Archive | October, 2005

The number of films on national figures like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Savarkar, and Bhagat Singh, as well as films like Lagaan and Gadar, in recent years point to an interest in revaluation and reinterpretation of history, especially that of the freedom struggle, in India. That this has happened in the last few years needs an explanation. […]

As I was driving through Ithaca, New York, on the weekend of the Grassroots Folk Festival, a guy with long curly hair and a beard — the sort of ‘sixties revenant common in college towns — strode into traffic on a red light.  I stopped my car, momentarily annoyed, and he grinned and flashed me […]

It will be hard to find a Capitol Hill vote any more shameful than this one. . . . Click on the graphs to enlarge them. Real Value of the Federal Minimum Wage, 1950-2004 Annual Minimum Wage Earnings in 2003 Dollars and the Poverty Level for Family of Three Source: Economic Policy Institute Senate Republicans […]

Monthly Review‘s July-August issue, focused on the theme of “Socialism for the 21st Century,” made me ponder the question of possible working-class organizing in the 21st century to build resistance to capitalism, the resistance that can dialectically develop into socialism. Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff wrote in “Approaching Socialism”: “[I]ntellectuals and specialists cannot derive a […]

19 October 2005 Teachers in British Columbia are standing on the rainy picket lines this morning for Day 8 of an unprecedented illegal strike against the Liberal provincial government.  This strike has surprised nearly everyone in its strength and resolve and is shaking the political culture of BC to its core. The strike began on […]

Brothers and Sisters, The crisis for the working class (whether employed or not, waged or not) continues to grow. Even as the nation, and especially the poor and Black working class of the Gulf states and New Orleans in particular, tries to pick up the pieces after Katrina’s (and Rita’s) devastation, the assault by capital […]

Lost amidst the media clamor over George W. Bush’s U.S. Supreme Court appointment in early October was a New York federal court decision giving constitutional legitimacy to the president’s scheme of “faith-based” government. Ruling in the case of Lown v Salvation Army, District Judge Sidney Stein (a Bill Clinton appointee) held that religious institutions are […]

Activist Brian Bogart asked himself: “Our top industry has been the manufacture and sale of weapons — and we’re a peace-loving nation?” Inspired by this paradox, Bogart created Strike for Peace . . . described on its website as an attempt “to highlight for everyone’s sake the dominant role of the military industry in America’s […]

  [What follows is an essay written in response to Michael D. Yates’ call for essays on work. — Ed.] My name is Jeremy Evanchesky. I’m originally from Central City, Pennsylvania and now live in Lakeland, Florida. I work as a teacher at the Homer K. Addair Career Academy. When I first came to the […]

Dr. Diana Dolev teaches at two schools of design in Israel and researches the connections between national identity and architecture. Her PhD dissertation analyzed the militarization of the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Diana has been an activist since 1980 when she facilitated a group of Palestinian and Jewish students at the […]

Have you ever felt that something was “wrong” with you? That something about you was so hideous, so unspeakably repulsive, so dark and unknowable that people could never, ever accept you? Something . . . “monstrous”? Of course you have. Later, you discovered there were others like you. You turned your shame into pride, and […]

  [Click on the photos to see original images.] Part I. The World Festival of Youth and Students, August 8-15, 2005 Caracas, Venezuela, Seen from a Park Above Poor neighborhood — “barrio” — in Los Teques, the capital of the state of Miranda, near Caracas, where we spent our nights during the 16th World Festival […]

Two percent. That’s the percentage of U.S. blacks who approve of President Bush’s job performance, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found. Blacks’ current two percent approval rating of Bush is down from 19 percent a half-year ago. Why is this? Hurricane Katrina and modern communication. Millions of African Americans watched TV coverage of the […]

Listen to Xochitl Bervera of Families & Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (mp3) and Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United (mp3) speak about race, class, and Hurricane Katrina. Xochitl Bervera Curtis Muhammad The audio files are made available to MRZine.org by the Strategy Center, at whose fund-raising event in solidarity with the New Orleans and […]

There is no precedent in US — or any other — history for the level of personal debt now carried by the American people. Consider the raw numbers. In 1974, Federal Reserve data show that US mortgage plus other consumer debt totaled $627 billion. By 1994, the total debt had risen to $4,206 billion, and […]

  In “new imperialism,” it is said, the American economy needs more instability abroad to maintain the health of its capital at home. Long before discourse on “new imperialism” became popular in the West, Palestinian intellectuals in refugee camps arrived at this very conclusion by simply reflecting upon the wretched conditions of their own existence. […]

Everything has changed! Nothing has changed! Barring unexpected difficulties, a new coalition has been formed in Berlin. Gerhard Schroeder, confident, even arrogant until his final days as leader, has been replaced by the first woman in German history to head a government, and she’s an East German at that, though she has never yet pushed […]

  Introduction Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, this beautiful island in the Caribbean has aroused passions everywhere in the Americas.  Since its inception, the revolution has had a profound impact on the popular classes throughout Latin America and haunted the political elites and wealthy classes in the United States […]

Preparations for renewed US intervention in Latin America are underway. To protect its hegemony and economic interests, the US government is using the threat of terrorism as an excuse for military operations aimed at destabilizing leftist movements and governments and securing natural resources such as oil and gas. By focusing on land reform and social […]

  UPDATE, 13 October 2005, 8:45 PM, EST A BC Supreme Court judge ruled that the teachers’ union cannot use its own financial reserves, donations from supporters, or other assets for strike pay or other strike-related purposes, and appointed a monitor to oversee the ruling. On Friday, October 7, 38,000 teachers in public elementary and […]