US rhetoric and sanctions ramp up dangerous tension with North Korea
North Korea recently issued a “No.1 combat readiness alert” announcing that the “North and South are at war”. Leader Kim Jong-un also put his strategic missile units on standby for launch. South Korea’s mainstream media and politicians say North Korea is “making intentional provocations, ramping up tension”. Socialists should not support such actions by North […]
The making of the Mystique
FIFTY YEARS after its publication, The Feminine Mystique has been credited with everything from single-handedly sparking the women’s movement to perpetuating an outdated and long-gone stereotype of the American family. Neither is true, but many of the issues that Betty Friedan’s book raised–such as the role of women and the nuclear family–make The Feminine Mystique […]
Obama victory: We don’t want “four more-of-the-same years”
The following is an editorial piece that appeared at SocialistWorker.org in the US. Barack Obama has won re-election, thanks to a strong turnout by the Democratic Party’s core supporters in every place the president needed to win. Obama was only barely ahead of Mitt Romney in the national popular vote as this article was being written, with […]
How the 1 Percent conjured a monster storm
Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, examines the man-made factors contributing to the disaster of Hurricane Sandy. “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that […]
What’s wrong with lesser evilism
Those who advocate a vote for the “lesser evil” hope to defeat the “greater evil” of the right wing–but they enable the Democrats to shift further right themselves. ————————————————————— DOES BARACK Obama deserve your vote? That’s the question people on the left should be asking as Election Day approaches. When you consider Obama’s record after four years […]
Film Review: American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein
“Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.” It is […]
Book Review: The Lacuna
How do you write a history of revolutionary lives and activity in the mid 20th century and sell it to the public? A tough order, certainly, but Barbara Kingsolver nails it with The Lacuna. The book follows the life of a young man, Harrison Shephard, who finds himself living between the worlds of his Mexican mother and American […]
