Archive | March, 2008

When World War I broke out in 1914, China joined the allies. As recompense, China was promised that the German concessions in the province of Shandong would be returned to them at the end of the war. After the Treaty of Versailles, which President Woodrow Wilson imposed on friends and foes alike, the German colonies were transferred to Japan, a more powerful ally than China.

It is now thirty years since the People’s Republic of China announced its market reform policy at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in December 1978, under the then new leadership of Deng Xiaoping.  The policy followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the purging […]

Without some basic historical knowledge, the subject I am dealing with could not be understood.

In Europe, people had heard about China. In the autumn of 1298, Marco Polo told marvelous tales about an amazing country he called Cathay. Columbus, an intelligent and intrepid sailor, was aware of the Greeks’ knowledge about the roundness of the Earth. His own observations led him to agree with those theories. He came up with the plan of reaching the Far East sailing westward from Europe. But…

Meet Jesus Iowa.  He’s a teen from Oaxaca whose family moves to a small Iowa town.  Athlete and worker, Jesus leaves his home in the U.S. heartland after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the East Coast.  That move partly heats up his community’s fears and hopes in Iowa Terror (Seventh Street Press, 2007), Mike […]

This past Wednesday, March 26, 20-year-old Lisandra Guerra became the 500-meter time-trial cycling world champion in the World Track Cycling Championship held in Manchester, Great Britain, following intense competition with athletes from 37 different countries. Fruit of our educational and sports system, of our talented youth and women, we can sincerely and legitimately feel proud of this victory. Credit where credit is due! Today, however, I shan’t write about sports. That same day, on the 26th, the Henry Reeve Contingent Detachment that had been involved in relief work in Peru returned to Cuba, undefeated.

  The Taft-Hartley mandatory Labor Board election is a steel trap.  It extinguishes the Constitutional right of free association for most workers most of the time.  It has effectively ended self-organization and the formation of new unions.  Tinkering with Board election procedures in an effort to revive the labor movement is exactly the wrong course […]

Cos’è successo al movimento contro la guerra che esplose nel 2003 mobilitando milioni di persone in tutto il mondo occidentale, al punto da esser definito una volta dal New York Times come «la seconda superpotenza»?Il fatto è che esso non è mai stato un movimento vero e proprio ma solo lo spasmo di un giorno, […]

  Washington DC — A March 13 event on Capitol Hill intended to expose Iran’s human rights violations was overcome with political rivalry and infighting.  The event, a one-hour briefing on Iran’s human rights record, was eventually broken up by Capitol Hill police officers. The briefing piggybacked on a recent rise in concern over Iran’s […]

  Thirty-two years, one month, and ten days ago — on 16 February 1976 to be exact — bankers, industrialists, the Sociedad Rural, and other leading organizations of rural sectors initiated a strike in support of a coup d’état (known as the Bosses’ Apegé Lockout), anticipating the military revolt of 24 March, all with the […]

  28 March 2008 Basra Assault Confirms Presence of British Forces a Threat to Political and Trade Union Rights in Iraq In a series of telephone calls from Basra over the past 48 hours, Iraqi trade union activists appeal for solidarity and describe how the so-called ‘Security Plan’ started midnight 24 March with intense shelling […]

Is there anyone with a deeper knowledge of the contemporary American labor movement than Kim Moody?  He not only seems familiar with the strategies and outcomes of practically every strike and organizing drive of the last twenty years.  He also appears to know the status of each union local, large and small, as well as […]

Christopher O’Brien.  Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World.  New Society Publishers (November 2006), 275 pages. Beer, like so many other products, is largely in the hands of giant corporations.  Therefore, drinking beer can often enrich the same systems of power we as activists are fighting against.  Fermenting Revolution: How To Drink […]

Unfortunately, influential American and Israeli opponents of Iran have been successful: using negative propaganda of the sort that claims that Iran has an intention to cause a nuclear holocaust and that a Third World War and “Islamic fascism” must be prevented, and tying the disaster of Iraq to Iran’s interference, they have turned Iran into […]

  Sociologist and historian at Yale University, Immanuel Wallerstein has described the globalization of capitalism, and today he criticizes Western “universalist” justifications of expansionism. In your book European Universalism, you revisit the 16th-century debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda on the American Indians.  In what respect does this debate seem to you particularly relevant to […]

New York City Labor Against the War joins the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions in denouncing Israel’s recent massacres in Gaza, the victims of which include at least 130 Palestinians — half of them civilians, including dozens of women and children — since February 27.

More than a year ago, I attended the official book release for the Venezuelan edition of Eva Golinger‘s Bush Versus Chávez, published by Monte Avila, and the book had previously been printed in Cuba by Editorial José Martí.  I recount this to make the following point: long before the publication of Bush Versus Chávez in […]

  March 20, 2008, destined to be another day of infamy.  On this date the US officially declared war on Iran.  But it’s not going to be the kind of war many have been expecting. No, there was no dramatic televised announcement by President George W. Bush from the White House oval office.  In fact […]

March is a cruel month in the recent history of the Middle East.  This year is the fifth anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving an armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozer on March 16, 2003 as she attempted to stop the gigantic vehicle from destroying the […]

The intimate partnership between mainstream economics and right-wing ideology has long trumpeted the wonderful efficiency of markets.  In these partners’ fantasy, markets are truly wondrous coordination mechanisms that perfectly match the supply of goods and services to what buyers demand.  All this happens, they say with immense self-satisfaction, without the intervention of any government or […]

Tuesday, March 18 marked the fifth anniversary of the arrest of more than 70 quislings, the capos of imperialism’s fifth column in Cuba who, paid by the U.S. government, violate the laws of the land and share the opinion that this dark corner of the world should be swept off the map. On that date…