Archive | Commentary

I took my Harry Choates CD off the player even though that Cajun violin he plays had a lot to say a year after Katrina hit.  The new Bob Dylan album was in my hand and it was time to put the little disc on.  Modern Times is what he’s calling it.  The cover has […]

  In the Name of God Ladies and Gentlemen, Distinguished Guests, “As-Salam-u-‘Alaikum” — Peace be upon you. Knowledge of the human soul has been one of the most significant debates in philosophical discourse throughout history.  A part of this tale was written in the Orient and another part in the Occident.  It is important to […]

Click on the photo for a larger view. Stephen Philion, Assistant Professor of Sociology at St. Cloud State University, contributed the photographs. | | Print

  Michael Perelman, Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology, Monthly Review Press, 2006, 238 pages, $20.00 RAILROADING ECONOMICS: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology by Michael Perelman BUY THIS BOOK Railroading Economics by Michael Perelman is an indictment of economists.  But the indictment is not, thankfully, the familiar rehearsal of untenable […]

  Mineros de Escondida harán plebiscito para medir apoyo a renacionalización Los patos negros de la mina de cobre La Escondida, quienes recién acaban de superar una difícil huelga de 25 días, planean efectuar en Antofagasta un plebiscito ciudadano que mida el apoyo para iniciar el debate sobre la conveniencia de una renacionalización del cobre.  […]

“If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built,” writes Patrick Buchanan in his new book titled State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.  For him, border control is the key to the […]

1. Introduction This commentary is offered as a contribution to the ongoing debate on the Bamako Appeal.  On the 18th of January, on the day preceding the start of the Polycentric World Social Forum in Bamako, Mali, a conference was held in the same capital, commemorating the holding of the Bandung Conference 50 years back.  […]

Over at least the last decade, employers in the West have been able to enlarge profits dramatically by taking simultaneous advantage of the following three opportunities: raising workers’ productivity (computerization, etc.), merging to reduce costs (vertical and horizontal), and keeping wages from rising much or at all (outsourcing jobs and importing ever-cheaper consumer imports from […]

Racism against Arabs and Muslims long preceded the 9-11 terrorist attacks and has much of its roots in Western imperialism in the Middle East, especially Israel’s colonization of Palestine.  Yet, the escalation that we witness today can be traced to the war on terror launched after 9-11 by Bush and his neoconservative ideologues with the […]

“We are moving into a service economy.”  How often have we heard this in the past twenty-plus years?  Most of us here in the Twin Cities have thought little about it until we received the jolt this year that, after eighty years in operation, the Highland Park Ford plant is going to be closed.  We […]

  Young people in El Salvador protested last July 5th against a wave of price increases of electricity, public transportation, and gas.  The protest ended in blood, and, as a consequence, 26 year-old trade union leader, Daniel Ernesto Morales Rivera, was beaten and thrown in jail.  The following is an interview of his experience. JA: […]

Upon returning from summer break, I found a surprising letter awaiting me written by three colleagues from another university, two of whom I’d known and worked with for decades.  The letter simultaneously informed me about a conference my friends were organizing and explained — with some anguish I think — that I would not be […]

After thirty-four days of relentless aerial bombardment and a ground invasion, Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon’s civilian population has come to a halt, at least temporarily.  As the dust from the rubble of Lebanon’s ruined cities, villages, and infrastructure settles, and as bodies of victims are recovered and buried, and the human losses mourned by […]

To endorse the following statement, please send your name, location, affiliation and title (if any) to [email protected], or NYCLAW, PO Box 3620166, PACC, New York, NY 10129. U.S. Out of the Middle East New York City Labor Against the War August 11, 2006 For weeks, Israel has turned Lebanon into a killing ground, slaughtering and […]

It was Jay Gould who once bragged that he could pay half the working class to kill the other half.  In American labor history, that often meant fomenting and exploiting racism to divide and conquer.  Apparently, CBS wants to give us a TV metaphor for it: it announced that the contestants on the upcoming season […]

  Paul LeBlanc Paul LeBlanc is what I have called an “organic intellectual,” a scholar and activist who has risen directly out of the working class.  Paul is the author of many books, including A Short History of the U.S. Working Class (Humanity Books, 1999) and Black Liberation and the American Dream (Humanity Books 2003), […]

When Harker sold off the hay ranches, the new owner, a super-rich businessman from Denver, kept Lester on as maintenance man.  This owner, Christopher Bane and his wife Audrey set themselves up in Harker’s old headquarters ranch and right away started drawing up plans for a big house on the sage bench across the creek […]

Gary Tyler, at one time the youngest person on death row, turned forty-eight years old this July.  He has spent thirty-two of those years in jail for a crime he did not commit.  The case of Gary Tyler is one of the great miscarriages of justice in the modern history of the United States, in […]

I was at a conference titled Build the Left, Fight the Right this past June.  The speakers and workshops at the conference ranged from the war in Iraq to the immigrant rights movement in the United States.  One of the most interesting (and there were many) and hopeful (in terms of a brighter future for […]

What Happened on May Day? On May 1, 2006, the largest strike in US history took place, with over a million people on the streets in a powerful show of force.  The May Day strike represented a culmination of waves of marches across the country demanding full, immediate legalization for all undocumented immigrants, workers’ rights […]