Archive | Commentary

I’ve just about had it.  I cannot watch one more episode of the Daily Show which makes racist jokes about Arabs and Muslims.  I am sick and tired of people who see themselves as part of the left writing articles that put a liberal gloss over what is, in essence, a right-wing “clash of civilizations” […]

Nestled on the bank of the Illinois River, the small community of Meredosia, Illinois sits sixty-five miles west of the state capitol.  In 1955, National Starch and Chemical built a plant there and has been a key employer for this community of about a thousand people.  A producer of adhesives, National Starch was generally considered […]

Many eyes are on the U.S. real estate market.  “During the past five years, home prices have risen at an annual rate of 9.2 percent,” according to the 2006 Economic Report of the President released on February 13. Was this growth normal?  We need the historical context of home price increases to answer this question. […]

  The death of twelve persons on January 2 in Kalinga Nagar of Jajpur district in Orissa, when the police fired on adivasis (adi = original, vasi = inhabitants) protesting against state-directed displacement and demanding adequate compensation, once again demonstrates the impact of escalating “development” aggression on India’s aboriginal communities. According to the official version, […]

El 22 de enero del año 2002, Evo fue expulsado del Paraíso.  O sea: el diputado Morales fue echado del Parlamento. El 22 de enero del año 2006, en ese mismo lugar de pomposo aspecto, Evo Morales fue consagrado presidente de Bolivia. O sea: Bolivia empieza a enterarse de que es un país de mayoría […]

On Wednesday, February 15, 2006, a group of war resisters began a 34 day liquids-only fast in Washington, DC.  The fast is sponsored by the Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV) — a nonviolent action group made up of regular citizens who are fed up with the direction of the US government, especially as regards its […]

The United Transportation Union, which represents railroad conductors and some engineers, reports that negotiations with the railroad corporations had broken down over the issue of crew reduction.  The carriers are demanding the implementation of one-person train crews for many routes on the US freight rail system.  The current standard train crew is two, an engineer […]

  During the twentieth century, there were two major shifts in mainstream economic thinking.  These two major changes were the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s and the return of orthodoxy on the back of the Rational Expectation and Monetarist school in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Each of the shifts was preceded by a […]

There is screaming, hugging, chanting, and many shhhs; the group takes a momentary pause in their celebration to hear the news.  A delegation of 70 women from all over the world, including, India, Uganda, Guyana, the UK, and the US, stand together in the community of La Padera, Venezuela, awaiting the details. Juanita Romero, also […]

  Oslo is dead.  This is not much of a scoop, as analysts and pundits have been saying and writing these words for many years, at least since the Intifada of September 2000 began.  But now that the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections of January 25th, 2006, are over, we can officially turn off the […]

MAKING FRIENDS WITH BLACK PEOPLE by Nick AdamsBUY THIS BOOK Comedian and writer Nick Adams wants to be called Black . . . not African-American.  “Once you get into hyphenating based on continent of origin,” he wonders, “where does it stop?”  For a thought experiment, Adams offers the conundrum of hyphenate marrying hyphenate: “My as-yet-unborn […]

“The only domestic terrorist attack here is the U.S. government’s attack on the people of Puerto Rico.” — New York State Assemblyman José Rivera1 In a move reminiscent of a U.S. Marine invasion of a foreign country, the FBI descended in droves on Puerto Rico on February 10.2  Without breathing a word of the invasion […]

  “Predictions are suspect.  But something new is happening. . . .” — Paul Buhle1 A people’s movement against the “class war from above” is beginning to crystallize across Thailand.  Students and unionized workers have suddenly emerged as a new force in the streets in helping to organize a broad-based people’s alliance to oust the […]

  The fate of socialism after the fall of the socialist bloc will be determined, more than ever, by socialism’s capacity to sustain in theory and in practice the . . . idea that the intellectual’s adherence to the Revolution (like that of any other ordinary citizen), if the intellectual “really wants to be useful, […]

RED SEAS: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica by Gerald HorneBUY THIS BOOK Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica.  By Gerald Horne.  New York University Press, 2005, 358 pp. The political connections of Harlem and the British West Indies have been […]

  The US Green Party called for divestment from Israel on 21 November 2005: The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) publicly calls for divestment from and boycott of the State of Israel until such time as the full individual and collective rights of the Palestinian people are realized. . . .  The party […]

It was comical, how Maury and his friend Red kept meeting each other, like in Idaho for potato or sugarbeet harvest, or Montana to fight forest fire, and then they’d drift off, going their own ways, and somewhere down the line they’d run into each other again. It got to be like a serial on […]

MANUFACTURING DISCONTENT: The Trap of Individualism in Corporate Society by Michael PerelmanBUY THIS BOOK Given the absence of criminal penalties for corporate misbehavior, society needs an alternative means to protect itself against corporate abuses.  Ideally, effective regulation might help to keep corporations in line, but the regulatory structure in the United States is embarrassingly weak. […]

US liberals — left, right, and center — have always justified reformism on the grounds that it is realistic.  “Nothing more than a limited set of reforms is achievable in the present circumstances” has been their mantra.  They insist that efforts toward more basic “revolutionary” social changes would be successfully resisted by the capitalist establishment, […]

  NO COLD KITCHEN: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer by Ronald S. Roberts BUY THIS BOOK No Cold Kitchen is a biography of Nadine Gordimer by Ronald S. Roberts (published by STE Publishers).  As an activist, Gordimer played a vital role in the struggle against the apartheid.  In 1985, Gordimer declared: “I am a partisan […]