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All the News That Doesn’t Fit Anywhere Else
NYPD to Racially Profile White Males New York, NY — Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced today in a joint press conference that, following a recent study on race and “going-postal” homicides, the New York City Police Department will revamp its Stop and Frisk crime prevention policy by instructing officers to stop […]
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What Have We Learned Since the “Forgotten Holocaust”?
Decent news to begin with: Near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate a memorial was finally unveiled to mark the murder of approximately 500,000 Roma people (often called Gypsies) in Nazi death camps. The decision to erect it was made in 1992, the year a pogrom in the East German city of Rostock was unleashed when Roma refugees […]
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Whose War? The War of 1812
Centennials, bicentennials, and other historical anniversaries — not to mention annual holidays — play a major role in the legitimation of power relations. And they can be sharp ideological battlegrounds like Columbus Day. This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, an inconclusive two and a half-year war with Great Britain […]
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We Refuse Economic Bondage: Stop the Loans
Dear friends, In the coming period we will again be facing a familiar enemy that many of you have and continue to battle. International Financial Institutions (IFIs) like the IMF have long had a hand in plundering the Egyptian economy and dispossessing the Egyptian people. We aim to resist these institutions and their depredations, but […]
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Health Care Reform, Year Zero
The ideological ambiguity of health care reform during Obama’s first term concedes few absolute truths. The enterprise of reforming health care by way of corporate regulation ignites debate across the left spectrum about the Affordable Care Act’s place in the 2012 election and beyond. Like it or not, the rules of the ACA are now […]
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“Collectivized Torture”: Drone Warfare and the Dark Side of Counterinsurgency
The recent Stanford University report on drone strikes in Pakistan, Living Under Drones, raises the possibility that the US is intentionally using drones, not merely as hi-tech assassination devices, but also as weapons of state terror intended to subdue unruly regions and populations. The appalling reality of drone warfare along the Afghanistan border closely resembles […]
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On Eric Hobsbawm’s Passing
Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), regarded by many as the top 20th century British historian, passed away October 1st, at the age of 95. Hobsbawm joined the British Communist Party in 1936, the year he entered Cambridge University, and remained a life-long member. In a life dedicated to historical scholarship and to draw attention to injustice […]
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The Sargasso Manuscript: Some Observations on Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
Susan Sontag. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. Edited by David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. I. David Rieff has played the last of Susan Sontag’s jokes upon the reader: to remain austerely cool, distant, and unsympathetic toward us even in “journals and notebooks.” The barbed wire of […]
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Capitalism and “Human Nature”: A Rebuttal
In the celebrated section of The Wealth of Nations in which he discusses the advantages of the division of labor, Adam Smith advances the thesis that “common to all men” is a “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith hedges on whether this “propensity” is a matter of original human nature […]
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Some Memories of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review. In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley. As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values. Meanwhile, the two […]
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All Sorts of Roguery? The ‘Financial Aristocracy’ and Government à Bon Marché in India
My voice is a crime, My thoughts anarchy, Because I do not sing to their tunes, I do not carry them on my shoulders. — Cherabandaraju, who was the lead accused in a “conspiracy case” involving poets and their poetry. It’s been two decades and a year since India’s elite embraced neo-liberalism. Money — the […]
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A Little-Known Film Master, Kurt Maetzig
An extraordinary mensch, an extraordinary filmmaker who made extraordinary films and lived to the extraordinary age of 101, Kurt Maetzig, who died last week, was virtually unknown in the United States, indeed, in the western world generally. The reason: he lived and worked in East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, whose films — many mediocre […]
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Howard Zinn’s Zen Politics
Howard Zinn. The Historic Unfulfilled Promise. Foreword by Matthew Rothschild. San Francisco: City Lights, 2012. 256 pages. Howard Zinn was called a lot of different names: anarchist, socialist, and communist. He called himself a lot of different names, too: anarchist, socialist, and communist. No one ever seems to have called him Zen, but maybe it’s […]
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The Prisoners of Democracy AKP Style in Turkey
“The remains of the human beings, each weighing 70, 80, 90 kg when alive, fit into just five 20-kg plastic bags. I mean, even their bones had burned down. I am a lawyer and I have seen many autopsies after murders and accidents, but I have never seen anything like this. Even their teeth […]
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Tadeusz Kowalik, 1926-2012
Professor Tadeusz Kowalik (1926-2012) was a noted Polish economist who played a major role in Polish economic debates for more than a half century. A graduate of the University of Warsaw, Kowalik was a student of the distinguished Polish Marxist economist Oskar Lange and like his teacher, was a prominent advocate of market socialism […]
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Brain Surgery Excises Obama Ambivalence for Rads
NEW YORK, N.Y. — In what promises to be a real boost for the U.S. presidential incumbent, a team of doctors has devised a “miraculous” new method of brain surgery that purportedly will enable thousands of radical leftists, progressives, and revolutionaries to vote — on purpose — for Barack Obama in the fall election. The […]
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Imperial Sovereignty in the Automated Battlefield: Interview with Aijaz Ahmad
Aijaz Ahmad: Since the Vietnam War the United States has been developing what they then called the “automated battlefield.” Now, after about 40 years, we are now seeing some very, very advanced expressions of that, where the entire battlefield is being automated, to use the whole spectrum of technologies that they have . . . […]
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The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World
Ralph Miliband Lecture on the Future of the Left, London School of Economics, London, U.K., 28 May 2012 It is a great honour and privilege for me to be invited to deliver this lecture in the Ralph Miliband series on the future of the Left. Ralph Miliband was not just an outstanding social scientist and […]
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The World Seen from the South: Interview with Samir Amin
I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East. What is your […]
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Resisting Drones in Missouri: “Let Justice Flow Like a River. . .”
The United States District Courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri, is a modern and graceful structure sitting on a bluff over the Missouri River. Less than one year old, it is a virtual temple in white marble, granite, and glass, its clean lines all the more immaculate in contrast to its nearest neighbor, the crumbling 19th […]