Although the corporate media gave a lot more coverage than usual to this year’s Vancouver rally, what they did provide was as inaccurate as ever. A realistic crowd estimate for the Vancouver march and rally would be in the 3,000-4,000 range. Yet CBC Radio was running 500, The Province newspaper had 1000, and the TV […]
Geography Archives: United States
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 […]
Whose Domain? Private Power, Public Policy, and Local Politics
Susette Kelo (Photo by Isaac Reese, 2004 / © Institute for Justice) “Justices OK land grabs!” “Property rights under attack!” “No homeowner safe from government!” “The sky is falling!” So argued critics from across the political spectrum in response to a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding a municipality’s use of eminent domain power to […]
Does Pace University Support Free Speech?
On Monday, March 13, students from the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — joined by other students, professors, original SDSers, and CAN members from CCNY — launched one of the largest demonstrations Pace University’s campus had seen, against Pace’s denial of our free speech rights. The university, […]
The Challenge of Revolutionary Democracy in the Life and Thought of Rosa Luxemburg
“Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned in the Breslau penitentiary, is able to continue working on her herbarium. Her secretary Mathilde Jacob, the only one able to visit her in prison, brings along the plants. ‘I can botanize once again, this is my favourite occupation and best way to relax. Since May 1913 I have pasted in about […]
Anne Braden, 1927-2006
Click on the image to watch video interviews with Anne Braden. The 6 March 2006 issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal reports the death at 81 of Anne Braden, the veteran Southern white civil rights leader and organizer of the fight for black integration and equality, and an American radical of untameable commitment who — […]
Antiwar Activists Arrested at House Appropriations Committee Hearing
Jeff Leys and Mike Ferner
Washington, D.C., March 9 — Two peace activists were arrested on March 8 for disrupting the House Appropriations Committee hearing on additional funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Mike Ferner and Ed Kinane of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, interrupted the hearing called to consider the $67 billion “supplemental” appropriation which was ultimately approved […]
Open Letter to Iran’s Nobel Laureate: Part 2
Dear Ms. Ebadi: Rostam Pourzal, “Open Letter to Iran’s Nobel Laureate: Part 1 “ (27 February 2006) Poet Khosro Naaqed, a prominent promoter of your reformist coalition, demonstrated in a published commentary last summer why a majority in Iran is now disillusioned with your “democracy” project. As you know, he speaks for almost all Iranian […]
World Events (June 1953)
Large scale military spending can have but one outcome: an increase in the size of the military forces, an extension of their influence, growing participation of the military in the direction of public business, a greater emphasis on armed might as an instrument for carrying out federal policy. The interests of those who dominate the […]
Right-Wing Attack Dogs Go after a Colorado High School Teacher
A high school geography teacher here in Colorado — Jay Bennish who teaches at Overland High School in Aurora — is in trouble, attacked by the right, for things he said in an honors geography class after Bush’s State of the Union address. A student in the class taped the teacher’s comments (about twenty […]
Cartoon-Krieg: Politics as War by Other Means
Jyllands-Posten stood Clausewitz on his head. Its now infamous cartoons of Mohammed are not so much speech as acts. Acts of provocation and belligerence. They are the latest round of politics as war by other means. Make no mistake. Jyllands-Posten is not in the business of promoting the freedom of speech. Nor are the European […]
Open Letter to Iran’s Nobel Laureate
Dear Ms. Shirin Ebadi: The appeal you and Mohammad Sahimi addressed to “Western democracies” in the International Herald Tribune on January 19 disappointed this former admirer of yours. Your invitation to the current and previous imperial powers to intervene for human rights in Iran fails precisely on grounds of the noble principles you invoked to […]
The Muslim in the Mirror
Few things are more frustrating than the doxa to which a hybrid and multifarious object such as “Islam” is all too readily reduced by formulaic provocation and paranoiac reaction. The current “cartoon war” between “militant” Muslims and “militant” liberals in the “West” is a case in point. Once again, people are led to view themselves […]
Left-Activist Work Can Be Liberating
William Morris said, in an article that appeared in The Commonweal on 21 June 1889, “[I]t cannot be too often repeated that the true incentive to useful and happy labour is and must be pleasure in the work itself.” Morris’s remark pertained to a debate at the end of the nineteenth century on the nature […]
Danish Cartoons: Racism Has No Place on the Left
I’ve just about had it. I cannot watch one more episode of the Daily Show which makes racist jokes about Arabs and Muslims. I am sick and tired of people who see themselves as part of the left writing articles that put a liberal gloss over what is, in essence, a right-wing “clash of civilizations” […]
The Second Founding of Bolivia [La segunda fundación de Bolivia]
El 22 de enero del año 2002, Evo fue expulsado del Paraíso. O sea: el diputado Morales fue echado del Parlamento. El 22 de enero del año 2006, en ese mismo lugar de pomposo aspecto, Evo Morales fue consagrado presidente de Bolivia. O sea: Bolivia empieza a enterarse de que es un país de mayoría […]
A Track Runs through It:Why Railroad Workers and Trackside Communities Should Fight for Jobs and Environmental Justice Together
The United Transportation Union, which represents railroad conductors and some engineers, reports that negotiations with the railroad corporations had broken down over the issue of crew reduction. The carriers are demanding the implementation of one-person train crews for many routes on the US freight rail system. The current standard train crew is two, an engineer […]
Homo Economicus vs. Aam Aadmi: Crisis of Democracy
During the twentieth century, there were two major shifts in mainstream economic thinking. These two major changes were the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s and the return of orthodoxy on the back of the Rational Expectation and Monetarist school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Each of the shifts was preceded by a […]
Venezuela Leads the Way: Welfare Mothers and Grassroots Women Are the Workers for Social Change!
There is screaming, hugging, chanting, and many shhhs; the group takes a momentary pause in their celebration to hear the news. A delegation of 70 women from all over the world, including, India, Uganda, Guyana, the UK, and the US, stand together in the community of La Padera, Venezuela, awaiting the details. Juanita Romero, also […]
Red Seas
RED SEAS: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica by Gerald HorneBUY THIS BOOK Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica. By Gerald Horne. New York University Press, 2005, 358 pp. The political connections of Harlem and the British West Indies have been […]
