Archive | Commentary

During the last year the global warming debate has reached a turning point.  Due to the media hype surrounding Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, followed by a new assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate skeptics have suffered a major defeat.  Suddenly the media and the public are awakening […]

Seventeen years ago, James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) fought for the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  Now Sensenbrenner is trying to repeal the “judicial amendments” that have destroyed the ADA. The ADA is not the only workplace law to suffer from judicial amendments. In the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Congress legislatively overruled judicial […]

3 million Vietnamese people and tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers are affected by Agent Orange — a chemical weapon used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War which causes cancer, other life-threatening illnesses, and serious birth defects in children — even those born several generations after the war. U.S. veterans received some compensation […]

Listen to Saadia Toor (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, College of Staten Island) and Kourosh Shemirani (of the Queer Iranian Alliance) on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News (WBAI, 99.5 FM, 31 May 2007) on liberal imperialism and how Western leftists should think about the conditions of women and LGBTQ people in Iran and […]

An attractive social democrat, Ségolène Royal, just lost the French presidential race to a neoliberal candidate, leaving French leftists debating the causes of their failures and what to do about them.  The center-left in Italy recently defeated the staunch neo-liberal, Sylvio Berlusconi.  Yet its incapacities to define a new and different social program or mobilize […]

  What happens when hundreds or even thousands of small and not-so-small organizations come together to meet, dialogue, and present their ideas over the course of a long weekend?  The World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of tens of thousands of people from over 100 countries, has provided this space for those able to […]

Perhaps you remember when Amnesty International’s journal printed as its lead story a laudatory review that liberal author Margaret Atwood wrote about Reading Lolita in Tehran.  Neither Amnesty nor Atwood nor Jacki Lyden, who promoted the twisted account of life in Iran on National Public Radio, bothered to mention the author’s close ties to warmongers […]

A mediados de los años setenta, los países no alineados reclamaron un Nuevo Orden Mundial económico e informativo.  Esa decisión provocó con el tiempo la retirada de Estados Unidos de la UNESCO.  Durante muchas décadas, apenas cinco grandes monopolios retuvieron el control de los flujos informativos.  Es solamente ahora cuando la exigencia de entender la […]

This month, US Labor Against the War, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and other organizations are sponsoring an “Iraq Labor Tour” in various U.S. cities. One of the featured speakers represents the Iraq Federation of Oil Workers, which spearheads opposition to privatization of Iraqi oil and demands immediate U.S. withdrawal. However, the tour also […]

The protest demonstrations have already begun, well in advance of the G-8 summit — and they are already sending strong messages.  The big summit meeting on June 5th and 6th in the seaside resort of Heiligendamm on the Baltic coast aims at winning a row of Brownie points for Angela Merkel and improving the images […]

  While the intense fighting between the Lebanese Army and Fateh el Islam escalates in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, the humanitarian situation of the Palestinian refugees — both within the camp itself and the tens of thousands who had previously fled the camp — continues to be dire. The majority of the […]

We, a delegation of students from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, were in Caracas this Saturday at a peaceful demonstration.  Imagine a protest that was more of a celebration than an angry mob.  Imagine ordinary citizens without ulterior agendas or motives celebrating the right to self-determination in the face of economic imperialism.  But, […]

My drive to work every day usually includes a little zig and zag “shortcut” through the outer reaches of Bethlehem, New York, a suburb south of Albany.  I like this section of the route, because there is a working farm, there are open fields, a creek, and other pockets of the natural world hanging on […]

SDS Is Back!  And Just in Time. . . . Mark Rudd I really appreciate your help with this.  I’ve been corresponding with these SDS kids since the fall and meeting them on their campuses across the country.  They’re accomplishing a lot. If you have any questions or want to discuss the re-formation of SDS […]

Michael Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University, is the editor of the recently published Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (NYU Press).  What motivated you to edit a collection on “New Conservatism”? The motivation was two-fold.  First, there was a real need to dissect American conservatism […]

Auto workers are bracing for a bumpy road ahead at Chrysler, following the May 14 announcement that Daimler-Chrysler (DCX) would sell off 80 percent ownership of the company to Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm.  The surprise sale may tip the balance of power further against the United Auto Workers (UAW) as the union […]

Hello, Doctor?  Thanks for taking my call — it’s an emergency.  I’ve been infected.  Well, medically speaking, I guess you’d say I’m not so much infected as occupied.  My symptoms?  They’re hard to describe.  A cough, maybe. Like today, I’m walking down the street.  Big, shady trees, leaves bright green-gorgeous of early spring, twittering birds, […]

The following is the text of Delia D. Aguilar’s keynote address at the 22-23 March 2007 Pacific Northwest Regional Conference of the National Association for Chicana/o Studies, University of Washington: “Class Dismissed?  Reintegrating Critical Studies of Class into Chicana and Chicano Studies.” — Ed. I cannot begin to tell you how delighted I am at […]

James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006) 190 pages, $16.95 paperback. Widely known as an expert in Latin American history and social movements, and a prolific critic of U.S. imperialism, James Petras has ventured forth in his latest book The Power of Israel in the United States, and […]

NAFTA from Below is an important book.  The full impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on the working people of Mexico, the U.S., and Canada has yet to be assessed, but this slender volume makes a major contribution to our overall understanding of this disastrous economic treaty that was imposed on the people […]