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Sense and Nonsense in the Balanced Budget Debate: A Socialist Response
| Barry Finger June 29, 2011 |
The Republicans have successfully changed the economic debate from jobs to deficit control. Why the urgency? After all, this anemic “recovery” has been marked above all by the lack of job growth. Growth needs to considerable exceed 3% per annum if the private sector is to make any significant headway in reducing unemployment. Instead growth is actually trending downward from its post Great Recession peak. The intractability of long term unemployment now exceeds the duration experienced in the 1930s.
Neither Masks nor Gloves
| by Laurie Calhoun | Summer 2011 |
IN 1961, DWIGHT D. EISENHOWERwarned about the dangers of capitalized war, how the military-industrial complex was already taking on a life all its own, and the single-minded quest for profit—a virtue under capitalism — would continue to drive weapons companies to exert an untold influence upon politicians. Since that time, the war-making apparatus has expanded both in size and in kind, with ever more partners joining in on the enterprise.
Torture and Historical Memory
| by Robert Pallitto | Summer 2011 |
North Americans seem to believe that torture has no history here. It happened in medieval Europe, at the command of dictators in far-off places, or as part of leftist insurgencies. For the United States, torture is anathema to our way of life, violative of our liberal-democratic commitments. From George Washington to George W. Bush, U.S. presidents have denounced torture unequivocally. Or so it was, as the story goes, before the September 11 attacks.
A Thousand Platitudes: Liberal Hysteria and the Tea Party
| Bhaskar Sunkara June 2, 2011 |
[Comments by Marvin and Betty Mandell and others are posted below the article.]
A Young Radical’s View of Marriage
| by Amy Littlefield | Summer 2011 |
A University of Michigan study[1] found that becoming a wife creates seven added hours of housework per week for women. For men, housework decreases by one hour per week after marriage. Another way to say this is that gender roles some like to claim are dead are in fact alive and well. The study took a "nationally representative" sample of couples (including, presumably, some who believed they were flouting the division of labor) and relied on time-diary data from 2005.
Lessons from Industrial Disaster in an Unpredictable Age
| Guy Walker May 9, 2011 |
As the Gulf oil spill of April 2010 came and went -- public outcry now quieted and offshore drilling now resumed -- so too seems the case with the nuclear fallout of Japan. Currently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are determining the future of more than a dozen aging nuclear reactors in the United States, some of which are of the same design as the Fukushima Daiichi reactors that exploded and melted down last month. The bureaucrats at NRC however, have never denied a nuclear plant application for renewal.
Harvard’s embrace of Christie – shameful but not surprising
| Lois Weiner May 2, 2011 |
Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) at one time had space for progressive ideas, (that's where I earned my doctorate) but it was never a “liberal bastion." True HGSE had space for critique of US society, but the culture and institutional structure were dominated by the very wealthy annoyed that their children had to be exposed to critiques of US society in order to get the Harvard credential to which they consider themselves entitled.
Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston's Authoritarian Anti-Statism
| Matthew N. Lyons April 29, 2011 |
"Perhaps what I champion is not so much the anarchist as much as the 'anarch,' the superior individual who, out of sheer strength of will, rises above the herd in defiance and contempt of both the sheep and their masters."
-- Keith Preston, "The Thoughts That Guide Me: A Personal Reflection" (2005)[1]
Rebels in industry: A story told well, and one worth telling
| Michael Hirsch April 15, 2011 |
Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s
Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow (editors)
Verso, 2010 $29.95
Wordsworth's paean to the French revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!" doesn't appear in Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s. It should.
Jobs for All
| Brian King April 8, 2011 |
Recently, George Fish had a piece on the New Politics website entitled Open Programmatic Proposal to the Broad U.S. Left for Directly Dealing with the Present Unemployment Crisis. I urge New Politics readers to read and consider Fish's proposal.