By Steven Jonas, Senior Editor
Oct. 11, 2011
In The New York Times “Sunday Review” of Sept. 25, 2011, Michael Kazin, a co-editor of Dissent magazine, published an article entitled “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” It is drawn from a new book of his entitled American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. In the article (full disclosure: I have not read the book, only the review that appeared in The Times Sunday Book Review on Sept. 18) Mr. Kazin attributed the aforementioned decline to a number of factors. They included: unlike the (relatively) powerful left of the 1930s, the modern left, unlike the modern Right, has not been germinating for very long; in the 1970s they started leaving traditional “left” issues such as “class justice” for such things as rights for minorities and women; the failed promises of the Democratic Party, post pre-Viet Nam Lyndon Johnson; dependence on “politicians;” and “not reconnecting with ordinary Americans.” So, you see, the “decline of the US left” is all the left’s fault.
<<< IMAGE: The legendary Big Bill Haywood, head of the I.W.W., was one of the earliest combative union leaders in the US. His kind has not been seen for almost 100 years, but the sorry state of American trade unions is not so much a product of their own flaws, as the inevitable result of an all-out never-ending assault on workers by private capital using all the forces and tools of the state, which they naturally control. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
ARCHIVES: Articles you should have read the first time around, but didn’t
Adventures in the left blogosphere while trying to introduce a discomfitting issue—
It’s a little known fact that factory farms produce more greenhouse gases that ALL modes of transportation combined.
By Patrice Greanville
In general, pigs are clean, intelligent, social animals. However, factory farms frustrate their natural desires to exercise, explore, play, root, stay clean, and socialize normally. (Courtesy: Compassionate Action for Animals)
NOT TOO LONG AGO I posted, mostly on impulse, as a result of hearing about yet another execrable crime committed against helpless animals (by the usual suspects)…a plea for “progressives” to consider amplifying their scope of moral consideration to include all sentient beings subject to tyrannization. As a lifelong leftist and animal liberationist I am well acquainted with the temperament and idiosyncrasy prevailing in both tribes, and knew quite well that the “left”—however we may define it, has been less than helpful in the struggles to introduce a modicum of compassion in the brutal interactions between humans and non-humans. I know that it seems inane to ask people who are already horribly busy and overstretched coping with the constant tsunami of crime and idiocies produced by this system by the hour…to take yet another “cause” on their shoulders. I am also quite clear about the fact that the Left has never weaned itself off of the 19th century hangover proclaiming “man” (generically speaking) as the measure of all things and therefore center of the universe. This victory of secularism and democracy with a very small “d” was in fact the result of long centuries of struggles against church and king to give rationality and the “common man” a legitimate place at the table of societal decision making. This impromptu essay, therefore, reflected some of these theses. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Cornel West: His criticism would be better grounded if it was straight political analysis instead of bourgeois psychobabble.
Unable to defend the indefensible, Black Obama supporters have been “rendered all but mute on issues of policy.” They got their chance to reenter the political conversation when Princeton professor and media celebrity Cornel West, a former Obama supporter who is now a harsh critic, speculated on the racial workings of the president’s brain. “There is no need to inject racial psychoanalysis into the (public) conversation when straightforward political analysis is more than sufficient to the task.” Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
Freedom Rider: Obama’s Killing Spree
By Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Created 05/04/2011
Obama receiving standing ovation after Osama raid.
OBAMA is certainly living the thug life, an international gangster without parallel. What is to lesser humans a planet is, to Obama, a spherical theater of war, a free-fire zone. With two more notches in his gun, the First Black President is ensuring that Black Americans will be viewed as just another brand of ugly, violent Americans set loose on the world. And “the Peace Prize winner will once again give a lofty, well written speech about why it makes no sense to be peaceful.” Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
The Anti-Empire Report
May 2nd, 2011
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org
Incredibly, things were much better under Saddam.
Iraq: Let us not forget what “humanitarian intervention” looks like.
Libya: Let us not be confused as to why Libya alone has been singled out for “humanitarian intervention”.
On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of “war criminal” and “torturer”. (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can’t Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: “Aren’t you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?” She also threw in another line that’s become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that’s used when all other arguments fail: “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.” 1 Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
