Seth Sandronsky
I'm a Sacramento-based writer.
Seth Sandronsky is a freelance journalist writing for Comstock's magazine, CounterPunch, Nonprofit Quarterly, The Progressive Populist, Sacramento Business Journal and Solving Sacramento.
CounterPunch
On Mészáros’s Critique of the State
November 8, 2024
The late István Mészáros analyzes political theories from the ancient Greek philosophers forward in Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, ed. and introduction, John Bellamy Foster (Monthly Review Press, 2022), 482 pp. The author’s premise is that the state and capitalism dovetail to exploit people and Mother Nature for profit, a contradiction humanity must overcome to build a sustainable society.
This is a systemic dilemma pushing humanity and the ecology to the brink. Tra...
The Progressive Populist
Reviewing ‘Rez Ball’
“Rez Ball,” a new sports drama streaming on Netflix, is based on true events, and a gripping story. You don’t have to be a basketball fan to appreciate this film.
The actors and Sydney Freeland, the director, deliver an emotional and factual dramatization of the role that high school basketball plays for Navajo people living on tribal lands in New Mexico. Emotions and facts can and do blend seamlessly in this film, which LeBron James, the NBA superstar, produced.
Jessica Matten, who sparkled ...
CounterPunch
Reviewing Socialist Register 2024
September 27, 2024
The essays in A New Global Geometry? Socialist Register 2024, an annual publication, unpack a wide range of anti-capitalist analyses on past and current political and social contradictions and relations. The contributors’ field of inquiry ranges from China to Germany, India, Japan, Latin America, Turkey and the US.
The volume under review maps global capitalism’s ebbs and flows during and after the years between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Ja...
CounterPunch
David, Goliath and Press Freedom
Press freedom struggled when a federal tax agency looked into The Davis Vanguard, a community news outlet based in Yolo County, one of 58 in California. Just ask David Greenwald, founder, editor and executive director of The Davis Vanguard, https://www.davisvanguard.org. In 2021, a private attorney who attended law school with the Yolo County District Attorney filed an Internal Revenue Service complaint over the new outlet’s coverage of the race involving this public official, according to Gr...
sacobserver.com
New film premiered at Sacramento’s Guild Theater affirms Black girlhood
By Seth Sandronsky | Solving Sacramento
A cinema project from Justice2Jobs aims to spur community conversation about the “adultification bias” of Black girls; the harmful expectations and stereotypes that distort and shorten their childhoods. To this end, the new documentary film “Essence of Black Girlhood” premiered at The Guild Theater in Oak Park on Sept. 1 to act as a jumping off point for further discussion.
One stereotype the film points out is that Black girls should have an adult-like...
sacobserver.com
Sacramento’s annual Solidarity Summit on Homelessness highlights needs, resources for the unhoused
By Seth Sandronsky | Solving Sacramento
Rev. Mahsea Evans opened Sacramento’s third annual Solidarity Summit on Homelessness with a welcoming speech and a secular prayer on Sept. 7 at the First United Methodist Church in Midtown. The summit highlighted the ties between affordable health care and rental housing, harm reduction versus punishment and the needs of the Black unhoused community.
Niki Jones, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, led the land ac...
CounterPunch
The Myth of Black Capitalism
September 13, 2024
Mass protests across the US against Jim Crow drove the rise of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements generations ago. The impacts were far reaching across the lines of class, color and gender. Ruling circles in and out of the federal, state and local governments responded, the backdrop to Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s The Myth of Black Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2023).
His new edition of TMOBC is as relevant now as when the book first published in 1970, two years afte...
CounterPunch
In and Out of California’s Prisons
August 30, 2024
“I was due to go to a parole board hearing in mid-2022, when a coworker at a California state prison mentioned a recent seminar from the Creating Restorative Opportunities and Programs,” said Lamar Simms of Sacramento. That was then for him.
Today, Simms is a wage-earning service worker in Oakland, Calif., and a recent graduate of CROP’s Ready 4 Life initiative, a yearlong reentry program. It provides supportive housing and equips justice-involved workers with practical traini...
solvingsacramento.org
How Women’s Wisdom Art on Del Paso Boulevard empowers marginalized communities through creative expression
Local artist Steff Echeverria uses charcoal, chalk pastel and oil pastel with paint on cardstock to create some of her artwork. Among her portfolio, some titles include “Spontaneous Healing,” “Living with a Mental Illness” and “Love More,” the latter of which is also the name of her recent solo exhibit at Women’s Wisdom Art in Sacramento.
After wrapping up her first solo art exhibit at WWA in early July, Echeverria taught a visual journaling class.
“Art is my favorite language,” Echeverria sa...
CounterPunch
Black Jobs?
August 7, 2024
“I love my black job,” tweeted Simone Biles, an American and Olympics star who is arguably the greatest gymnast in history. The context of her pointed comment on social media is a response to what former U.S. President Trump said about black employment and immigrants.
“Coming from the border are millions and millions of people who happen to be taking Black jobs,” Trump said at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago recently. “They’re taking the empl...
The Progressive Populist
Prison Costs Busting California’s Budget?
California is facing a budget deficit, the gap between income and expenditures, of up to $73 billion. Prison spending is part of this budget, which the state is constitutionally required to balance, unlike Uncle Sam, which can and does use deficit spending.
Meanwhile, there are 93,000 state prisoners in California. The cost to imprison one person is roughly $132,000 per year, far above the annual price of a student to receive a higher education. The 2006 California prisoner population was 165...
The Progressive Populist
Lethal Workplaces: Deaths on the Job Continue
The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) announced “The Dirty Dozen” employers of 2024 recently. Who are the Dirty Dozen? They are members of an employer class, a tiny minority of the population, which put the vast majority of workers and communities at-risk due to unsafe practices, leading to preventable illnesses, injuries and fatalities.
That is not all. Several of the Dirty Dozen also harass and retaliate workers who demand in deeds and words more safety on ...
CounterPunch
Living Left: Reviewing Helena Sheehan’s New Autobiography
Helena Sheehan’s autobiography “Until We Fall: Long Distance Life on the Left” (Monthly Review Press 2023) delivers a firsthand account of world-historic events such as the fall of the former Soviet Union and its impacts from the eastern bloc to the UK and US. Her book does not stop there, as she also travels to South Africa to participate in the fight for justice there.
For readers who did (not) live through the demise of the former Soviet Union, Sheehan offers a unique perspective of a diso...
The Progressive Populist
Walk This Way: Reviewing Anne Braden’s Letters, Speeches and Writings
Anne Braden (1924-2006) was a freedom fighter in the US South. She talked and walked left. Ben Wilkins’ book “Anne Braden Speaks” (Monthly Review Press 2022) is a collection of her path-breaking advocacy to form a mass movement to challenge and transcend the economic system and its handmaiden of the color line, e.g., Jim Crow and white supremacy.
The book under review has an Introduction, three parts and an Index. In part one, we read a thoughtful letter that Braden penned to Rev. Dr. Martin ...
The Progressive Populist
Facts Against Industrial Farming
Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist who writes for the layperson. His “Big farms make big flu: dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and the nature of science” (Monthly Review Press 2016) is a guide to making sense of the world. To this end, he unpacks food and health, economics and politics, as a totality.
His totalizing angle is not, of course, a mainstream view of science and the society in which it operates. With the aim of making clear what is unclear in a mainstream ...