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).

There’s an AP story today that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan “will soon order U.S. and NATO forces to break away from fights with militants hiding among villagers.” The order is expected to reduce “the use of air strikes, mortars and artillery in villages.” There are three points to note here: 1. The order does not prohibit U.S. troops from using massive force when civilians are nearby if the troops are in “imminent danger,” and indeed, the order allows massive force if necessary to avoid “undue danger” to the troops.

Late last year, Columbia University Press published Jeffrey B. Perry’s Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, the first of a promised two-volume study of a great, forgotten figure from the early Socialist Party. Given the unabashed racism so common within the movement, Harrison ended up leaving it to build a black nationalist group that antedated Marcus Garvey’s efforts.

For immediate release
Contact: Joanne Landy, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, jlandy@igc.org

NEW YORK, March 18, 2009

I just read a particularly silly piece by Shlomo Avineri, the Israeli political theorist who has written some interesting things on Marxism.

How we admired and respected Max! The “we” was small in number of course, for how many revolutionary socialists were there in the Thirties in this country? Only a handful of Trotskyists and not all of them had that special feeling for Max shared by “my crowd,” some barely teenagers, others in their late teens or twenties and a few oldsters crowding thirty.