When I first met Brendan Sexton in the mid-1930s, he was pure flame: an activist in the then still-vital Socialist party, a leader in the unemployed movement, a young man full of blazing energy. I saw him from a distance, …
After twenty-one years of Israeli occupation, the status quo in the West Bank and Gaza lingers on, with dire implications for the future of the entire area. Palestinians and Israelis compete in denying each other’s interests and aspirations, or, on …
The astonishing thing about the Reagan administration’s policy toward Nicaragua is its resiliency. Twice in the space of a year, it appeared that the administration’s sponsorship of a proxy war was on the brink of failure: in November 1986, when …
Lech Walesa says that glasnost makes him uneasy. “In my twenty-five years as an electrician I’ve had to tighten and loosen many screws. When tightening them I’ve broken only one, but I must have broken several hundred in my attempts …
On Wednesday, January 20, the Peace Now movement held a meeting to protest the Israeli government’s handling of the Arab uprising on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. It was a wet, cold Jerusalem night, and the mood …
Free trade is a myth. It does not exist; it never did exist, with the possible and limited exception of a brief period when Britain practiced it as well as preached it to expand its near-monopoly over world manufacture. It …
Neoconservative Michael Novak, once a man who decried U.S. military and political encroachment in other lands, has written another apologia for U.S. policy in Latin America in the guise of a critique of Latin American liberation theology. Novak charges, with …
Since the depths of the Volcker-Reagan recession of the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has followed a course of economic expansion that has heartened supporters of the Reagan administration and put its critics on the defensive. In terms of the …
There are fewer and fewer places to be poor in the city of America’s future. Walk down any residential street on the periphery of downtown; it teems with immigrant families doubling and tripling up in small apartments. A Los Angeles …
Imbued with a salutary populist distrust of bankers, Americans only grudgingly and belatedly accepted the public need for a central bank analogous to the Bank of England and similar institutions in Western Europe. Major bank failures early in this century …
For almost a quarter century, Americans have been engaged in a kind of civil war, divided into two camps defined by fundamentally different moral-cultural perceptions. That idea, which would have been a surprise to Tocqueville or Bryce, has haunted our …
The road from Leningrad to Moscow stretches some 450 miles, a distance that I, on advice of my doctor, my conscience, and a consuming curiosity about some hidden aspects of Soviet life, set out to walk recently, in the company …
Recent events in Britain offer little cheer for anyone committed to democratic socialism. After what was widely held to be Labour’s most effective election campaign in twenty years, Labour gained a share of the vote that was only 3.5 percent …
I was privileged to be Bayard’s friend for over forty-five years and a colleague for the past twenty-three. I would like to try to give some sense of what made Bayard—not his activities, not his achievements, not his politics—these have …
The most important political issue—in peacetime—is always the economy. This basic truth will only intensify over the coming decade, as the United States continues its painful transition from an industrial economy built on assembly-line manufacturing in large, stable firms, to …
