Archive | Commentary

Click on an image for a larger view. Gaza: Free Fire Zone Does the Israeli Army Need Smart Bombs or Smart Soldiers? Accept the Existence of Israel Carlos Latuff, born in Rio de Janeiro on 30 November 1968, is a political cartoonist.  He is the author of the famous “We Are All Palestinians” series, comparing […]

The depth and breadth of bipartisan commitment to the US empire among America’s political elite is best seen in the House vote on HR 282, the “Iran Freedom Support Act,” essentially a bill to “make U.S. sanctions against Iran under ILSA permanent unless there is a change of government in Iran”1:   YEAS NAYS PRES […]

The 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s signing of the Interstate Highway Act on 29 June 1956 is a good time to watch a 1996 PBS documentary Taken for a Ride again. Ten years ago, President Clinton visited my city during the 1996 presidential campaign.  Riding a “Presidential Special” from Columbus to Toledo on tracks that no […]

Here in the purported paragon of electoral democracy, the United States of America,  we have now suffered through presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 that were widely regarded as questionable.  I am referring of course to the fiasco’s of Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. Even before the Supreme Court made Bush President by […]

Last week, in Hudson v. Michigan, the new composition of the Supreme Court revealed its hostility to the century-old exclusionary rule, which prevents illegally-obtained evidence from being introduced against a criminal defendant.  In 1914, in Weeks v. US, the Supreme Court said that, without the sanction of exclusion, the Fourth Amendment “might as well be […]

On a broken woman’s scalp a froth of white gloves the fingers scrubbing pillow-matted hair combed, parted, cut, frosted tissue-wrapped ends rolled gently pink and blue. Surrounded by potions clear, cream rinses and highlighters, protein replenishers, a bouquet of silver scissor wands a judge whose voice can’t shape her name sits rapt anticipating, a waitress […]

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Iran must really adore the American model of state conduct.  Contrary to popular perceptions, the decision-makers in Tehran agree with their nemesis, Akbar Ganji, who recently told the Voice of America that the West was “the cradle of civilization.”  Two recent moves by Iran are especially noteworthy […]

Robert Fitch.  Solidarity for Sale.  PublicAffairs, 2006. In Solidarity for Sale, Bob Fitch argues that the defining weakness of U.S. unionism bubbles up from a single poisoned well: corruption.  Much of his book is a well-written account of the rise of business unionism in this country — and business unionism’s ability to hold onto power […]

Against a bloody backdrop of massacres and lynchings aimed at blacks in early 20th century America, W.E.B. DuBois observed that the suffering of the nation’s darker-skinned sons and daughters gave many whites a feeling of “fierce, vindictive joy.”  He further wrote, “A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons […]

The current debate in Congress over the war in Iraq has put the myth of victory and its opposite — surrender– back on the front pages.  These are actually more than myths; they are genuine misrepresentations of what’s happening in Iraq — lies, in other words.  It doesn’t really matter, though, because those who want […]

I was fortunate enough to attend the Bruce Springsteen “Seeger Sessions” concert in Saratoga Springs, New York, Monday. June 19th. The current Springsteen tour is in support of his new album, We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions, inspired by a request to do a Pete Seeger song for a tribute, which morphed, according to Springsteen, into […]

With several months to go until the election, you may already be tired of the seemingly endless speculation in the media about the Democrats’ chances to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.  While there is some small discussion among working people about this possibility, for most, the November 7th elections are a long […]

Capitalism’s demand for cheap labor is the thread that runs throughout the history of immigration in the U.S. and remains the central issue today.  Currently, the crux of the immigration issue is the status of the undocumented Mexican and Central American labor force working in this country.  Just how closely the U.S. economy is linked […]

After years of tortured searching, I have finally found a use for Western literature.  I merely select pieces from the dead-white-men canon and revise them, in a way that we can better understand contemporary politics!  For instance, the perplexing realpolitik of a certain U.S. Senator, and possible Presidential candidate, suddenly becomes clear, as we reconfigure […]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM by David HarveyBUY THIS BOOK Neoliberalism has left an indelible, smoldering mark on our world for the last thirty years.  Eminent Marxist geographer David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005), spoke earlier this year to Sasha Lilley, of the radical radio program Against the Grain, about […]

Even before Iran was rocked by the mass uprising of 1978-79, I understood that moralists of all stripes shroud certain tragedies with unique reverence as a means of discouraging dissent.  Three decades later, Iran’s opposition movement — and occasionally Human Rights Watch — are grounded in orthodoxies of their own even as they struggles against […]

  My father’s travels ended in 1980. We came back to live the Iran-Iraq war. Zinnah, my sister, was a child of ten when she attended the Dijla (Tigress) Primary School. One day she returned to ask my mother, “Are we Sunni or Shooyouii (Arabic for Communist)?” a word she had most probably picked up […]

I watched the World Cup match of Iran and Mexico — two peoples with whom Washington is at odds! — on 11 June, with my Iranian friends (mainly men).  So I adopted Iran as my team for the day. Knowing little about Iranian footballers, before the match began, I told my friends to point out […]

2,500 US known dead, give or take a corpse or two  Untold tens of thousands of Iraqis. A new and more repressive crackdown in Iraq’s capital city titled, rather lamely, Operation Forward Together.  No Iron Fist this time.  No Desert Storm.  Just Forward Together into the fog or perhaps the abyss.  No one really seems […]

  I. The New Israeli Left The new Israeli Left — Zionist and liberal — reinvented itself immediately following the 1967 war.1  During the 1948 war and its aftermath, the Zionist Left had difficulty in working out the contradiction between its socialist obligations to social and political justice and being an inseparable part of the […]