Advanced Search

They hoped for FDR; all they got was the "F"

[three_col]

  • They hoped for FDR; all they got was the "F"

    newpolitics

    [The following appeared as a contribution to a symposium on electoral politics in the September 2011 issue of Yankee Radical, DSA’s Boston-area socialist monthly. While the piece makes reference in places to the perspectives of a particular organization, its analysis is meant to apply to a broad swath of the US left as well.]

    Read more

  • The Greek and the European Crisis in Context

         AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, Greece, a weak, peripheral nation in the European economy, was still licking its wounds from the greatest politico-financial scandal in its post-war history — the collapse of the Athens stock exchange. The wild stock market speculation had been fueled by often-repeated statements from various government officials (with Finance…

    Read more

  • The Existential Robert Fitch

    newpolitics

    An overflow crowd at New York’s Brecht Forum on Sept. 18 commemorated the life of the late journalist, author, scholar, educator, activist, union organizer and frequent New Politics contributor Bob Fitch, who died in March after complications from a fall. Among the speakers were Bertell Ollman, Steve Bronner, Doug Henwood, Christian Parenti, Jonathan Fitch and…

    Read more

  • Is Something Wrong With Single Payer?

         With all the advocacy efforts expended over the last 20 years, it might be reasonable to expect some results by now for the Single Payer (SP) movement. Of course, SP would be a great way to provide health insurance in America. Instead of thousands of private insurance companies (payers for health care services) competing with…

    Read more

  • Slandering Nonviolence

    newpolitics

    [Originally published as an Op-Ed, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal, October 2008. Updated, corrected and partially rewritten, January, May and September 2011. ]

    Read more

  • Talking about race and Haiti

    newpolitics

    Though these two pieces about education, one about the terrible way the US is destroying any possibilities for a real system of public education in Haiti, the other reasons the author is NOT talking about race, do not make this connection, they point to the fact that education in the US has to be seen…

    Read more

  • The Working Families Party: Stumping for Jesus

    newpolitics

         An isolated Assembly race in underserved North central Brooklyn in an election off- year wouldn’t normally attract much interest — witness grudging coverage in The New York Times on the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend.

    Read more

  • Labor Day and school reform

    newpolitics

    This Labor Day, I’m hoping that teachers will press labor to fulfill its responsibilities to kids, by breaking with any politicians who don’t “put kids first” by creating jobs.

    Read more

  • Why a former teacher union president goes over to the dark side

    newpolitics

    The LA Times reports that AJ Duffy, who just this spring stepped down as President of the second largest teachers union in the US, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), is opening his own charter school, which will use all of the union-busting techniques UTLA has long opposed. LA’s political establishment, most notably the former…

    Read more

  • Cincinnati: First Outsider, First African American Police Chief

    A Victory After Decades of Struggle for Racial Justice        Cincinnati's recent selection of someone who is not white and is not from the West Side of Cincinnati as the city's new police chief is a victory for justice and civil rights, and a vindication of the efforts of those activists who for decades have…

    Read more

  • Obama in Hyde Park: “Black and White Together, Against the Lower Classes”

      “Black and white together, against the lower classes”—Nichols and May routine about Hyde Park (Chicago), late 1950s  

    Read more

  • Matt Damon, Diane Ravitch, and scapegoating teachers

    newpolitics

    Several thousand teachers and their supporters rallied in Washington July 30, for the SOS (Save Our Schools) march, a grassroots effort organized by an Oakland CA science teacher.

    Read more

  • Hannah Arendt Against the Facts

         [The publication in 1963 of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt provoked a storm of controversy which has been going on for decades. Arendt, the author of the famed The Origins of Totalitarianism claimed that Eichmann, organizer of the Holocaust, was not a fanatic who hated Jews but…

    Read more

  • Alas, we who wished to lay the foundations of kindness . . .

    …Alas, we Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness Could not ourselves be kind. But you, when at last it comes to pass That man can help his fellow man, Do not judge us Too harshly. — Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity”

    Read more

  • A Thousand Platitudes: Liberal Hysteria and the Tea Party

    [Comments by Marvin and Betty Mandell and others are posted below the article.]

    Read more

  • Human rights activist Mazin Qumsiyeh has been arrested by Israeli soldiers

    newpolitics

    Human rights activist, Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, was arrested by Israeli soldiers along with two

    Read more

  • Lessons from Industrial Disaster in an Unpredictable Age

         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,…

    Read more

  • Harvard’s embrace of Christie – shameful but not surprising

    newpolitics

    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…

    Read more

  • How the Islamic "virus" broke out of the imperialist laboratory

    [Editor's note: This article continues Richard Greeman's series about Islamism.] Over the years, the British-backed Moslem Brotherhood’s activities spread far beyond Egypt. Not by coincidence did the first Arabic translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” still in circulation today, appear in Egypt the 1920"s. This anti-Semitic forgery was created by the Imperial…

    Read more

  • Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston's Authoritarian Anti-Statism

    "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]  

    Read more

  • Rebels in Industry: A Story Told Well, and One Worth Telling

    newpolitics

    Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, eds. 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…

    Read more