Peter Rothberg

Peter Rothberg writes the ActNow column for the The Nation. ActNow aims to put readers in touch with creative ways to register informed dissent. Whether it's a grassroots political campaign, a progressive film festival, an antiwar candidate, a street march, a Congressional bill needing popular support or a global petition, ActNow will highlight the outpouring of cultural, political and anti-corporate activism sweeping the planet.

Articles by this author

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Friday, April 15, 2011
A Primer on Tax Day Activism
With Tax Day hard on our heels, David Cay Johnston has done a tremendous service by boiling down and unpacking what he calls the nine things the rich don't want you to know about taxes . There aren't really nine discrete items in his list but the main points are:
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Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Rockefeller Bill Would Gut the EPA
This morning the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the Upton-Inhofe bill (H.R. 910) on a largely party line vote of 34 to 19. The legislation attempts to overturn the EPA’s scientific finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases endanger public health and welfare and thus require regulation. The NRDC's Pete Altman live blogged most of the markup.
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Thursday, March 10, 2011
Do We Need a General Strike?
It seems to me that just the very fact that the idea of a general strike is being discussed shows how far our political discourse has come and how deeply Scott Walker and prolonged economic anxiety have radicalized otherwise moderate masses.
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Thursday, March 03, 2011
The Story of 'Citizens United' vs. the FEC
This is the best short history of the growth of corporate power that I've ever read, heard or seen. It's also a primer on exactly why the Supreme Court's closely divided Citizens United decision is incompatible with basic notions of democratic governance.
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Friday, October 08, 2010
10/10/10
Actress Ellen Page is getting to work on climate solutions this October 10 as part of the 10/10/10 Global Work Party organized by 350.org and hundreds of partners around the world. Let her explain:
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Tuesday, September 21, 2010
One Nation Working Together
The sobering new data on poverty has given new impetus to the One Nation Working Together movement, a coalition of union members, community activists, students, entertainers, civil and human rights leaders and progressive politicians coming together on October 2 to demand jobs, justice and education.
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Sunday, April 11, 2010
Protest Publix
For decades, Florida's farmworkers have faced terrible abuses and brutal exploitation. Workers frequently earn sub-poverty wages for toiling 60 to 70 hours per week in season; some have even been chained to poles, locked inside trucks, beaten, and robbed of their pay. In the face of this grim reality, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has offered continuing rays of hope since its founding to tackle these issues in 1993.
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Friday, March 05, 2010
Students Protest Nationwide
Walkouts, student strikes, and marches shook every level of California's embattled public education system yesterday. University of California students blocked access to campus entrances at Berkeley and Santa Cruz while college kids joined forces with K-12 students and teachers in Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles. In Oakland and Sacramento, hundreds of marchers confronted police after taking their protests onto the freeways. Numerous concurrent rallies numbered in the thousands.
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Goodbye Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and the author of the seminal A People's History of the United States, died today at the age of 87 of a heart attack in Santa Monica, California. He was in a swimming pool doing laps and was spotted immediately by lifeguards but died instantly.
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Monday, November 30, 2009
Global Day of Action on Climate Crisis
As world leaders start gathering next week in Copenhagen , the people hit hardest by the climate change crisis -- the global poor -- will continue to be systematically excluded from formal discussions of how to address problems like water shortages and crop failures stemming from global warming.
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