to drag our nation
from its fragile stable station
down to their level of infantilization
with its primitive rage
in permanent end-stage
all or nothing demented rampage
and who act the sage
reciting warped tragic history
while pretending innocence intrigue and mystery
these schemers nightmare dreamers
harebrained screamers
with apologies to hares
the comparison’s unfair
Hares wouldn’t claim victimization
and brag about a sadistic vindication
while reducing civilization
to its violent bare essential
the brutal quintessential
their illness chronic and acutely mental
they who deny political asylum
to those tortured and hounded
their bodies minds pounded
by those in their fellow fascist phylum
these ogres of the species
their minds full of feces
they consider inspiration
as the corpses high they pile them
Why their desperation
for total desensitization
are they jealous of a nation
who can feel emotion sensation
that doesn’t promote annihilation
and can compete on a fair playing field
of honesty, intelligence, and kindness
without sword and shield
do they know they can’t be healed
by their sociopathic blindness
about only themselves can they care
while they brazenly malign us
Among leaves of grass they are weeds
dispensing poison’s seeds
their life a coward’s dare
their threat an existential bet
now we must do our share
their brutal quintessential not quite here yet
be wild and free like the hare
with its survivor’s clever stare
and accept their coward’s dare
Larry Piltz

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