Archive | Commentary

It is fascinating for me to think about SDS. In fact, it’s downright compulsory. I am gathering stories and pictures, trying to weave them into a script for an artist to make into a visual (or comic-book) history, mostly “from the bottom up,” i.e., the chapter standpoint. Sometimes the national leaders were good, sometimes they […]

  Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort. This was a nation with no large standing army, with […]

“This is why we’re fighting,” this Delphi worker said, carrying her grandson on a picket line in Flint. Photo: Jim West. Rank-and-file United Auto Workers members stepped up their organizing efforts in December, forming a group called Soldiers of Solidarity (SOS) and planning actions to confront concessions. Meanwhile, auto parts maker Delphi pushed back the […]

  José Martí and Simón Bolívar, two of Latin America’s most respected independence fighters, recognized nearly a century ago that their homelands would never be free of imperial domination, until Latin America came together in solidarity as a united force. Martí and Bolívar’s insights remain relevant in the age of neo-liberal globalization.  The colonizers of […]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is no armchair theorist.  She was and is on the front lines of struggles for social justice at home and abroad.  An acclaimed author, Dunbar-Ortiz is also a professor of ethnic studies at California State University, Hayward.  Her substantial body of work includes Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the […]

“I’ve told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam, and I repeat this here tonight. . . . I’m hopeful that this fighting will not go on for long and that casualties will be held to an absolute minimum. This is an historic moment. We have in this past year made […]

Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds. “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 533 pages. Max Elbaum. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London: Verso, 2002. 370 pages, including index. Barry Sheppard. The Party, A Political Memoir, The Socialist Workers […]

The Social Movements and the State Among the presidential candidates that ran in the December election, Evo Morales has the broadest ties to the country’s social movements. However, he has played limited roles in the popular uprisings of recent years. During the height of the gas war in 2003, when massive mobilizations were organized to […]

Reading the local and international media, one gets the feeling that the brain hemorrhage which pushed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon out of politics will have almost the same effect as those two bullets which ten years ago ended the life of his friend and predecessor, Yitzchak Rabin — the death of the peace process. […]

  [This essay is a winner of an essay contest held by Left Hook and sponsored by Monthly Review. — Ed.] During the last two summers, I did not spend my days relaxing on a beach reading great novels and poems.  I did not write the grand story I promised myself I would write.  Instead, […]

[This essay is a winner of an essay contest held by Left Hook and sponsored by Monthly Review. — Ed.] I spent three of my formative years working for McDonald’s.  As if that were not bad enough, it was a tiny, cramped little store, tucked inside of a Wal-Mart.  If simply living in America is […]

The world scoffed in 1988 when it discovered that Nancy and Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer. But the world was wrong; Ronnie and Mommie needed all the help they could get. Their only mistake was in relying on the tacky, low-class zodiac of the masses. I have therefore upgraded Western astrology, in keeping with the […]

I’ve been in prison for almost 17 years.  Like so many other poor men raised in the ghettos throughout this country, I am guilty of the crime of ignorance, self-hate, and the desire to follow the road to self-destruction. Though our families tried to give us the tools they felt would lead to a more […]

I’ve been in prison for almost 17 years.  Like so many other poor men raised in the ghettos throughout this country, I am guilty of the crime of ignorance, self-hate, and the desire to follow the road to self-destruction. Though our families tried to give us the tools they felt would lead to a more […]

Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005), 271 pages, paperback, $22.00. LAST RESORTS: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (New Edition) by Polly PattulloBUY THIS BOOK The four S’s (sun, sand, sea, and, sometimes, sex) draw millions of tourists, mostly Americans and […]

The TV glows green like the obsolete computer in the attic blurred shapes that could be buildings or simply the geometry of electrons bright circles of lens flare as accents an abstract electronic image they say is Baghdad. I don’t know Baghdad, don’t know where the missiles are falling I don’t know which buildings are […]

Unless political elites change strategy and tactics in 2006, North-South relations will continue to degenerate.  By the end of last year, opportunities ranging from rock concerts to summits and trade negotiations were lost. South Africa’s role in this failure of global nerve was substantial.  Three leading politicians of South Africa — Thabo Mbeki, Alec Erwin, […]

1. Evo Morales y el socialismo “Evo, ¿que entienden tú y el MAS por socialismo?”, le pregunté durante aquellos horribles días de matanza de Sánchez de Losada, en La Paz, en febrero del 2003, donde estaba invitado por el Comité Ejecutivo de la Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). “Vivir en comunidad y en igualdad”, me contestó. […]

  In October 2005, I ran into several Guatemalan guest workers in a village laundromat.  My first guess was that they worked on a large dairy farm, but in my poor Spanish and their almost non-existent English, we managed to communicate, and they made me understand that their jobs were in new home construction!  I […]

Most of the coverage of the West Virginia mine murders quoted International Coal Group CEO Bennett Hatfield, who was on the scene. But its owner and “Non-Executive Chairman” is corporate takeover artist Wilbur L. Ross, Jr., who has bought up bankrupt firms in a variety of industries after they shed pension, health and/or other obligations […]