The UN General Assembly on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to call for an end to the US embargo on Cuba. The vote was cast at the 192-member General Assembly with 187 in favor, three against and two abstentions. This is the 18th year that the General Assembly voted to urge an end to the US embargo. […]
Geography Archives: United States
Gathering Rage Revisited
In 1992, I was a thwarted, guilt-ridden and depressed revolutionary, living underground with my lesbian partner and two-year old daughter in St. Louis. I was part of a tiny group that had gone underground at the beginning of the 1980s, responding to the collapse of the mass movements after the end of the Vietnam […]
Why the Health Insurance Excise Tax Is a Bad Idea
Twenty years ago, 60,000 workers from New York City to Maine rallied against healthcare cost-shifting at the telecom giant then known as NYNEX (since “rebranded” as Verizon). NYNEX was a very profitable, multinational company seeking to capitalize on a demoralizing decade of lost strikes, contract givebacks and widespread unionbusting. At a time when many […]
Why No Government Jobs Program?
From the official beginning of the current economic crisis in December 2007 to the present, the number of unemployed workers has risen roughly from 7 to 15 million members of the US labor force. But there is no government program directly to hire these millions of the unemployed. The Bush and Obama administrations quickly and […]
Say NO to the New Racist, Sexist and Homophobic Dominican Constitution
The government of President Leonel Fernández, with the support of the powerful Catholic Church and the far right (known as the Nazionalistas), will soon adopt a new constitution that will set the country back decades. The new constitution is part of a ruling class attack on working people in a desperate attempt to preserve the […]
How to Defeat Jundallah and Its Ilk
Sunday’s suicide bomb attack on a conference hall in the Pishin region of Iran’s vast Sistan and Balochistan province is by all accounts a major blow against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the most important military and security institution in the country. It is now known that at least 42 people were killed […]
Why We Need to Give This Rotten System the Heave-ho
Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates. The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know. Monthly Review Press, 2009. Books that start out with quotes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth make me nervous. Like many of my fellow workers, I have attended far more rock concerts — or pro wrestling matches — than […]
Cesar
Author’s Note: This story was recently posted on CounterPunch. Here I have corrected a couple of errors pointed out by readers. The essay is taken from my book, In and Out of the Working Class. I worked for the United Farm Workers Union during a sabbatical leave in the winter of 1977. I […]
On the Dollar’s Decline
If time lags matter, news of the dollar’s demise as the world’s principal reserve currency is grossly exaggerated. That prediction has been periodically heard at least since the early 1970s when the United States brought the Bretton Woods arrangement to an end by breaking the link between dollar and gold. As is obvious, whatever else […]
You Need to Watch Lou Dobbs: Or the Dobbsian Economy of Racism
I can barely watch Lou Dobbs. His attacks on Latino immigrants continue to escalate, and there is increasing evidence that there is a correlation between anti-Latino media like that of Dobbs and hate crimes against the Latino population. But we need to watch him, and in this instance I am using “watch” in the sense […]
The Iran Versus U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats
It is spell-binding to see how the U.S. establishment can inflate the threat of a target, no matter how tiny, remote, and (most often) non-existent that threat may be, and pretend that the real threat posed by its own behavior and policies is somehow defensive and related to that wondrously elastic thing called “national security.” […]
State Department Officials Signal Moves towards Recognizing November Elections in Honduras
Washington, D.C. — Although the official policy of the Obama administration is that it will not recognize next month’s elections in Honduras if democracy is not restored first, it became clear last week that some State Department officials are undermining this position and signaling that the U.S. could accept the results of the November 29 […]
Mexican Electrical Workers Union Fights for Its Life
The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), made up of approximately 43,000 active and 22,000 retired workers in Mexico City and surrounding states, is fighting for its life. The union’s struggle has rallied allies in the labor movement and on the left in Mexico and solidarity from throughout the country and around the world, but, if […]
Malalai Joya: “The Bravest Woman in Afghanistan”
“Now, my people are squashed between two powerful enemies. From the sky, the occupation forces are dropping bombs, even using cluster bombs and white phosphorus and killing innocent civilians in the name of combating the Taliban. On the ground, the Taliban and also Northern Alliance fundamentalists continue their fascism against men and women of […]
Puerto Rico: Reflections on the National Strike
On October 15, thousands of people in Puerto Rico flooded the streets to protest the government’s decision to lay off around 17,000 government employees (in total there have been around 25,000 lay-offs this year). Workers and members of trade unions, women, environmentalists, religious groups, students, teachers, professors, lawyers, and the LGBT community, among many other […]
Open Letter to All Those Concerned about the Labor Movement
Note to New York Times Readers In his November 18th article “Some Organizers Protest Their Union’s Tactics,” the New York Times‘ Steven Greenhouse cites a couple of sentences from this letter and links to it. While it is good to see the New York Times examine important debates within the U.S. labor movement, for […]
A New Role for the IMF?
Rescued from a state of near-irrelevance by the world recession and an infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars (mostly from the U.S., Europe, and Japan), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is now thinking of expanding its role into previously uncharted territory. In Istanbul for the fall meetings of the IMF, Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn […]
The End of Mahmud Abbas
A United Nations report commission, created after the 2008-2009 Gaza War, has released a thundering report that has ripped through the Palestinian and Arab street, threatening to bring down Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and his entire cabinet. Mandated to lead the mission was Richard Goldstone, the respected South African president of the United Nations Human […]
Occupying Afghanistan Is Making Things Worse
President Obama is coming under attack from the Right for his reluctance to grant the request of General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, for more U.S. troops. On the other side of the equation sits the majority of the American people, who are against sending more troops and in fact oppose […]
Measuring Progress
For some time now it has been clear that standard measurements of growth and development are inadequate and possibly even misleading. The problem of looking at only the aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) has been widely noted: its blindness to distributional issues and its inability to measure either the quality of life or the sustainability […]
