Archive | Commentary

Since the coming into power of the Stephen Harper Conservative government in January of this year, there has been much gnashing of teeth over the foreign policy stance of Canada.  In particular, Canada’s relation with the U.S. on a phalanx of fronts has been at the center of controversy.  One has been the softwood lumber […]

L’assassinat de Pierre Gemayel, ministre libanais de l’Industrie, est un acte indéniablement terroriste qui intervient à un moment délicat de polarisation politique au Liban.  L’empressement de Washington – et certains de ses clients libanais – à désigner la Syrie souligne d’emblée l’enjeu géopolitique de la situation au Liban. Mais cela n’empêche pas de noter, froidement, […]

America stands shamed in the eyes of the world thanks to the Bush administration’s crime spree.  And, as a partial result, the Democrats scored a resounding triumph in an election where only 40.4% of eligible Americans cast ballots.  40.4%!  So much for urgency. The Democrats, covering their aid-and-abetment in the American catastrophe called Iraq, chortled […]

The massive grief for Tower Records is staggering.  Since the announcement that it would be liquidating and selling to Los Angeles-based Great American Group, music fans and journalists alike have been dreading the moment when the super-chain will be closing its doors; a moment which will arrive any day now.  Anyone who passes by a […]

The recent election win of an incumbent and centrist GOP governor in California over his Democratic rival by double digits might suggest that the political status quo is alive and well.   Is this gubernatorial landslide a triumph of centrism in the face of left and right extremism?  Have California voters spoken and returned to their […]

Critical students of ethnically coded nationalism would agree: propagating the glory of “our” race or culture almost always entails the suppression of equal status for the race or culture that is represented as its other.  West Asia is no exception.  Iranian and Arab identity politics thwarted, perverted, and dismembered communitarian thinking for long periods in […]

  This is Sid Shniad’s presentation to the LaborTech 2006 panel on “The Corporate Media Assault and Developing a Labor Media Strategy” (18 November 2006). — Ed. This panel is called Corporate Media Assault and Developing a Labor Media Strategy.  In my view, the issue should be framed as a discussion of the overall corporate […]

  “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’  But . . . the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” — Martin Luther King, Jr.1 “The truth […]

NAKED IMPERIALISM:The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance by John Bellamy FosterREAD EXCERPTBUY THIS BOOK John Bellamy Foster’s Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance was published by Monthly Review Press in May 2006.  It consists of essays written between September 2001 and September 2005, addressing the origins of today’s undisguised imperialism, led by the […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its November 2006 issue features the following editorial.  — Ed. The November 8, 2006 agreement between the seven parties alliance (“SPA”) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (“CPN(M)”) brings peace, confirms the subjection of king and army […]

Peter McLaren, Rage and Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism, and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 394 pages, paper $32.95. “One morning they gave us a guinea pig.  It came to the house in a cage.  At midday, I opened the door of the cage.  I returned home at nightfall and […]

Occidente aparece, de pronto, desprovisto de sus mejores virtudes, construidas siglo sobre siglo, ocupado ahora en reproducir sus propios defectos y en copiar los defectos ajenos, como lo son el autoritarismo y la persecución preventiva de inocentes.  Virtudes como la tolerancia y la autocrítica nunca formaron parte de su debilidad, como se pretende ahora, sino […]

Come ye, O Light in the Loafer.  Come ye, O Friend of Dorothy.  Ye conservative homosexuals who looked to the Democrats and were rebuked by their lurid liberal election gains.  Ye right-thinking rump-rangers who looked to the Republicans, only to be scorned as left-leaning “queers.”  Ye passing-for-straight poofs who turned in despair to the preacher […]

Exit polls conducted at last week’s elections reveal the contradictions and limits of the Democrats’ victories.  As reported in the New York Times (November 9, 2006, page P7), the four fifths of US voters who are white preferred Republicans (52 to 48 percent), while Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians chose Democrats (by 89 to 11, 70 […]

South of the Border The residents of the colonias of Matamoros, Mexico are refugees of the modern free trade wars.  Located near the maquiladora factories south of the US-Mexico border in the lower Rio Grande Valley, the impoverished colonias provide sharp contrast to the affluent suburbs and bustling shopping malls just across the river in […]

  The bus rumbled along a highway in southwest Iran, passing a series of anti-aircraft batteries and rickety guard towers before pulling in through a checkpoint to the Bushehr nuclear plant compound.  Having anticipated significant difficulties finding, much less nearing, the reactor, I stared in stunned silence at its dome.  So much for state secrets.  […]

RELIGION AND THE HUMAN PROSPECT by Alexander SaxtonBUY THIS BOOK I first met Alexander Saxton in 1997 at a conference on the “problem of whiteness,” held at the University of California, Berkeley, at which we were both speakers.  Although we had never met, I considered him a mentor, particular his book, The Rise and Fall […]

I. Three Metropoles, Four Peripheries Many of us on the Left have pondered what would replace the Cold War division of the planet into the First, Second, and Third World.  Though the three worlds thesis was arbitrary at best — the social divisions within nation-states are often more significant than the distinctions between nation-states — […]

The man in the cardboard box wakes up in America on the morning after the election after a night of clattering in the fuzz of high frequency bands the static on the screen attracts the dust of Emperors and Czars and postmen. He tastes the residue on his tongue babies cry, the smoke of the […]

Harry Kelber, My 70 Years in the Labor Movement.  379pp, $20 pbk.  Labor Educator Press, 25 Washington St., Suite 302, Brooklyn NY 11201. This is a revised edition of an underappreciated 1996 self-published classic by one of the most remarkable figures in the last half-century of American labor. What makes Harry Kelber still tick, at […]