contributions

By Laura S. Washington
“There’s no doubt that Mexican men and women-full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work-are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States.”
Mexican President Vicente Fox’s comments last year to a group of Mexican businessmen ignited a political firestorm across the Americas. Fox also foreshadowed a powerful divide in the national debate over immigration reform.
He was defending Mexican immigrants, arguing they are hard-working, (…)

LET’S IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT / by Neil Young (Streaming Audio)
With Neil Young and Pearl Jam releasing devastating anti-Bush albums in the coming weeks, it looks like rock has rejuvenated its protest past.
By Jan Frel
Only one friend of mine popped the champagne after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore effectively sealed the deal that we’d see a right winger in office.
The friend, a fan of ’70s and ’80s punk music, was overjoyed because he told me (I’m paraphrasing), "The (…)

Il Manifesto
Fausto Bertinotti, Secretary of the Italian Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), talks to Valentino Parlato, founding editor of the Communist daily Il Manifesto, about the challenges facing the next center-left government, the challenges to Marxist orthodoxy posed by the powerful rise of democratic mass movements, and the development of the Party of the European Left, a project which Bertinotti is leading in Italy. (Translated by Vittorio Longhi)
These days much has been said (…)

Pack Journalism can be Lethal Instead of checking facts, the media prefer to follow what others are saying
By Gregory Clark
April 10, 2006 Japan Times
Some call it pack journalism. It is also lazy journalism.
Instead of checking facts, the media prefer to follow what others are saying. And what others are saying is often inspired by establishment hardliners seeking to impose their agendas with the help of bogus news agencies, subsidized research outfits and hired scribblers. (…)

by Haider Rizvi
NEW YORK, Apr 28 (IPS) - In more than 100 years, people in the United States have not seen what they are likely to witness this May Day, with massive rallies and protests against the treatment of undocumented workers expected to take place all over the country.
"No work, no school, no buying, no selling," vow posters in cities and towns across the U.S., as campaigners for immigrant rights plan to hold a nationwide strike on Monday, May 1.
Every year on May 1, workers (…)

US allies behind Iraq’s death squads and ethnic cleansing BY JONATHAN STEELE
30 April 2006
BAGHDAD - MUCH ink, as well as indignation, is being spent on whether Iraq is on the verge of, in the midst of, or nowhere near civil war. Wherever you stand in this largely semantic debate, the one certainty is that the seedbed for the country’s self-destruction is Iraq’s plethora of militias. In the apt phrase of Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador in Baghdad, they are the "infrastructure of (…)

The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was televised on C-Span Saturday evening. Featured entertainer Stephen Colbert delivered a biting rebuke of George W. Bush and the lily-livered press corps. He did it to Bush’s face, unflinching and unbowed by the audience’s muted, humorless response. Democratic Underground members commented in real time (here, here, and here).<script language="JavaScript" (…)

By Aluf Benn
Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will meet in Washington with U.S. President George Bush on May 23. The two will focus on Olmert’s convergence plan, the Hamas-led government in the Palestinian Authority, and the Iranian nuclear threat.
Olmert’s first trip abroad as prime minister will be devoted entirely to meetings with U.S. administration and Congressional leaders in Washington, and he will not travel to other destinations.
Advisers Dov Weissglas and Shalom Turjeman (…)

By MAUREEN DOWD
Even some State Department officials thought it was like watching a cranky, eccentric uncle with an efficient, energetic niece.
Rummy was ordered to go to Iraq by the president, but he clearly has no stomach for nation-building, or letting Condi run the show. He seemed under the weather after a rough overnight ride on a C-17 transport plane from Washington into Baghdad. And Condi’s aides were rolling their eyes at the less than respectful way the DefSec treated the (…)

April 28, 2006
"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
Bad news continues to pile up around Don Rumsfeld like garbage at a land fill. The latest blast came from an unlikely source, The Army Times, which conducted a poll showing that 64% of enlisted men think Rumsfeld should tender his resignation immediately.
It would be impossible to find a more conservative (…)