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Is The Strike Dead? Not According to Bob Schwartz. . . .
Three years ago in Boston, downtown streets and office buildings were the scene of inspiring immigrant worker activism during an unprecedented strike by local janitors. Their walk-out was backed by other union members, community activists, students and professors, public officials, religious leaders, and even a few “socially-minded” businessmen. The janitors had long been invisible, mistreated […]
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True Belligerence or Belligerent Bluster? Tel Aviv and Tehran Go at It Again
In recent weeks, the battle of words between Tel Aviv and Tehran has reached ever more heated levels. On December 8, 2005, the populist and fundamentalist president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, questioned the truth of the Nazi holocaust and suggested that Israel be moved to Europe. These comments were made in the wake of previous […]
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An Interview with Lila Rajiva
THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE: Abu Ghraib and the American Media by Lila RajivaREAD EXCERPTBUY THIS BOOK Baltimore resident Lila Rajiva is the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (Monthly Review Press, 2005). She has taught at the University of Maryland and is a prolific freelance journalist, whose work can […]
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The WTO Road to Neo-Liberal Development — On Keeping Alive the Alternatives
The merchant-minister caravan of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has moved to Hong Kong for its ministerial conference. What really is another round of multilateral negotiations to advance the cause of “free trade” had been designated a “development” round. Not surprisingly, development has been conceived as a mere corollary of free trade, never mind […]
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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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“This Is a Cover-up and Paul Martin Knows It”: Kevin Pina on Canada’s Role in Haiti
A cross-Canada week of action in solidarity with Haiti will be kicked off by a November 12 demonstration on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Solidarity committees are springing up across the country, objecting to the central role that the Canadian government played, along with France and the United States, in overturning the democratically-elected government of […]
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A Note on South Africa’s National Land Summit
The national land summit that the South African Communist Party (SACP) called for in its 2004 Red October campaign took place at the end of July 2005. Provincial land summits ostensibly prepared the ground to stage the July land indaba, just as the SACP had requested government to do. Since the SACPs intention was to […]
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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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John Wayne and the New Orleans Indians
“The cavalry is coming!” announced a reporter on the Fox News Channel when National Guardsmen finally trooped into downtown New Orleans on the fourth day of apocalypse. I said to myself, “There they go again, racist Fox News.” I switched channels and found reporters and government officials repeating the same phrase: “The cavalry has arrived.” […]
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“The Question of Working-Class Power”: Bill Fletcher, Jr. Speaks to the Canadian Auto Workers Conference, Toronto, Canada, 13 July 2005
Good morning. President Hargrove, leaders, and members of the Canadian Auto Workers, I wish to thank you very much for inviting me to speak with you today. This is a great honor and I have been looking forward to this opportunity. If all goes according to some plans, by the end of July, the […]
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The Labor Movement: It’s More than We Bargain for
The battle over labor’s future is heading toward a showdown at the AFL-CIO Convention, beginning Monday July 25th in Chicago. But the confrontation pitting a team of insurgent unions led by the Service Employees International Union against the AFL-CIO establishment is shaping up to be organizationally bloody, but spiritually bloodless. We’re fighting for the heart […]