Archive | November, 2005

  • Homage to Nazim Hikmet

    Living is no laughing matter:
    you must live with great seriousness
    like a squirrel, for example —
    I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
    I mean living must be your whole occupation.
    Nazim Hikmet, “On Living,” 1947

  • FreedomChunks: A True Story from Canada’s Little War on Terror

    Over the course of the whole debacle, there was a lot of criticism directed against Mandeep and me — even from our purported supporters — for the way that we handled the public relations angle of our case. Much was made, particularly, of the so-called “Kafka Declaration” episode wherein, against the cool protestations of our […]

  • An Occupation Worth Applauding: Celebrate Un-Thanksgiving

    Until the federal penitentiary was closed in 1963, Alcatraz Island was a place most folks tried to leave. On November 20, 1969, the island’s image underwent a drastic makeover. That was the day thousands of American Indians began an occupation that would last until June 11, 1971. The 1973 armed occupation of Wounded Knee along […]

  • New York Times Should Come Clean with Its Readers

    To the Public Editor: I think the Times owes a response to James Bamford’s reporting (“The Man Who Sold the War”) on Judith Miller in Rolling Stone (17 November 2005). Miller, encouraged by the Rendon PR firm (which had largely created Chalabi‘s Iraqi National Congress) boosted the claims of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri about Iraq’s […]

  • Arlington Midwest

    “Arlington Midwest,” a memorial of over 2,000 tombstones on display on the grounds of the Immaculate Heart of Mary motherhouse, in Monroe, Michigan, November 18-19. The IHM national headquarters building is in the background. Inspired by VFP Santa Barbara’s “Arlington West,” this memorial has been displayed three times in the Toledo area since the second […]

  • Cuba and the Lessons of Katrina

      What explains why the “dictatorial regime” of Fidel Castro can do a vastly better job of saving the lives of its citizens from hurricanes while the “democratic” government in Washington has proven to be so apparently inept? In 2004, Hurricane Ivan, a category five storm, slammed Cuba with devastating force. Yet there was not […]

  • Tookie Williams and the Politics of the Death Penalty

    “. . . what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law? . . . [I]s there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these […]

  • Debating and Contesting the “New Economy”

    For some time now, students of radical political economy have been preoccupied with interpreting the new phase of capitalism that has followed the postwar boom and been dominated by neoliberal ideas and policies.  This has meant, on the one hand, a number of declarations of political endings — the end of corporatism, the end of […]

  • The Architecture of Dreamworld 2: The Disarming Reflex

    For fourteen years or so I lived with the most beautiful cat in the world. That, at any rate, was the way most people treated her. On pleasant days our cat would walk no further than the sidewalk. She would wait there all day, and almost every passer-by would stop, coo, exclaim at her wondrous […]

  • My Very Own Cleaning Lady

    I always thought I’d do my own cleaning,                         never             forget the working-class way of Italian American women like my mother who kept                         a broom             beside her front door as if it were a sign that read, “we work hard, we clean hard                         so wipe             your damn […]

  • Meet Lila Rajiva and Discuss The Language of Empire

    Lila Rajiva, the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, will discuss her book at the following venues. Wednesday, December 14 7:00 PM Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., T: 510-658-1448 OAKLAND, CA Thursday, December 15 7:30 PM The Marxist School of Sacramento, Sierra 2 Center, Curtis Hall, 2791-24th St., […]

  • Union Organizing in the Trenches

    Thirty-five years ago, my Dad told me a story that I recall from time to time. It was about my mother’s father, Grandpa John Kelley. Grandpa lost his small Chicago moving business during the Great Depression. Soon after losing his business, he was lucky enough to land a job at the massive Electromotive train engine […]

  • The Mysterious Case of WMD; Or, How the BBC Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

      “There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using ‘outlawed’ weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.” — U.S. Department of State, 9 December 20041 “But I repeat the point made by my […]

  • US House Resolution 4232 — A Step in the Right Direction?

    On November 4, 2005, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts introduced a bill whose purpose is to “prohibit the use of funds to deploy United States Armed Forces to Iraq.” This bill, numbered HR 4232, is co-sponsored by twelve other representatives, including Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA). The bill was […]

  • GM, the Delphi Concessions, and North American Workers: Round Two?

    It is important to recall that, until the 1970s, collective bargaining in the United States and Canada was largely about workers demanding improvements from their employers. But a new era in collective bargaining erupted at the end of the 1970s that was soon dubbed “concessionary bargaining.” Corporations were now the ones making the demands. Tensions […]

  • President Salutes Anonymous Red-Baiter

    Military bands played and choirs of sweet-voiced children sang today at Arlington National Cemetery, as President George W. Bush officially commemorated nearly a century of anticommunist hysteria in a stirring ceremony consecrating the Tomb of the Unknown Red-Baiter. “We Americans owe so much to communist witch-hunts,” declared a tearful President Bush, exhibiting an uncharacteristic degree […]

  • The Marketing Front: The Real Essence of Advertising

    In recent decades, many well-meaning thinkers and activists have peddled or purchased the idea that class conflict has somehow waned or been “de-centered” in the richer nation-states.  As workers in these countries have lost more and more power, and as vast tides of wealth have sloshed around in the form of automobiles, shopping malls, and […]

  • Mobilization

      For the most part, we go along living without thinking much about the world around us. Things just seem to happen without rhyme or reason. My parents knew that people like themselves were not quite the same as people who had a lot more money, but they didn’t reflect very deeply as to why […]

  • A History of Violence

    David Cronenberg‘s latest, A History of Violence, is a fine reworking of the Western and film noir in his “realist” turn. In a feminist twist of film noir, in this film it is a man, not a woman, who has a past. The past that the man (well played by Viggo Mortensen) thought he left […]

  • Students and Educators to STOP THE WAR

    John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, will join Roger Marheine, Sonali Kolhatkar, and Barbara Trent in the keynote plenary session at the Students and Educators to STOP THE WAR conference, Los Angeles, 19 November 2005. The conference is timely indeed. As William Ayers and Mike Ferner remind us, the No Child Left Behind Act, […]