Archive | Commentary

An insider’s analysis of what Corporate Bankruptcy Czar Robert Miller is cooking up for workers and communities in America by Delphi worker/UAW activist Gregg Shotwell, with an introduction by former UAW Executive Board Member, Jerry Tucker Gregg Shotwell is a machine operator for Delphi (formerly GM) — the world’s largest auto parts supplier.  He has […]

  I am Ron Ridenour, a 55-year-old Flathead County and Canyon resident of Montana.  I stood before a federal judge on June 25th, 2004, the most critical reckoning day I had encountered in my lifetime.  In order to reduce a 5 to 20 year prison term and a two million dollar fine to livable amounts, […]

We are being short-changed.  The Oakland City Council and the Oakland Police Officers Association have just agreed to spend $2.4 million from city coffers, not to hire more police officers, but to recruit them. While Oakland residents fret about their security, city leaders present them with a bill for an empty plate.  Nobody has to […]

The Great Depression represented a new moment for government involvement in many facets of American life including a national photography project.  The government-sponsored photography project documenting the experiences of Americans during these years of economic crisis existed from 1935 through 1942.  The project was housed in various government departments’ including the Resettlement Administration, the Farm […]

“Filipino writers in the Philippines [and the United States] have a great task ahead of them, but also a great future.  The field is wide open.  They should rewrite everything written about the Philippines and the Filipino people from the materialist, dialectical point of view — this being, the only [way] to understand and interpret […]

The clouds quit teasing, gave us a hard rain with long rolls of thunder and lightning sky-splitters. We hid out in the hay sheds, shifted a few bales around to make the stacks look a little neater. When the rain quit we went to work in the fields, propped bales endwise against each other so […]

Richard D. Vogel, “NAFTA Corridors: Dividing the Nation to Multiply Profits” (MRZine, 4 February 2006) As required by law, the State of Texas has finally posted the long anticipated 4,000-page draft environmental impact statement for the Texas leg of the I-35 NAFTA corridor on the Internet.  Access to the document is limited by the digital […]

Si el pueblo trabajador en Estados Unidos ha de alcanzar unidad, autoconfianza colectiva e independencia política en el futuro próximo (¡y cuanto nos hacen falta!), la demanda del movimiento de los trabajadores inmigrantes de derechos plenos debe ser el primer punto en su agenda.  El pueblo trabajador en este país necesita darse cuenta de lo […]

After more than twenty years in the film industry, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was at the top of his profession in 1950.   He had won two Oscars in March for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and had completed filming All About Eve (1950) which would be released in October and go on […]

IRAQ: The Logic of Withdrawal (Hardcover) by Anthony Arnove (Introduction by Howard Zinn)BUY THIS BOOK Coherent.  That’s the one-word review of Anthony Arnove’s latest book, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New Press, April 2006).  Incoherent.  That’s what Washington’s policy in Iraq seems to be.  What makes Arnove’s book so important is that he dissects that […]

  Listen to Steffie Woolhandler on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News radio show (6 April 2006). Read David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, “Mayhem in the Medical Marketplace” (Monthly Review 56.7, December 2004). It’s a stirring scene.  The Governor, legislative leaders and leaders of Health Care for All standing in the State House Rotunda declaring […]

France’s leading bureaucrats, from President Jacques Chirac on down, have been defeated.  French neo-liberalism — the dismantling of its welfare state in favor of business —  has suffered a serious blow.  A powerful alliance of high-school and university students and of organized labor achieved the victory against the government’s law that undercut job security for […]

10 April 2006 was the National Day of Action for immigrant rights.  Millions marched nationwide on 9-10 April 2006 in opposition to HR 4437 (which would make undocumented immigrants — and those who help them stay in the United States — felons for the first time in the nation’s history) and in support of legalization […]

  Yiwen Cheng lives in Kansas City, and Stephen Philion lives in Minneapolis.

« L’article 8 de la loi Egalité des chances va être remplacé par un dispositif en faveur de l’insertion professionnelle des jeunes ». C’est en ces termes que le Président de la République signifie l’abrogation du CPE. C’est un authentique succès de l’action syndicale et de la mobilisation unie des étudiants, des lycéens, des salariés […]

Click on the image for a larger view! Doug Minkler is a San Francisco Bay Area artist specializing in fundraising, outreach, and educational posters. Minkler has collaborated with ILWU, Rainforest Action Network, SF Mime Troupe, ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, CISPES, United Auto Workers, Africa Information Network, ADAPT, Cop Watch, Street Sheet, and Veterans for […]

Michael Hoover, “Whose Domain? Private Power, Public Policy, and Local Politics” (17 March 2006) Local government initiatives to deal with housing and community development issues coincided with the expansion of industrial capitalism in the late 19th century.  New York City became the first to enact building codes following a cholera epidemic (the city’s third since […]

Those hoping for left-wing unity in Germany have been on an emotional roller-coaster ride in recent months, with many dramatic ups and downs. The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) which has already renamed itself The Left (to which the letters PDS are usually added), has about 70,000 members, who are divided on many issues but […]

The April issue of Monthly Review contains a biographical profile of Vito Marcantonio.  Marcantonio, or Marc as he was known, was the product of one of the worst slums in early twentieth-century New York.  Through seven Congressional terms in the 1930s and 40s, he was an indefatigable voice for his poor and oppressed constituents and […]

Peter McLaren David Gabbard and Karen Anijar Appleton, “Fearless Speech in Fearful Times: An Essay Review of Capitalists and Conquerors, Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, and Teaching Peter McLaren,” MRZine, 30 October 2005 Peter McLaren is Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of […]