Archive | July, 2007

“Containing Russia: Back to the Future?” by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov was published on the Web site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation on 19 July 2007.   The account of Lavrov’s conflict with the journal Foreign Affairs, which follows his essay, was published on the same Web […]

  The post-911 immigration regime originates in 2003 when immigration control shifted from the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished March 2003, and its functions were transferred into the newly created DHS, in a merger of some 180,000 employees from 22 different agencies.  […]

After practicing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands, Nauru, and East Timor, the Australian Government is invading and occupying outback Aboriginal communities with soldiers and police. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard declared a “national emergency” on June 21 over sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory.   The trigger was said to be […]

  هويت من ياس با همراهي امين براي اعتراض به فيلم 300 Yas lives in Tehran, and he wrote “My Identity / Hoviate Man” in protest against the film 300.  At YouTube and elsewhere on the Net, you can find many different videos his fans made for this song: e.g., <www.iranclip.com/player/1266> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6G9-bx7Kbc> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvczxoKNaWk> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnr1zFWgGWk> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmgCuID4CYc> […]

Imperial rulers and violently fixated Cuban exiles need Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program to accelerate learning processes and not continue to repeat mistakes.  Hey, on Cuba policy, it’s only been 48 years! Fidel Castro, in contrast, learned fast.  He used Washington and Miami to improvise material for three chapters in future releases of Machiavelli’s […]

The March 1 House of Representatives vote for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) was an important milestone for legislation intended to help employees form and join unions, but that vote was as close as this bill would get to becoming law for the next two years.  Even if the Senate had passed EFCA, neither […]

  Since the first pictures of Abu Ghraib, the collusion of medical personnel, including psychologists, in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bagram, and CIA detention centers is no longer open to question: Mark Benjamin, “The CIA’s Torture Teachers,” Salon.com, 12 June 2007; Valtin, “Fact Sheet: Psychologist Participation in Torture,” Invictus, 6 July […]

I will not refer to Bush’s health and education, but to that of his neighbors. It was not an improvised declaration. The AP agency tells us what his opening words were: “Tenemos corazones grandes en este país” (We have big hearts in this country); he said this in Spanish in front of 250 representatives of […]

دموكراسي از گروه آبجيز “Abjee” is a Persian slang for sister . . . and sisters are what Safoura (vocal, guitar, and composition) and Melody Safavi (vocal and lyrics) are.  For more information about Abjeez and their music samples and videos, visit their Web site: . | | Print

1. Introduction: The War We are in the fight of our lives.  The hostile onslaught against U.S. labor that was launched after the Second World War and redoubled in the 1980s is entering a new phase that will profoundly influence the future of all working people in North America.  How we respond to this latest […]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — For my first three days in Pakistan, no conversation could go more than a few minutes without a reference to the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) compound.  I had landed in Islamabad on July 8, and by then it seemed clear that government forces would eventually storm the mosque and […]

Following months of criticism and sharp internal debate, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) ended its controversial partnership agreement with a group of California nursing homes on May 31.  The four-and-a-half-year-old deal was a quid pro quo arrangement that brought over 3,000 workers into SEIU after the union secured higher state government payments to nursing […]

  When Hamas members were elected as the majority bloc of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and as it became apparent that a US-led international embargo would be an adjoining price to that victory, I contacted many intellectuals and writers in Palestine, mostly those who often positioned themselves as part of the Palestinian Left.  I asked […]

  I recently received a circular from the Local Authority of the district in London where I live, which addressed me as a “customer.”  I should really be inured by now to neoliberalism’s relentless penetration of the “life world,” but it took me aback all the same.  I don’t buy anything from my local council; […]

As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century — or what the neocon ideologues propping up the Bush administration triumphantly call the New American Century — the contradictions of capitalist imperialism are becoming more and more acute. The most recent fallout of Bush’s policy is in Pakistan, where a movement against the US-backed regime of General Pervez Musharraf has been brewing since March 9, 2007 when the general dismissed the Chief Justice (CJ) on charges of corruption and nepotism.

Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko indicts private health insurance and calls for its abolition.  Sicko joins an American tradition that includes Lewis Hine‘s photographs of child laborers (1908) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), two examples among many.  But can Moore’s theme change our nation in 2007? Private health insurance, usually obtained […]

THE CRY WAS UNITY: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936by Mark SolomonBUY THIS BOOK Mark Solomon’s account of the troubled alliance between blacks and Communists in the years between the wars is much more than a meticulous study of racial and social protest.  For Solomon, a long-time civil rights activist (and leading member of the left-wing […]

Recientemente, aprovechando un nuevo aniversario del nacimiento de George Washington, el presidente George W. Bush aprovechó para comparar la Revolución americana del siglo XVIII con la guerra en Irak.  De paso recordó que el primero, como el último, había sido “George W.” La técnica de las asociaciones es propia de la publicidad.  Según ésta, una […]

  The nation is in grief; our memories are full of anguish, and yet we have fresh wounds.  As the Palestinians were commemorating our losses to the Israeli occupation in the Nakba and the Naksa, our blood was running hot in Gaza — but this time we are the murdered and the murderers, too. Hamas […]

  The first US Social Forum wrapped up on Sunday, July 1 in Atlanta, Georgia.  That it happened at all seems almost miraculous.  It is hard to remember any previous comparable gathering of diverse currents of US social movements.  This is not a particularly dynamic moment in their history — the anti-war movement is bland […]