Archive | Commentary

STRANGE LIBERATORS: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit by Gregory Elich (with Michael Parenti’s Introduction and Mickey Z’s Afterword)BUY THIS BOOK I first met Greg Elich more than two years when we were both speakers at the One Dance People’s Summit.  We’ve since become friends and I was proud to write the afterword for […]

Watch Fanaa if it comes to a theater near you, out of solidarity with Aamir Khan if nothing else. Apparently, the BJP is angered by Khan, the handsome star of Fanaa (who plays Rehan Qadri, a Kashmiri boy who is serving in the Indian military but secretly working for the Kashmiri independence movement — Rehan […]

America’s most-watched TV crime dramas leave the impression that crime and punishment in the streets of America is an equal opportunity event.   Even cursory content analysis of the most popular shows indicates that the incidence of minority offenders is at (or below) the minority proportion of the population at large, while the number of minority […]

[The following profile of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first appeared in Asia Times Online (www.atimes.com) on 19 May 2006.  It shows that the President of Iran is winning the right friends (the economically disenfranchised, ambitious men and women of younger generations who are denied political power by the current clerical rulers, ordinary Iranians of middling sorts who […]

  Introduction by Socialist ProjectThe passing of a resolution on 27 May 2006 by the Ontario Division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in support of the Palestinian peoples has sparked a great deal of notice across the North American labour movement, and, indeed, the international labour movement.  Resolution 50 clearly states the case […]

At noon in the hay sheds Lester and me, we kept mostly quiet and old Enos didn’t say much either.  Maury and Vern did almost all the talking.  Vern was a cowboy, an all-around Marlboro Man, calm and rugged, except that back then he smoked Camels.  And Jared, the man we called Preacher when he […]

WHO THE HELL IS STEW ALBERT? by Stewart Edward AlbertBUY THIS BOOK Stew Albert had one of his smart, funny ideas when he was thinking about a name for his memoir.  “My Sixties,” he said was going to call it.  He was in his late fifties when we kicked this one around and I thought […]

5 June 2006 marks the 39th anniversary of the beginning of the war that led to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  In observation of this event, the Institute for Middle East Understanding talked with five prominent Palestinians who have experienced the occupation since it began.  We asked them for their […]

MAY 6, 2006, New York City Stew Albert Photo by Robert Altman © 2006 Stew Albert was our troubadour, poet, writer, our cherished moral center. On May Day 1971, in Washington DC during the May Day antiwar demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of activists to shut down the city, Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo […]

  Andrew Stern, president of the 1.7-million-member Service Employees International Union, once likened the leadership of a mass movement to the crew on a sailboat.  What matters is the wind in the sails, he said, not the fight over who steers. The wind behind the movement for immigrant rights had reached gale force by May […]

  Click on a photo for a larger view. 23-25 May 2006 29 May 2006 On the eighth day of the Olympia Port Militarization Resistance, the U.S.S. Pomeroy has docked to take the Stryker Brigade to Iraq.  The resistance escalates, the Port fence is shaken and nearly taken down before a riot squad enters the […]

Shakespeare.  Undeniably one of the most well-known names in the world.  His plays are performed all over the planet in several different languages, and his collected works are read by millions (if not, in fact, billions) of people.  Thousands of theatre companies around the world are dedicated to his work and he is taught as […]

In June 2004, the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), resolved to consider a phased, selective divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation.  Subsequently it came under intense pressure from Jewish organizations (and their allies) and will consider rescinding the resolution at the next General Assembly meeting on June 15-22 in Birmingham, Alabama.  To firm up […]

The room had been arranged, the speakers ready — with a last minute, unannounced substitution of Wilfredo Berrios of El Salvador’s SUTTEL (telecom) union replacing Miguel Gonzalez Vargas from the Oil Workers Union of Venezuela who had not been able to come due to problems back home — and the only remaining question was, “Would […]

During the countdown to the May Day immigrant walkouts, transportation industry commentators worried about the impact that immigrant strikes would have on the nation’s ports.  Many feared repeats of the 2004 and 2005 strikes by mostly immigrant Latino port truckers (or troqueros), which crippled freight traffic up and down the West Coast. Troqueros at the […]

“He’s not always as ambitious as he could be, and he’s better on dishonesty than he is with feelings of warmth . . . He’s a good guy, and he’s definitely an auteur.  Which is not to say that every film is an artistic success.”1                      […]

  The Palestinian gay and lesbian community has yet to leave the closet, but it’s on its way.  Today it’s possible to go to parties of gays from the Occupied Territories and see young residents of the West Bank perform drag.  They have not told their mother about this, but one day they intend to […]

Mister Bush, you deserve a good reaming for your performance at the United States Military Academy graduation on Saturday.  Post around to my room for some character guidance. Come in, wackhead.  Slam up against that wall!  Suck up that capacious gut!  Shoulders back!  Pop up that puny chest!  Fingers along the seams of your trousers!  […]

At the annual convention of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario, held 24-27 May 2006 in Ottawa, the union passed a resolution of historic importance.  Resolution 50 — adopted unanimously by the 900 delegates at the largest convention in the union’s history — expressed support for the global campaign against Israeli apartheid.  The […]

All my life, I have wanted to be a cutting-edge, Queer Studies academic.  And now that I have written my first opus deconstructing a Western literary classic, I am!  All I have to do is send this in to the London Review of Books, and wait to be mercilessly attacked by rightwing critics like David […]