On The Afl-CIO Split
In some respects it was fitting that four important affiliates declared their withdrawal from the AFL-CIO in the days running up to the 50th anniversary convention in July 2005. A merger which was conceived in a unity that signified complacency was dissolved. The problem now is what can workers expect from the fissure? Will the…
Read MoreOn The Future Of Trade Unionism
It should have been the time for a celebration of the golden anniversary of a calculated mariage de raison that had endured in spite of sometimes serious disagreements. Instead, the couple created in 1955 by the fusion of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the AFL-CIO) has experienced a separation…
Read MoreIt Happened Here: The Bush Sweep, The Left, And The American Future
Political commentary is always replete with exaggerations: it fits the need of the culture industry. Even the greatest thinkers like Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno tended to take the experience of a crucial historical moment and extrapolate its most dramatic implications into the future: it’s a natural inclination. But the victory of George W. Bush…
Read MoreEinstein On Race And Racism
On January 30, 1933, the day Hitler and the Nazis took over the German government, the most famous scientist in the world may also have been the luckiest. Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa were away from their Berlin home on a visit to Pasadena, California his third winter there as a guest faculty member…
Read MoreA Resurgent Left In Latin America: Implications For The Region And U.s. Policy
With the bulk of international news coverage over the past few months focused on Iraq, Sudan, and the Asian Tsunami, it would be easy to miss one of the handful of articles describing the increasingly clear leftward political trend in South America. This trend has serious implications for both the trade and security agenda of…
Read MoreEinstein’s Legacy — Where Are The “einsteinians?”
For more than two centuries after Newton published his theories of space, time, and motion in 1687, most physicists were Newtonians. They believed, as Newton did, that space and time are absolute, that force causes acceleration, and that gravity is a force conveyed across a vacuum at a distance. Since Darwin there are few professional…
Read MorePrologue To Mark Twain’s “to The Person Sitting In Darkness.”
Picture Huckleberry Finn, a bit older and flintier, in Army uniform remorselessly slaughtering Filipino insurgents, and their hapless families, at the inauspicious turn of the 20th century. What would nigger Jim think?[1] A tad earlier, these same villainous Filipinos had been hailed in the fickle US press as glorious freedom fighters for helping America to…
Read MoreTo The Person Sitting In Darkness
Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked but not enough, in my judgement, to make any considerable risk advisable. The People that Sit in Darkness are getting to be…
Read MoreHow Bush Won
Is it really the case that, as the British tabloid the Daily Mirror famously put it, nearly 60 million Americans were simply too “dumb” to understand the implications of reelecting George W. Bush? It seems so. Even though few Americans had personally benefited from the regressive social and economic policies of the president’s first term,…
Read MoreBergman’s Last Words: Saraband?
I began to attend Bergman’s films in my late teens-an insecure, confused adolescent hungrily seeking explanations and solace for my existential angst. Bergman films like Wild Strawberries and The Magician so powerfully affected me that I began to reflect on my own life in a different light. Here was a director who made films that didn’t…
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