Archive | October, 2005

That “Sex Machine” ever got approved for air play is testimony to the stupidity of radio censors. It’s little more than James Brown, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business (one of several), encouraging his penis to labor just as hard: Stay on the scene Like a sex machine. In case you miss the point, the […]

Whoopee! The Change to Win Coalition has established itself in the labor movement! Happy Days are here again! Andy Stern’s going to lead us to the promised land! And the overwhelming response by American workers: yawn. At the time when American workers — indeed, US society as a whole — so much need a new […]

  Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy against Empire by Peter McLaren (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy by Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) Teaching Peter McLaren: Paths of Dissent, by Marc Pruyn and Luis M. Huerta-Charles (New […]

Legal pad in hand, I strode into the classroom trying to look confident. Forty mostly young faces watched me, probably wondering how heavy the workload would be and how easy the grading. I lit a cigarette and passed out a stack of note cards. In those days you could smoke in class, and I burned […]

  [Nikolaj Nielsen spent two months in Africa this year. He stayed in the slums of Nairobi for two weeks, interviewing men and women about their thoughts on poverty. He was accompanied by a local NGO, about which he has reservations. — Ed.] The main road in the Korogocho slum in northern Nairobi is littered […]

As American casualties in Iraq surpassed 2,000, activists nationwide mourned their deaths and organized vigils against the Iraq War. Here is a photograph of a vigil in Colonie, New York, by Jon Flanders. Jon Flanders is a member and former president of IAM LL 1145 and a member of the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Growing old in the U.S. is becoming increasingly scary.  Beginning in January, U.S. baby boomers will be turning 60 at a rate of more than 4 million per year, and for most of them the American dream of a comfortable, worry-free retirement after a life of hard work is not going to materialize. With the […]

Evelyn Wiener died October 8, 2005, at 91, surrounded by her friends and comrades.  Her earliest memory was her parents’ two-week celebration of the Russian Revolution in 1917.  Hiding her age to join the Young Communist League at 14, she was the Manhattan District Organizer for the American Communist Party in the 1940s. A childhood […]

One law for the rulers and another for the ruled. So decided English Chief Justice Bingham in his 1998 ruling granting the mass murderer (and former dictator of Chile) Augusto Pinochet immunity. His exact words were: “The applicant is entitled as a former head of state to immunity from civil and criminal proceedings of the […]

50 AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW: Reclaiming American Patriotism by Mickey Z BUY THIS BOOK In his new book, 50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know, Mickey Z has authored yet another incisive examination of the political and social landscape.  This time his focus is on people’s victories that have been won […]

if she could use her hands to fasten a button twist a knob scribble a letter to tell me she dreams about tailpipes thirteen parts assembled again and over like a broken dance of two palms stroking rubbery backs fingers bowing to partners swollen with gnarled collapse snapping delicate cylinder joints in place for the […]

  [The UAW New Directions Movement (NDM), founded in the 1980s to challenge the auto union’s policy of “jointness” and lack of internal democracy, is experiencing a new burst of support from the union’s rank-and-file membership. The movement’s revitalization comes as workers in the auto industry are facing unprecedented health care concession demands by General […]

The Dan Halutz affair is well documented and the main facts are undisputed. Halutz, as commander of the Israeli air force, was responsible for an order on August 2, 2002 for the targeted assassination of an “alleged” terrorist, Saleh Shehada. Since, among his other evil activities, Shehada happened to live in an apartment building, a […]

The national land summit that the South African Communist Party (SACP) called for in its 2004 Red October campaign took place at the end of July 2005. Provincial land summits ostensibly prepared the ground to stage the July land indaba, just as the SACP had requested government to do. Since the SACPs intention was to […]

For the first time in two weeks, public schools in British Columbia were open for business yesterday.  Teachers had voted over the weekend by a 77% margin to accept a mediated settlement to the dispute recommended by arbitrator Vince Ready.  In the wake of the decision, there is much public debate and discussion, including among […]

Employers in heavily unionized U.S. industries are turning to bankruptcy courts as a strategy for gutting union contracts and imposing layoffs and givebacks even deeper than those workers made in the concessions of the early 1980s. Bankruptcy-as-a-strategy first became prominent during the restructuring of the steel industry in the late 1990s, then spread to the […]

Today, patents supposedly exist to provide an incentive for new discoveries. Patents had a different purpose at their origin. When the Venetians invented what today we would call intellectual property in the fifteenth century, governments openly treated it as an element of state power.  Workers could enjoy monopolistic privileges only if they continued to strengthen […]

[Below is a talk that Michael A. Lebowitz gave at el Encuentro Nacional de Trabajadores Hacia la Recuperación de Empresas (the National Meeting of Workers for the Recovery of Enterprises), organized by la Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT, the National Union of Workers) in Caracas, Venezuela, 22 October 2005. The meeting was preparatory to el […]

The Israeli occupation of Gaza Strip didn’t end — it merely changed form. With the completion of the Israeli army withdrawal from Gaza Strip, and the eviction of all the settlers from there, its occupation has seemingly ended. And indeed, if by “occupation” we mean, as the Israeli establishment wants us to understand, a mere […]

Near the few remaining woods are modern pictographs,                                           warning passing vehicles of the presence of deer, not for the protection of the deer but for the protection of the vehicles                                                             And a few of the signs are boastful, a strange sort of civic boosterism: our deer here                     were not […]