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NAFTA Corridor Update
Richard D. Vogel, “NAFTA Corridors: Dividing the Nation to Multiply Profits” (MRZine, 4 February 2006) As required by law, the State of Texas has finally posted the long anticipated 4,000-page draft environmental impact statement for the Texas leg of the I-35 NAFTA corridor on the Internet. Access to the document is limited by the digital […]
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A Note on Immigration and the U.S. Workers [Una nota sobre la inmigración y los trabajadores estadounidenses]
Si el pueblo trabajador en Estados Unidos ha de alcanzar unidad, autoconfianza colectiva e independencia política en el futuro próximo (¡y cuanto nos hacen falta!), la demanda del movimiento de los trabajadores inmigrantes de derechos plenos debe ser el primer punto en su agenda. El pueblo trabajador en este país necesita darse cuenta de lo […]
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Vetting God’s Politics
Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Dearly beloved leftists and friends. It’s 2006 and we’re gathered here together uncomfortably discussing why so few of us are […]
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Minneapolis-St. Paul, 9 April 2006
Yiwen Cheng lives in Kansas City, and Stephen Philion lives in Minneapolis.
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“Make Marc Mayor”: Songs for Political Action
The April issue of Monthly Review contains a biographical profile of Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio, or Marc as he was known, was the product of one of the worst slums in early twentieth-century New York. Through seven Congressional terms in the 1930s and 40s, he was an indefatigable voice for his poor and oppressed constituents and […]
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Latino Milwaukee
Click on an image to watch a slide show of the immigrant rights march in Milwaukee on 23 March 2006. SOURCE: Kristyna Wentz-Graff, “A Day without Latinos,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 23 March 2006 March 23, 2006 was a historic day for Milwaukee. It was a day of Latinos in a city that still thinks […]
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Revisiting “Another Country”
No wonder capitalist societies are coming apart at the seams. Trust is supposed to be the bond that holds a society together, and trust is based on truth. But so often have government leaders asserted their “right” to lie, to manage the news, and to contrive to deceive the public that large numbers of people […]
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Great Target, Bad Aim: Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices
Thanks to Michael Moore, the growth of a moderately-aroused left-liberal public since the invasion of Iraq, and the low manufacturing costs of DVDs, the politically-conscious documentary film has reemerged in the United States. A central figure in this movement has been the seasoned producer-director Robert Greenwald. Formerly known for TV epics like Flatbed Annie and […]
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Weighty Alternatives for Latin America Discussion with Heinz Dieterich [Ernsthafte Alternative für Lateinamerika Gespräch mit Heinz Dieterich]
The following is a conversation with Heinz Dieterich about his friendship with Hugo Chávez, irregular war, the new Venezuelan military doctrine, and an account of the Bolivarian revolution in Latin America. Heinz Dieterich is a sociologist and economist. He has been a professor at Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City since 1977. Since the 1990s, […]
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Free Cristina Rosas Illescas and Pánfilo Reséndiz
Last Sunday, my fifteen year old daughter and I went to Querétaro, Mexico. We were trying to visit Cristina Rosas Illescas at the state penitentiary of San José El Alto, five miles northeast of the state capital. At the entrance, my daughter refused the guards’ orders to take her clothes off and let them conduct […]
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What Brought Evo Morales to Power? The Role of the International Indigenous Movement and What the Left Is Missing
What has been left out of reports and analysis in both the mainstream press and among anti-imperialists and leftists about the triumph of Evo Morales’ election as President of Bolivia is the role played by the three-decade international indigenous movement that preceded it. Few are even aware of that powerful and remarkable historic movement, which […]
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NAFTA Corridors: Dividing the Nation to Multiply Profits
Click on the image for a larger view. Photo by Richard D. Vogel The NAFTA corridors system currently under construction will irreversibly divide the U.S. geographically, economically, and socially for the sake of profit. The cumulative consequences of this “biggest engineering and construction project in the history of the U.S.” promise to be more damaging […]
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Kenneth Timmerman’s Iranian “Democracy” and the “Intelligence” Summit
While George Bush, the man who controls the trigger of the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal, expresses his fear that a “non-transparent” and nuclear Iran might use its non-existent nuclear weapons to blackmail the world, and his Secretary of State tells the media that the time for talking with the regime in Tehran is over, a […]
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The Nuclear Attack against Iran, the Aggression against Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, and Socialism of the XXIst Century [El ataque nuclear contra Irán, la agresión contra Cuba, Venezuela y Bolivia, y el Socialismo del Siglo XXI]
El futuro de la Revolución Bolivariana en América Latina se ve más brillante desde que Evo Morales participa en la construcción del Bloque Regional de Poder (BRP) de América Latina, en lo que será probablemente el año más peligroso para la humanidad desde el fin de la “Guerra Fría”: el año del ataque de la […]
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Getting to the Point of No Return: A Conversation with Andre Vltchek
Andre Vltchek Andre Vltchek is a Czech-born American writer who has written for Der Spiegel, Asahi Shimbun, the Guardian, and many other international papers. He has reported on the violence of the neo-liberal order from all over the globe, but especially from Indonesia, about which he has made a ground-breaking documentary: Terlena: Breaking of a […]
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The Answering Machine
Paul Krell, UAW spokesperson, is not a person. Paul is an answering machine. Which explains why he can’t return calls and always says the same thing, i.e., “The UAW has no comment.” Since the UAW does not have a spokesperson per se, I don’t have to be concerned about stepping on anyone’s toes. Thus, I […]
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Workers’ Rights ARE Human Rights — Not Just in the USA, but around the World
Click on the image for a larger view. Chicago, 2005 In the middle of a blizzard in Chicago on December 8, 2005, I stood with about 250-300 union members and supporters at the Haymarket Memorial, chanting, “Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights.” This was one of a number of rallies around the country that the AFL-CIO […]
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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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Dismantling the Central American Gangs and Recovering a Lost Generation
Guatemala City, Guatemala Carlos, my driver, was a former federal policeman. He weighed a good two hundred pounds and was well over six feet. He was assigned to me by a local businessman whom I knew in Guatemala City after I explained that I wanted to visit some areas where I could see gang activity. […]
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Unity — In Memory of Rosa Luxemburg
There was a subtle difference in both groups this year — many said they noticed it. As in every year, tens of thousands of Germans visited the Memorial Site of the Socialists in an eastern section of Berlin and placed red carnations at the tall memorial stone honoring Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, or the […]