Archives for 2020

“How many of you have an easy life?” the speaker asked the audience. To his dismay a handful of people raised their hands. “Well, okay, I guess some of you have it good, but many of you clearly don’t.” His voice could be barely heard and the audience shouted at him to speak into the […]

On this week’s episode of WBAI radio’s Deadline NYC, our editors John Garvey and Mike Morgan sat down with veteran journalist Tom Robbins for a discussion of their early political development and the Hard Crackers project. The episode can be heard here. (Note: the Deadline segment begins after the 1:00 mark.) Thanks to Tom and […]

Hard Crackers has reached out to a South African independent social justice publication called New Frame Magazine.  New Frame describes itself as such:  We are dedicated to a pro-poor, pro-working class focus that aims to report faithfully and informatively about the lives and struggles of working class people, the marginalized and unemployed, shack-dwellers and migrants. […]

Almost two weeks ago, I thought that I might have been exposed to someone with the COVID infection.  I waited for a week and then my wife, Laurene, and I went to a nearby testing site—consisting of a dozen trailers in what had been an empty lot.  This was right before Thanksgiving and the line […]

On Thanksgiving morning supporters of President Trump’s doomed reelection effort descended on the Loop neighborhood of Chicago to raise the battle cry “Stop the Steal!” The “steal” in this tortured locution is the purported Democratic Party theft of the November presidential election, chronicled in a convoluted conspiracy theory that one conservative federal judge recently compared […]

54-46 was Toots Hibbert’s prison number.  He sang it out loud on the electrifying track 54-46 That’s My Number (1969), one of a crop of tunes that made Toots and the Maytals a household name on the island of Jamaica and soon thereafter in a lot of other places too.  Toots Hibbert, the reggae singer, […]