Seth Sandronsky

December 20, 2024
In his new Netflix special, entertainer Jamie Foxx shares that he suffered a debilitating stroke. The $4.5 trillion U.S. health care system at first failed to give him helpful treatment, which Foxx eventually received at a hospital in Atlanta.
Think about the class dimensions of his experience. Foxx is a multimillionaire who in his time of medical need got a cold shoulder from the American health care industry.
Where does that leave the majority of the U.S. working class who...

December 13, 2024
Watching season two of “Sprint” on Netflix recently, American sprinter Noah Lyles says from the 2024 Paris Olympics that the covid pandemic is over. For him, it’s the place and time to run fast and self-promote faster.
He does both. First, Lyles wins the 100 meters dash in a photo finish. His performance before, during and after winning this gold medal shows that it’s not bragging when an elite athlete predicts a victory and achieves it.
Later, things change. Lyles contracts...

Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British actor and screenwriter, hits a home run directing “Rob Peace,” a gripping biopic streaming on Netflix now. This film is based on a 2014 biography, “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.”
The storyline is linear. As a youth, Peace becomes a high-achieving student. He excels in math and science.
Peace overcomes the adversity of class and skin color to achieve educational and, later, occupational success. We see an individual defying the odds, making choices th...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...