Archive | Commentary

“Do you support national (single-payer) health care insurance?” Click on the chart for a larger view. Sources: U.S. General Public: An AP-Yahoo! News survey of more than 1,800 people conducted Dec.14-20, 2007, by Knowledge Networks. U.S. Physicians: “Support for National Health Insurance among American Physicians: Five Years Later.” A survey of over 2,000 physicians, by […]

IF I AM NOT FOR MYSELF: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew by Mike MarquseeBUY THIS BOOK Your book is subtitled “Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew.”  Were you always an Anti-Zionist? No. I grew up, in the 1960s, in a left-wing household in a largely Jewish New York suburb — where Israel was seen as a […]

الضمير العربي أنا رافضة أنا هيمنتك تحت ستار الحرية أنا رافضة رأيك نصحك بإسم الديموقراطية الحرية مش منحة تتفضل بيها علي إرادتنا تمحي المحنة إصحي يا أمة يا عربية The Arab Conscience (Al Dameer Al Arabi, directed by Ahmad Al Arian), a sequel to The Arab Dream (Al Hilm Al Arabi, 1998), premiered on Zoom […]

  April 2, 2008 — The Department of Justice under the Bush administration continues to manipulate the legal system to keep Dr. Sami Al-Arian imprisoned indefinitely. Sami Al-Arian, a computer engineering professor from Tampa, Florida, was arrested on charges of supporting a designated terrorist organization in 2003.  Al-Arian proclaimed his innocence and maintained the charges […]

MRZine must be commended for its recent publication of Mike Friedman’s interview with Nicaragua’s Comandante Mónica Baltodano.  It is especially welcome because there has been a dearth of information and analysis about Nicaragua in the English-language world ever since the 1990 electoral defeat of the revolution.  That in some ways is puzzling because the actions […]

April 4, 1968 was the day when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee.  He had been working with the Memphis sanitation workers in their struggle for better working conditions and a union.  The night before his assassination, he gave his speech that ended with the words “But I want you to know […]

The US media and party election machines have once again transformed the run-up to the US elections into a melodrama.  Across the country, party candidates have been swaggering across stages, surrounded by stars and stripes and CNN logos, to spew out the latest piece of propaganda that the spin doctors have managed to conjure up.  […]

Although it’s been over five years since the United States invaded Iraq, a few non-patriots among us refuse to understand or endorse our wartime zeitgeist.  I have, therefore, persuaded our noble, statuesque Icon of America to gas up her torch and shed some light on a few selfish queries posed by our huddled, recalcitrant masses. […]

It’s become quite fashionable for journalists to report on the diminishing popularity of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (for example in the Independent, the Herald Tribune and the New York Times), especially focusing on his economic policies, which were seen as one of the main reasons he was elected. But facts on the ground suggest […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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, […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]