Archive | Commentary

It is important to recall that, until the 1970s, collective bargaining in the United States and Canada was largely about workers demanding improvements from their employers. But a new era in collective bargaining erupted at the end of the 1970s that was soon dubbed “concessionary bargaining.” Corporations were now the ones making the demands. Tensions […]

On November 4, 2005, Democratic Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts introduced a bill whose purpose is to “prohibit the use of funds to deploy United States Armed Forces to Iraq.” This bill, numbered HR 4232, is co-sponsored by twelve other representatives, including Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA). The bill was […]

In recent decades, many well-meaning thinkers and activists have peddled or purchased the idea that class conflict has somehow waned or been “de-centered” in the richer nation-states.  As workers in these countries have lost more and more power, and as vast tides of wealth have sloshed around in the form of automobiles, shopping malls, and […]

Military bands played and choirs of sweet-voiced children sang today at Arlington National Cemetery, as President George W. Bush officially commemorated nearly a century of anticommunist hysteria in a stirring ceremony consecrating the Tomb of the Unknown Red-Baiter. “We Americans owe so much to communist witch-hunts,” declared a tearful President Bush, exhibiting an uncharacteristic degree […]

  For the most part, we go along living without thinking much about the world around us. Things just seem to happen without rhyme or reason. My parents knew that people like themselves were not quite the same as people who had a lot more money, but they didn’t reflect very deeply as to why […]

David Cronenberg‘s latest, A History of Violence, is a fine reworking of the Western and film noir in his “realist” turn. In a feminist twist of film noir, in this film it is a man, not a woman, who has a past. The past that the man (well played by Viggo Mortensen) thought he left […]

John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, will join Roger Marheine, Sonali Kolhatkar, and Barbara Trent in the keynote plenary session at the Students and Educators to STOP THE WAR conference, Los Angeles, 19 November 2005. The conference is timely indeed. As William Ayers and Mike Ferner remind us, the No Child Left Behind Act, […]

Two URPE Insights First, I should start by assuring you that I have not gone round the bend. I am not about to suggest that we dust off our volumes of Capital, corner some poor unsuspecting soul, and then launch into some long-winded exegesis of the concept of commodity fetishism. That sounds more like a […]

  A cross-Canada week of action in solidarity with Haiti will be kicked off by a November 12 demonstration on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Solidarity committees are springing up across the country, objecting to the central role that the Canadian government played, along with France and the United States, in overturning the democratically-elected government of […]

As election day (now rescheduled for December 18, 2005) approaches, musicians are mobilizing in Bolivia. Who are on the side of Evo Morales and el Movimiento al Socialismo? Arawi, Tupay, Alejandro Cámara, Semilla, and la banda Real Imperial de Oruro, among others. Here are two samples of music for the MAS. “Cholita Marina para Evo” […]

A rare moment of truth — several of them, actually — occurred at last week’s meeting of the Toledo Board of Education’s Policy Committee when school officials, peace activists, and military recruiters assembled to discuss a draft policy to control recruiters in public schools. Thanks to the federal No Child Left Unrecruited Act, kicking the […]

[Lisa N. contributed all photographs below that illustrate Remi Kanazi’s essay. Lisa came back to the United States from her nine-month sojourn in Palestine two months ago. Over the last several years, she spent twenty-seven months in Palestine, working with Palestinians and Israelis struggling to end the Israeli occupation. She took some of the photographs […]

  “I’ve always loved George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, those kinds of guys,” said Kevin’s smiling, catastrophically Caucasian father from his overstuffed recliner, as I waited for the boy to come down the wide, oak stairway with the sheets of music he had scribbled his ideas down onto, but which he had mistakenly left upstairs in […]

Ten years after the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, with its razor-thin victory for the No side, and 25 years since the first referendum, mass media and academics alike have been immersed lately in speculation on the likely result of a third such vote, which could occur as early as 2007. This is not an […]

(Patrick Resta is the New England organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War. He can be reached at .) I want to discuss Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), but first a little background on you. Can you tell us about your service in Iraq? When were you in Iraq? I served as a medic […]

When we arrived at our hotel in Rome at the beginning of the trip to Italy my son and I made last February, we were greeted by young North Africans selling umbrellas, something that became a familiar sight during our visit. I asked one of them if I could take his picture. He complied readily. […]

For better or worse, I work for a power company. My mostly white male union workers and I have been through cycle after cycle of lousy labor contracts. We’ve seen healthcare, retirement benefits, job security, and work practices crumble, and we dread our next round of labor negotiations. Customer service has fared no better than […]

  One of the most pleasant (and, for us, unanticipated) consequences of finishing a film is the chance to travel on other people’s tab. In the coming months, we have invitations to travel and screen Zizek! in venues as far flung as Vienna and New York City, Beirut and Columbia (Missouri, that is), primarily at […]

The protest against the Nazis in Toledo on October 15, 2005 was an appropriate response to the violent racism that the Nazi party represents. Wherever racist groups like the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan go, they need to be exposed for what they are, not ignored. Sure, they may be (willing) pawns in a […]

The disconnect between Bush regime deed and American public need grows: in Iraq, in New Orleans, on global warming and off-shore oil drilling, from Social Security to selecting Supreme Court Justices, the gulf widens. The choice of Dr. Benjamin S. Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve Board Chairman follows the pattern. Just as […]