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Let’s Put the Nature of Work on Labor’s Agenda: Part Six
In the last four parts of this series, I gave many examples of the alienating and degrading nature of work in capitalist societies. Even “good” jobs, such as college teaching and nursing, have lost whatever luster they once had. Part-time teachers teach an increasing fraction of all course while struggling to make ends meet. […]
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Filiberto*
La hemorragia de América anclada en tu cuerpo como una sangría en tu alma cáncer de espanto quebrada de llanto canto de dolor y muerte pasajeros cautiverios secuestradas las almas y en ti Puerto Rico se proyecta resurge y reclama el faro de luz negado por Halcones de la noche tú como un rayo […]
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Dribbling toward Armageddon
Retired U.S. Army Lt. General William Odom is a Vietnam Veteran who, in the late 1970s, helped Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski use mujahedeen zealots to “give the Soviets their Vietnam” in Afghanistan. In the mid-1980s, Odom worked for Ronald Reagan as Director of the National Security Agency. One week ago, this very same General […]
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CAFTA Math
CAFTA 15 NAME (Click on the name for contact information.) DISTRICT Melissa Bean IL (8th District) Top Industries/Top Contributors Jim Cooper TN (5th District) Top Industries/Top Contributors Henry Cuellar TX (28th District) Top Industries/Top Contributors Norm Dicks WA (6th District) Top Industries/Top Contributors Rubén Hinojosa TX (15th District) Top Industries/Top Contributors William Jefferson LA (2nd […]
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History Can Guide Us: Toward a Third Reconstruction
“Then came this battle called the Civil War, beginning in Kansas in 1854, and ending with the presidential elections of 1876, twenty awful years. The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste.”1 — W.E.B. DuBois, Black […]
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Second Letter to Young Activists: But It’s My Own Country!
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at his most radical, the year before he was assassinated, said: “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” That was four decades ago, yet it is perhaps more true today. The greatest purveyor of violence on this earth is my own government. For those […]
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The Euro — Going Global, Making Trouble: Why the Europeanization of “Modell Deutschland” Does Not Make a World Currency
Going Global Supporters and even critics of the European Monetary Union (EMU) often see its policies — its rejection of Keynesian demand management that was written into the Maastricht Treaty and later transformed into the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), as well as its monetarist belief in the priority of anti-inflationary policies over any other […]
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A New Labor Federation Claims Its Space: If Enthusiasm on Display Were Substance, CtW Could Claim a Good Start
Jerry Tucker The founding convention of the Change-to-Win labor federation held in St. Louis on September 27, 2005 was, if nothing else, filled with enthusiasm and efficiently managed. The founding unions’ top leaders put forward a lean and specifically organizing-focused agenda, and it was adopted without even a hint of dissent. The longer-term question is […]
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Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” Law: Killing in Defense of Private Property, at Home or in the Streets
Inequality in the state of Florida has become increasingly dangerous. Despite extensive urban planning and social policies that maintain the segregation of the haves from the have-nots, interaction and even conflict between them are unavoidable. The relationship of extremes in the state’s major metropolitan areas is both interdependent and alienating — the residents of the […]
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Neo-Paleyism’s Assault on Reason
William Paley‘s Natural Theology, originally published in 1802, stands as one of the prime examples of the teleological, mystical, and theistic premises that underlie bourgeois thought. Paley opened his book with an argument that if one were crossing a heath and stumbled upon a watch, one would inevitability infer that it must have had a […]
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Becoming Conscious of Our Own Strength: Gabriele Zamparini Listens to Voices of Dissent
An Italian-born former law student, Gabriele Zamparini moved to the States in 1998 where he worked as an Italian teacher and freelance journalist. It was post-9/11 when Zamparini got the idea to make a documentary about “the fast growing, grassroots peace movement” he was witnessing in America. The result was a seven-part film series called […]
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We Are Just Getting Warmed Up:Notes on Civil Disobedience (Monday, 26 September 2005)
We gather provisions. In my pockets are only a key to the house, $50, and an energy bar — somehow in my careful adherence to the recommendations I have neglected to bring my driver’s license — and in my shoe are a pen and a makeshift notebook. I am ready for this. We drink […]
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Flexibility for Whom?
MANUFACTURING DISCONTENT: The Trap of Individualism in Corporate Society by Michael PerelmanBUY THIS BOOK Imagining the workplace as a network of voluntary relationships has dire political implications. For example, in 1997, a California state agency, the Industrial Welfare Commission, bowing to employer pressure voted to reinterpret an overtime regulation dating back to 1918. For almost […]
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Induced Failure
The current penal system in America is not working. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that it predisposes prisoners to recidivism (a relapse into a life of crime). Since man is ultimately a product of his environment, the current system’s products speak for themselves: failure. The system’s practices set […]
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Dylan
[The following was delivered, by Paul Buhle, to an audience of 150 Brown undergraduates preparing to watch the first night of the Dylan special directed by Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 26 September 2005.] In my young political lifetime, from being your age to twice your age, there were three great individual singers […]
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An Interview with John S. Saul
[John S. Saul is professor emeritus of politics at York University in Toronto. He is the author of many highly-acclaimed books on the politics of southern Africa, including Recolonization and Resistance: Southern Africa in the 1990s, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword, The Crisis in South Africa, and A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism […]
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This Time, the Movement Won’t Leave the Streets
After a hiatus of more than a year, the anti-war movement surged back into the streets on September 24, 2005. Diverted into the cul-de-sac of the Kerry campaign, which saw the fervently anti-war let their equally fervent anti-Bush sentiments overwhelm a rational look at the pro-war Kerry Democrats, “the other super-power” has been re-ignited into […]
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Bringing the War Home to the Pentagon and the White House
Washington, D.C. — In a pre-dawn civil disobedience action Monday morning, forty-one War Resisters League members and others sat down and were arrested at a pedestrian entrance to the Pentagon, slowing foot traffic at that location and prompting officials to close the U.S. military headquarters’ sole stop on Washington’s Metroline for a period. Protesters — […]
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A Story of Resistance: How a Conservative Rural Community Repudiated the Administration’s Effort to Criminalize Dissent
On March 17, 2003, Saint Patrick’s Day, only days before “Shock and Awe,” four Catholic Workers entered the U.S. Military Recruiting Station in Ithaca, NY, and spilled their blood to protest the imminent invasion of Iraq. They knelt, read a statement in opposition to the war, prayed, and waited to be arrested. Ithaca is home […]
