contributions

by Irwin Silber
I make no apologies for having voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. It wasn’t Nader who did Gore in. It was Al Gore himself (aided and abetted by the Supreme Court) who ran a totally lackluster campaign and did more to alienate progressives like myself than anyone else. (I.e., his crudely opportunistic decision to call for keeping the Cuban boy Elian forcibly in the U.S.) I believe Nader sees the corruption and underlying affinity with corporate business by both Democrats like (…)

Or, It’s the Social Movements, Stupid.
by Michael Hirsch
printed in the Spring 2004 Democratic Left
Voting is a bitch. John Kerry will get my vote in the November elections, and I’ll give it with the same grudging, wintry discontent that I did in the last two presidential elections, when I backed Ralph Nader. In those races, I made statements. Now I want to beat Bush.
But that’s not what this piece is about. It’s not why a vote for Kerry is inevitable in a year when Bush is (…)

Counter-insurgency strategy
I’ve thought long and hard why our uniformed military forces lack ’finesse’, and consequently why we are so incredibly incompetent at CI and low-intensity conflict.
May I suggest our doctrines are based on myths...
Contrary to our highly skewed version of WWII,ie. we won it, as eloquently pointed out above, any informed military historian will point out we were in reality little more than bit players...the Soviet Union and China engaged and occupied more (…)

by Gail Robinson
Even parents who can afford private schools send their children to P.S. 6 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The school offers instruction in political cartooning and foreign language and a joint program with the Museum of Natural History. And all the innovation apparently pays off. More than 92 percent of the students at the school meet the state standards in reading and math for their grade level.
But there is another P.S. 6 in New York City, this one in the East Flatbush (…)

INTERACT (Commentary and Personal Essay)
Racial domination may no longer be the law of the land, but that doesn’t mean social practices have changed completely in the last half-century.
Written by Danielle Allen / Chicago
The question, "Where are we 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education?" carries a note of despair.
We know where we are: Northern public schools have more segregated than they have ever been and are more segregated than their Southern counterparts, African (…)

by Frank Rich
The New York Times - Published: May 16, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/arts/16RICH.html?th
It’s almost too perfect. Two young working-class women from opposite ends of West Virginia go off to war. One is blond and has aspirations to be a schoolteacher. The other is dark, a smoker, divorced and now carrying an out-of-wedlock baby. One becomes the heroic poster child for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the subject of a hagiographic book and TV movie; the other becomes the (…)

The Gray Zone by Seymour M. Hersh
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
The New Yorker
http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision (…)

(Last week, Italian communist leader Fausto Bertinotto was elected leader of the new European left party created by 16 communist and socialist parties.
The following commentary by Bertinoti appeared in The Guardian (UK) August 11, 2003.)
Reformist social democracy is no longer on the agenda
By Fausto Bertinotti
The terrible events in Iraq marked the end of the post-war period - a period marked by the memory of the horrors of the Nazi-fascist war, when the world saw two opposing (…)

America has a lot to apologize for. This has been a week of grim juxtapositions with more photographs of torture perpetrated in American prison camps overseas, the reopening of the brutal murder of Emmett Till, the display of thousands of picture postcards of lynchings at Jackson State University, admissions that the treatment of the prisoners has been approved at the highest levels, the realization that it has been known by the administration since March, since January, since the fall of (…)

For prisoner family members and activists, the situation at Abu Ghraib is hauntingly familiar. My son is in prison ... six years on an offense that seems so obscure and hugely unrelated to the physical abuse and constant mental torture he consistently endures (in varyng degrees) at the hands of ignorant, ill-trained and/or sadistic guards.
In New Mexico, the Department of Correction periodically runs TV spots inviting applicants to "join the team." The ad illustrates clearly what happens (…)