Mortality and the Utopian Quest
My quest for utopia continues. I want to participate as long as possible in the shaping of our world. I cannot join the camp of the pessimists who believe that the world is headed for disaster.
Unions Work to Turn the Tide
Source: In These Times
America’s unions are contending with the harshest legislative attack on workers’ rights since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Labor strategists, their forces in decline, face an urgent question: What should unions do to defend their existence, and to provide workers more power at work and in politics?
The rise of the Tea Party right, recession-induced fiscal crises and Republican midterm victories—especially in many unionized Midwestern battleground states—set the stage. But Democrats’ failure to respond adequately to the economic crisis—in the areas of jobs, home foreclosures and financial regulation—enabled the ascent of the Republican right. And now Democratic governors and legislators, even in states like Massachusetts, have joined in the Republican attack on labor unions and workers—particularly public service workers.
Dispersing Power in Bolivia: Tending the ‘Sacred Fire’ of Social Movements
Understanding how social movements in El Alto, Bolivia have operated and sustained themselves in recent years is a key part of grappling with the questions of social change and state power in Bolivia today.
Gone With the Papers
Source: TruthDig.com
I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent.
Palestinian Status at the UN: Breaking the Logjam
There is a good deal of discussion in the halls of the UN, both in New York and Geneva, concerning a possible application of full membership in the UN by the Palestinian Authority.
Obama: Three More Years of War in Afghanistan
Source: The Progressive
Our war president promised more war. While he trumpeted his big Afghanistan speech as the first step in ending that war, Barack Obama essentially told the American people that tens of thousands of our soldiers would still be fighting there for at least three more years.
A year from now, Obama said all the additional “surge” troops will be back home. But the U.S. will still have close to 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, twice the number that were there when Obama took office.