In a suburban nation enjoying declining rates of violent crime, we forget that not all places are created equal. Homicide in America remains concentrated in African American urban communities. In my city—Philadelphia—over 70 percent of homicide victims in 2008 were …
On March 4, 2009, Pre-Trial Chamber 1 of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it was charging Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Long anticipated, the arrest warrant was immediately used by al-Bashir’s National …
If you’re not afraid to ask for money, says nonprofit fundraising guru Kim Klein, then you weren’t born in this country or you’re a child. The taboo against talking about money, much less asking for it, has survived even as …
The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did) by James Traub Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008, 272 pp., $25.00 “Stepping Back from Democratic Pessimism” by Thomas Carothers Carnegie Papers, Carnegie Endowment for International …
That nearly twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost breakdown of a $37.99 University of Connecticut hoodie that appeared in the Hartford Courant a couple of years ago: the workers received a mere …
Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg Harvard University Press, 2008, 392 pp., $29.95 [contentblock id=20 img=gcb.png] Newsweek proclaimed that Barack Obama’s budget means, “We’re all socialists now,” and conservative erstwhile presidential …
The political and military scene in Iraq is best described as a series of truces. All parties await America’s exit, and all will try to steer it in their favor. President Barack Obama’s moment can be used either to guide …
Last September, when the presidential race was close, Barack Obama tried to quell a flap in the news media over what he had intended as a routine jibe. “You can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama had said of the …
The 2008 election was historic on many counts, but one of the more significant developments was the decisive defeat of the politics of smear and fear. As the campaign wore on, and the prospects of the McCain-Palin candidacy appeared increasingly …
Writing about the German Left and Israel—the debates on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism of the last several years—often feels like a race against history. Not a day goes by without another piece being added to this complex and troublesome mosaic. No …
The resolution required to get out of an imperial or a humanitarian-improvement occupation is not different in kind from the heave of the will required for getting in. The problem is that getting in was made possible by a morale …
Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It by Kim Bobo The New Press, 2009, 336 pp., $17.95 During the last presidential transition, George W. Bush made his first …
An inspiring if flawed documentary, Made in L.A. follows three Los Angeles sweatshop workers as their lawsuit against a low-price retail label and the community campaign to support them developed from 2001 through 2004. Enthusiastically received by critics and activists …
Europe has plunged into its severest economic recession since before the Second World War, with rising unemployment, plant closures, and a credit crunch as the financial system falters. The political challenge this sets for the European Left looks daunting and …
One of the most important solutions to the current economic crisis is a bill that, outside the labor movement and anti-labor business lobbies, almost no one has heard of: the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for …
