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An Interview with Dawn Paley, Author of Drug War Capitalism
Dawn Paley is a Canadian author. Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, November 2014) is her first book. We conducted an e-interview as protests grew against police and military policies in Mexico and the U.S. The drug war on both sides of the border has played no small role in generating such dissent. Seth Sandronsky: Can […]
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They Fear and They Kill
It’s open season on wild turkeys. They harm no one, are decorative feathered dinosaurs. Tough to eat, so why shoot? But the season ends. It’s open season on Black youths all year, so long as you have a uniform and a gun. They are genuinely scared, the cops. Kids of color are going to eat […]
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Cops, Hooligans, and Neo-Nazis in Germany
Confrontations with the police in Germany have not been quite the same as in Ferguson and other USA cities. But some were dramatic enough. Back in September 2010 mass protests in Stuttgart against a huge underground railroad station at the cost of a prized old building and a central park were hit hard by cops […]
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“I Have No Real Politics”: Susie Day Talking Trash
“[S]urviving evil doesn’t make you a good person: Surviving evil and not passing it on does,” writes Susie Day in her recent book Snidelines: Talking Trash to Power. One possible way to not pass on evil is to laugh about it. Day, through her comedic ability and shrewd observations reveals (with a giant spotlight) […]
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Armed Woman Massacres All-Male Harvard Club, NRA Chief Calls for Gun Control
Harvard University remains shut down one day after a lone woman wielding a Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle broke through security at the university’s elite, men-only Porcellian Club and shot 14 white male students to death. The female — of indeterminate age, race, and sexual attractiveness — was described as wearing a torn leather jacket emblazoned […]
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Democracy, Hypocrisy, and President Gauck
In the USA Republicans are jubilant. Jubilation here in Germany is about an event twenty-five years ago: “We beat those red SOBs!” But is there not, hidden behind the confetti, helium balloons, and crowing of the victors in both Germany and the USA, an occasional jarring note of anxiety? A man with good reason for […]
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On Taking Risks and Eating Crow
A long, warm, coatless autumn made some wonder whether climate change might cancel winter this year in a reverse of the canceled summer two centuries ago in a year called “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” But no, I now read that the weather will change after all. Northern blasts may soon be here. Perhaps […]
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PFLP Calls for Unified Revolutionary Front of Solidarity with the Struggle of People of Kobane against ISIS
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine expresses its solidarity with the Kurdish resistance in Kobane struggling to defend themselves and their community from the reactionary armed group, ISIS, whose entry into our region has been facilitated and supported by imperialist powers and their lackeys. Comrade Khaled Barakat said that “All Palestinian and Arab […]
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Call for Solidarity with Kobanê
On Monday, October 6th, ISIS forces entered the autonomous Kurdish canton of Kobanê in Western Kurdistan (North Syria) following a siege which began on September 15th. Defending Kobanê are the skilled but ill-equipped People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), who are up against The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), […]
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Richard Linklater’s Boyhood: A Review
It is difficult to put into words the effect of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014). But, I suspect that the power of this spell-binding film lies in its ability to mirror for us both the cinematic experience and a certain truth about life in the first decade and half of the new century, i.e., the […]
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Who Can Stop the “Islamic State”?
The most severe crisis in the Middle East to date, the coming to power of the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria, has entered an extremely absurd phase. The European states are about to follow the lead of the U.S. by exporting arms to the Kurdistan Regional Government under the command of Mustafa Barzani. This […]
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Losing Heads and Sending Arms
Two famous heads got lost in Berlin. Neither loss, I hasten to add, was connected with brutality. From the past or near future, they caused melancholy or rejoicing, depending on your viewpoint. One loss really occurred twenty-two years ago, when the 62-foot red granite statue of Lenin on East Berlin’s Lenin Square and Lenin Allee […]
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Interview with Deon Haywood: “Nine Years After Katrina, It’s All About the Takeover”
Deon Haywood is the Executive Director of Woman With a Vision, a New Orleans social justice non-profit founded in 1991 by a grassroots collective of African-American women in response to the spread of HIV/AIDS in communities of color. According to the WWAV website, “We envision an environment in which there is no war against women’s […]
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National Lawyers Guild, Other Legal Organizations Urge International Criminal Court to Investigate War Crimes by Israeli, U.S. Leaders in Gaza
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Center for Constitutional Rights, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Arab Lawyers Union, and American Association of Jurists (Asociación Americana de Juristas)sent a letter on Friday, August 22 to Fatou Bensouda, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging her to initiate an investigation of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against […]
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Shoppers Without Borders: Cure for Media-Inflicted War Wounds
Paige Turner, a 29-year-old graduate of Grinnell College’s creative writing program, came to New York to start her life as a novelist. She got some gigs chronicling upscale Manhattan lifestyles for glossy magazines: “good background for my first socially conscious bestseller!” Things were going great — she was online most of the day, researching fashion […]
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Sour Pickles and Sour Grapes
When politicians vacation and little action is expected, the words German journalists use for such summer doldrums is “Saure-Gurken-Zeit” — “sour pickle time.” Since German often squeezes things together into what Mark Twain called “not words but panoramas,” it’s usually written with no break, “Sauregurkenzeit,” and may be derived from the time before the harvest […]
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US Intervention Is Not Humanitarian and Will Not Protect the People of Iraq
Here we go again, the US is using a humanitarian catastrophe to implement imperialist objectives and pour petrol on fire. It is sickening to see Obama and the Western media shedding crocodile tears for the Iraqi people, after the US-led occupation pulverised Iraq as a society and killed a million of its people. It […]
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I See Palestine
In response to Roger Cohen, “Why Americans See Israel the Way They Do,” New York Times, August 3, 2014. . . . The bias of the cowboy-and-Indians movies I grew up on in the 1950s has long been exposed: swallowing up Native American land was the aim, and the myth of the dangerous savages who […]
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On Capital, Real Socialism, and Venezuela: An Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Gülden Özcan and Bora Erdağı: In some of the interviews you gave, you talked about your own everyday life experiences that led you to discover that Marx’s total critique of capitalism is an unfinished project. In this discovery, you emphasized elsewhere that your class background and political struggle you were involved in have played an […]
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Across the Atlantic: A Month in the USA
What a trip! I had last visited my American home country three years earlier; some things hadn’t changed much, some things had. As ever, piled high, were many contrasts and contradictions. My first goal was my class reunion (the 65th!!!), partly in the Harvard Yard, sober and dignified even when filled with thousands of new […]