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Through a Capitalist Looking-Glass:Standard and Poor’s Rates Latin America
Capitalism always stays focused on the bottom line — profit — but occasionally finds more than it is looking for. Such is the case with Standard and Poor’s recent research report, “Credit FAQ: The Impact of the Rise of the Left on Latin American Sovereign Ratings” (17 January 2006). While doing research to update the […]
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North versus South:Expect More Global Apartheid — and SA Collaboration — in 2006
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, […]
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The First Pamphlet Proposing the Creation of Committees of Correspondence to Redeem the Constitution of the United States by Causing the Impeachment of Richard M. Nixon
American Civil Liberties Union Washington Office 410 First Street, S.E.Washington, D.C. 20003 INDEX Letter to Fellow Citizens Resolution on Impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon Annotations to the Resolution Impeachment: Its History Impeachment: Its Procedures I. Constitutional Provisions Relating to Impeachment II. Excerpts from Jefferson’s Manual III. The Rules of Procedure and Practice in the […]
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“Damage Control”: The Corporate Media’s Service to the Empire
In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky posit that the “‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (p. 298).1 Lately, however, the media has been taking […]
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Saturday, December 10, 1960: The Debate That Never Happened
At 9:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Saturday, December 10, 1960, NBC television was supposed to broadcast something truly exceptional: a debate on the topic of “U.S. policy toward Latin America” between liberal theorist A. A. Berle and the radical “Texas wobbly” sociologist C. Wright Mills. To the enduring loss of the world, the scheduled debate […]
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Western Canada Labor Battles Show Need for Solidarity
Thirty-eight thousand public school teachers in British Columbia voted on October 23 by seventy-seven percent to end a sixteen-day strike that had brought the province to the brink of a general strike. The teachers, members of the BC Teachers Federation, walked off the job on October 6. Bargaining for a new collective agreement was going […]
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This Election Will Not End the Impasse of Canadian Democracy
By a vote of 171 to 133, the united parliamentary forces of the Conservatives, Bloc Quebecois and New Democratic Party felled the federal Liberal Government of Paul Martin at 7:09 pm of November 28 on a motion which simply read “This House has lost confidence in the government.” Thus the 38th Parliament of Canada ended. […]
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An Interview with David Roediger
WORKING TOWARD WHITENESS: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs by David R. RoedigerBUY THIS BOOK David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a scholar of critical whiteness studies, delivered a talk titled “The Dilemmas of Popular Front Antiracism: Looking at The […]
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FreedomChunks: A True Story from Canada’s Little War on Terror
Over the course of the whole debacle, there was a lot of criticism directed against Mandeep and me — even from our purported supporters — for the way that we handled the public relations angle of our case. Much was made, particularly, of the so-called “Kafka Declaration” episode wherein, against the cool protestations of our […]
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Debating and Contesting the “New Economy”
For some time now, students of radical political economy have been preoccupied with interpreting the new phase of capitalism that has followed the postwar boom and been dominated by neoliberal ideas and policies. This has meant, on the one hand, a number of declarations of political endings — the end of corporatism, the end of […]
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Tookie Williams and the Politics of the Death Penalty
“. . . what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law? . . . [I]s there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these […]
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President Salutes Anonymous Red-Baiter
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 […]
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The Sykes Anthem
“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 […]
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Media Campaign Attempts to Get Farmed Salmon off the Hook
Industrial salmon farming corporations have learned an important lesson from their corporate cousins about what to do with their tarnished images of ecological and social injustice: simply pour money into a public relations campaign and overwhelm dissent. After years of bad publicity, the salmon farming industry is adopting a damage control PR campaign. A recent […]
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Labor: Eyeless in America
Whoopee! The Change to Win Coalition has established itself in the labor movement! Happy Days are here again! Andy Stern’s going to lead us to the promised land! And the overwhelming response by American workers: yawn. At the time when American workers — indeed, US society as a whole — so much need a new […]
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The Architecture of Dreamworld: Like a Sex Machine
That “Sex Machine” ever got approved for air play is testimony to the stupidity of radio censors. It’s little more than James Brown, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business (one of several), encouraging his penis to labor just as hard: Stay on the scene Like a sex machine. In case you miss the point, the […]
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Remembering Evelyn Wiener
Evelyn Wiener died October 8, 2005, at 91, surrounded by her friends and comrades. Her earliest memory was her parents’ two-week celebration of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Hiding her age to join the Young Communist League at 14, she was the Manhattan District Organizer for the American Communist Party in the 1940s. A childhood […]
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BC Teachers Go Back to Work — Who Won the Battle?
For the first time in two weeks, public schools in British Columbia were open for business yesterday. Teachers had voted over the weekend by a 77% margin to accept a mediated settlement to the dispute recommended by arbitrator Vince Ready. In the wake of the decision, there is much public debate and discussion, including among […]
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In Patents We Trust: How the U.S. Government Learned to Stop Worrying about Monopoly and Love Intellectual Property
Today, patents supposedly exist to provide an incentive for new discoveries. Patents had a different purpose at their origin. When the Venetians invented what today we would call intellectual property in the fifteenth century, governments openly treated it as an element of state power. Workers could enjoy monopolistic privileges only if they continued to strengthen […]
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BC Teachers Hold the Line — the Government Blinks
19 October 2005 Teachers in British Columbia are standing on the rainy picket lines this morning for Day 8 of an unprecedented illegal strike against the Liberal provincial government. This strike has surprised nearly everyone in its strength and resolve and is shaking the political culture of BC to its core. The strike began on […]