The Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s “Q&A on Iran” has elicited an extremely critical response from Edward Herman and David Peterson, posted on MRzine. To summarize, Herman and Peterson accuse the Campaign of aiding and abetting (unwittingly, they allow) U.S. imperialism and its aggressive designs on Iran. They reject, for the most part, allegations of election fraud by the Ahmadinejad regime and dismiss the idea of solidarity with the Iranian pro-democracy movement. Their position appears to be that the U.S.

Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29 (2008), directed by Kevin Rafferty, a thrilling football movie showing Harvard’s astonishing come-from-behind “victory” – the title is the Harvard Crimson’s — in the last 42 seconds of the 1968 Yale-Harvard game. Rafferty is a brilliant documentarian, known for his earlier Atomic Café. In some ways, Harvard Beats Yale is continuous with the themes of the earlier film. Harvard’s largely working-class (and mostly anti-Vietnam War) team is up against the aristocracy and arrogance of Yale and its fans..

Both of us had been in Orgone (Reichean) therapy for most of the 1950s, and we still believe it was efficacious. Orgone therapy involves tearing down the muscular armor of the body’s defense mechanisms – neck armor, jaw armor, chest armor, eventually pelvic armor, sometimes with the therapist’s palpitations of the patient’s rigidity. It is an attempt to go beyond Freudian psychoanalysis in that it deals not only with a patient’s dreams and free association but also with the physical manifestations of repressed hatred.

Multiculturalism vs. human rights?

Defending multiculturalism but warning against its excesses

Multiculturalism has many positive benefits. It defends the right to the different, which is a very important and precious human right, especially for those people whose difference has historically resulted in social marginalization and exclusion: including women, black, disabled and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

Underneath any specific conclusions we come to on any subject, is a more fundamental framework consisting of our premises. Because premises are usually implicit in contrast to explicit conclusions, and because they often are shared by much of our surrounding culture, we tend to take them for granted. We may argue or discuss some specific government action, for instance, without even being aware that our agreement or disagreement is itself shaped by our underlying sense of human nature or what kind of society is possible or what difference we are able to make in the world.

While researching a book on The Great Recession (or whatever we wind up calling this economic downturn) I noticed that I couldn’t find any unemployed bankers who had actually handled the “toxic assets” that supposedly caused the crisis. I started to look for them systematically and eventually discovered that they were still employed. Furthermore, their activity of creating and trading collateralized debt obligations and the SWAPS that insured them was, in fact, booming.

These are my remarks in a debate/discussion on the topic “Can a New Public Option Be A Step to a Single Payer?” sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), July 22, 2009, at Bluestockings Bookstore, Manhattan. I was debating with Mark Hannay. Can a New Public Option Be A Step to a Single Payer? My answer is “no.”The movement for healthcare reform is facing a great opportunity

GIVING BACK – OR RATHER, GIVING UP

The Council of NJ State College Locals, CNJSCL ( http://www.cnjscl.org/ )

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay — Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)

Michael Harrington is rarely taken seriously as a Marxist thinker — indeed, his Marxism is rarely taken seriously at all, by either his critics or sympathizers.

Campaign for Peace and Democracy July 7, 2009 Right after the June 12 elections in Iran, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued a statement expressing our strong support for the masses of Iranians protesting electoral fraud and our horror at the ferocious response of the government.

With the Obama election, many of us are wondering how far we can push the new Administration in a progressive direction. As Frances Fox Piven says, he won’t go left unless there is a powerful movement pushing him in that direction. Piven compares him to FDR, under whose Administration many liberal programs, including Social Security, were enacted. FDR began as a centrist but was pushed to the left by protest movements. There has been a steady drum roll of pundits proclaiming that welfare reform is a success.

The NY Times reported on June 23 that Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, warned that inferior charter schools are ruining the reputation of the entire charter school project, endangering the administration’s initiative to make charter schools the focal point of school reform. Each charter school is essentially its own miniscule school district (a “local education authority,” in educational policy-speak).