Geography Archives: United States

Tom Leedham, principal officer of Teamsters Local 206 in Oregon, is challenging IBT President James Hoffa on a reform slate in this year’s Teamster elections.  Leedham’s Strong Contracts/Good Pensions slate — and its rank-and-file supporters — won a big victory when their campaign was accredited for the 2006 International elections. In just over a month, […]

How stupid do they think we are?  The administration has been on the road these past few days trying to package the war in Iraq as a success.  Bush insists that the war is going well and that the US will stay on until final victory and eternal democracy.  Dick Cheney told the world that […]

Of all the types and genres of film that exist, the rarest of all may be the autumnal masterpiece.  What explains the infrequent sightings of this cinematic marvel?  It is not that filmmakers somehow lose their talent at a particular age, but rather that, the industry being a slave of fashion, they lose the ability […]

  The demonstration of about 100 received favorable coverage by a local newspaper: “Protesters Want Soldiers, Dollars Home” (The Pantagraph 19 March 2006). Click on an image for a larger view. Jan Cox is a co-chair of Bloomington-Normal Citizens for Peace and Justice.

The demo in Perth on 18 March 2006 was attended by about a thousand people, down substantially from the size of demos before the beginnng of the Iraq War. The majority of people out in downtown Perth on Saturday were shopping. They weren’t hostile — rather, openly indifferent or mildly curious about the people who […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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, […]

“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 […]

  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 — […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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” […]