Germany is the world’s leading exporter and the third largest industrial economy, following Japan and the United States. German multi-nationals are drowning in supreme opulence, yet the wages of German workers remain severely depressed. The Wall Street Journal, engaging in low-intensity class struggle labor journalism, confirmed in its January article “German Unions See Leverage […]
Geography Archives: United States
U.S. Imperialism and Arroyo Regime in the Philippines on Trial at the Permanent People’s Tribunal, the Hague
An interview with Luis Jalandoni, chairperson of the National Democratic Front-Philippines Negotiating Panel, follows E. San Juan, Jr.’s analysis. The February visit of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, Prof. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, reconfirmed the barbarism of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s de facto martial-law regime in the Philippines. Stavenhagen bewailed the worsening pattern of […]
Is the New UN Global Warming Report Too Conservative?
There is now a strong consensus among climate scientists that human activities are the primary forces responsible for the observed warming of the earth’s atmosphere. The recently released fourth assessment report, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that warming is “unequivocal” and human […]
Uprising against the “War on Terror”: The Danger of US Foreign Policy to International Security
For those among us who hoped that 2007 would be a more orderly year in world politics, the current trends have been frustrating. Over the past few weeks, the Bush administration has pursued the escalation of two major international crises. The first major crisis is taking place in Somalia, where the Ethiopian Army and its […]
Inconvenient Truths
We humans are basically big furless animals who make tremendous demands on energy and materials for staying warm in cold places and cool in hot places. It wouldn’t hurt any of us to recognize this biological fact. Right now I’m burning big chunks of stove wood, to keep warm at zero F. We possess, each […]
Soul-Shakers, Gone but Not Forgotten
The period 2003-2006 saw the passing of some of the truly remarkable artists in pop music. It’s Black History Month, so it’s only fitting to remember the mighty Black pioneers and creators of blues/soul/R&B who’ve left us physically, but never spiritually or creatively: Ray Charles, Hank Ballard, Lou Rawls, Wilson Pickett, Little Milton, Clarence “Gatemouth” […]
Rock Democracies, Paper Freedoms, Scissors Securities [Democracias de piedra, libertades de papel, seguridades de tijera]
Hace diez años, en contradicción con la ola posmodernista, desarrollamos en Crítica de la pasión pura la idea de la moral como una forma de consciencia colectiva. De la misma forma que un cardumen o un enjambre actúa y se desarrolla como un solo cuerpo, de la misma forma que James Lovelock entendía Gaia — […]
Abolish It!
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. […]
Change the System — Not the Climate!
Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has helped dramatize the enormity of the global environmental crisis. The scale of the threat posed by industrially induced global warming, and the short time in which to take meaningful action to prevent catastrophic consequences, makes the question of how to combat global warming arguably the most urgent […]
The Paris III Conference on Assistance to Lebanon: Who Aids Whom? [La conférence de Paris III pour le soutien au Liban : qui aide qui ?]
Le 25 janvier 2007 se tenait, à Paris, la Conférence internationale de soutien au Liban, dite « Paris III », convoquée et présidée par Jacques Chirac. Etaient réunis les représentants de trente-six pays, notamment la secrétaire d’Etat américaine Condolezza Rice, et de quatorze institutions internationales dont le nouveau secrétaire général des Nations Unies Ban Ki-Moon, […]
Immigrant Workers Buck Long Slide in Meatpacking: Raids Follow as Backlash
Heavily-armed federal agents stormed six Swift meatpacking plants last month and rounded up nearly 1,300 immigrant workers in one of the largest workplace raids in U.S. history. The raids represented the climax of a year in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ratcheted up its workplace operations. ICE claims that it’s tripled its workplace raids […]
Academia and Social Change
The American Historical Association (AHA) is the most prominent professional organization for American historians. Its annual meeting, held recently in Atlanta, featured abstruse panels and presentations with titles such as “Disciplined Bodies and the Production of Space, Place, and Race: Atlanta’s Latino Day Laborers at the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century” and “The Desire […]
Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: Another Day at the Pentagon
When I was a teenager apprenticing at being a trade unionist and a left winger both, two of my favorite books were Labor’s Untold Story and History of the Great American Fortunes. I recommend them to any readers desiring a review of our own history as working people here in the United States. Both are […]
A Counter-Revolution in Military Affairs? Notes on US High-Tech Warfare
When Colonel Harry Summers told a North Vietnamese counterpart in 1975 that “[y]ou know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” the reply was: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.1 News stories surrounding the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proclaimed the arrival of a long-promised “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA), a […]
The Limits of Abolitionism: British Imperial Policy in Egypt
“We cannot admit rivals in the East or even the central parts of Africa . . . to a considerable extent, if not entirely, we must be prepared to apply a sort of Munro [sic] doctrine to much of Africa.” — Lord Carnarvon1 The original Monroe Doctrine initiated in 1824 prevented European interference in the […]
Of the People: A Conversation with Howard Zinn
G.M.S.: Here in Tucson, Arizona, 70 miles from the border, we are feeling the effects of President Bush’s deployment of National Guard troops at the U.S. border. The first hundreds arrived last summer, and 2,500 are expected to be in our “Tucson Sector” by August. Moreover, the Border Patrol is to grow from 12,400 […]
Leveraging the Academy: Suggestions for Radical Grad Students and Radicals Considering Grad School
Romanticized, demonized, celebrated, denounced — among activists in the United States and Canada, academia is all of these things. It is a gate-keeping institution that shapes and is shaped by relations of power and privilege. It is a site of intense struggle: those who are structurally excluded battle for access, while those who study there […]
The Iraq War and America’s Economic Imperialism
Several weeks ago, with much media fanfare, the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Committee submitted to President George W. Bush its long-awaited, bipartisan report on the U.S. war in Iraq. On balance, the report provided Bush with a face-saving strategy for pulling out all U.S. combat forces by the beginning of 2008. The Baker-Hamilton report favors an […]
Justice for the Omaha Two
Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are not names familiar to most Americans. The longest-serving political prisoners in the United States, these two former Black Panthers have spent more than thirty-five years behind bars for a crime they did not commit — the 1970 murder of Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard. The American media […]
Worker Centers Increasingly Are Forging Alliances with Unions
This August, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), a network of over 140 worker centers that organize mostly immigrant day laborers, entered into an agreement that would allow worker centers to apply for membership with local and state federations of the AFL-CIO. The agreement could signal a new chapter in the way organized labor […]
