If you believe Glenn Beck, the Tea Party lunatics, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk, Frances Fox Piven is the Marxist Machiavelli whose 1966 article in The Nation (written with Richard Cloward) still serves as the blueprint for a radical takeover of American society, including Barack Obama's "socialist" administration.

[This article appeared in New Politics no. 13, Summer 1992.]

The fire burning in South-Central Los Angeles illuminated the rage, anguish and despair of African-Americans consigned to bleak lives of poverty and hopelessness by the most "advanced" country in the world. But as history attests, once the rage subsides, the images, which should be unforgettable, are all too soon forgotten. The ghetto and those trapped inside it are once more invisible.

You can hear Diane Ravitch’s revised version of what’s needed for school reform, as well as a very different perspective (my own), in a panel this Friday, March 26, 6:00 PM, at NYU, Silver Room 207.

Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, claims that many men in Iraq and Afghanistan are addicted to war. If this is true, could it have something to do with the fact that GIs today do not face the endless bombardment from airplanes, field artillery, and tanks that World War II soldiers did?

I served in the 88th Infantry Division in Italy and I never met anyone so addicted. Had we met someone like that we would have considered him “Section 8,” that is, seriously disturbed.

Does that mean that many gung-ho GIs now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are Section 8?

[This article was published in New Politics No. 23, Summer 1997]

Review of HELLMAN AND HAMMETT, by Joan Mellen (HarperCollins, New York, 1996. 572pp. $30.00 HB, $13.00 PB)

 Anyone who doubts that the Democratic Party has morphed from “liberal” to “neoliberal” in regard to education policy should check out the Democrats for Education Reform (DER).

         Conspiracy theorists often take evidence of government cover-ups as proof that a conspiracy occurred. Sometimes a conspiracy may indeed have occurred, but often the cover-up was designed to hide not some grand conspiracy, but malfeasance, incompetence, or wrong-doing.

Below is an appeal from Mark Dow for the Haitian popular radio work of New Politics writer Sony Esteus and his colleagues in the wake of Haiti’s devastating earthquake. I hope you can make a contribution, even if it is modest. Send a donation to our office, New Politics, 155 W. 72nd Street, Rm 402, NY, NY 10025 or go give through PayPal on our website www.newpol.org. As always, gifts to New Politics are tax deductible; please indicate that the donation is for Haiti. To contact Mark directly, write him at mdow@igc.org
In solidarity,
Joanne Landy, member, New Politics editorial board

The Swiss health insurance system, which mandates every individual to buy private health insurance, has been held up by many as a realistic model for the United States. In Switzerland, however, private insurers are far more highly regulated than is conceivable to imagine in the U.S. for example, they are not allowed to make profit on “basic” coverage. Yet even so, as my friend Dennis Clagett who lives in Switzerland has written to me, popular dissatisfaction with the country’s healthcare system is mounting due to the way that the private insurers have behaved.

“Unions are killing the economy” says Henry Blodget at the Business Insider. He gleefully applauds the firing of every teacher in a Rhode Island school for their arrogance. How dare workers, teachers especially, think they have a voice in their working conditions or salaries? How uppity of teachers to sneer at the bosses’ absolutist control of the workplace. Let’s recall that Henry Blodget was indicated for insider trading.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the mass media, which focuses its attention on the way teacher unions impede “educational innovation,” (e.g., standardized testing’s stranglehold; privatization; cuts in funding), we are witnessing a growing swell of reform in teacher unions. Transformation of both national teacher unions is absolutely essential to turn back the neoliberal program that the Obama administration is pushing.

[Editors' note: Howard Zinn, among his multitude of other contributions to the left, was a long-time sponsor of New Politics. We express our deepest sympathies to his family and post here an article by NP board member Steve Shalom that will be appearing in the spring issue of Democratic Left.]