I recently returned from the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota where I was part of a Pacifica Radio nightly live broadcast. While there it hit me time and again, that I felt completely out of touch with the type of Americans that identify as Republicans. Waiting in line to get into the convention hall, I was surrounded by perfectly coiffured white women in shades of pink, white, and powder blue, …

It’s International Women’s Day 2006 and men still get a free ride. Women still do most of the world’s work, and much of the most important, most difficult work is done by women, at great cost to themselves. So many men who could use their privelege to work in solidarity with women and push their societies towards more justice remain silent, speak diplomatically, or conform to expectations. At the same time I am amazed at how many …

I always ask the question: Can a black man in America receive justice? I can say to you or anybody else that the answer is absolutely no. -Stanley Tookie Williams

Speaking of his time as a gang member, Stanley Tookie Williams said, “My courage was predicated on violence, on a negative reputation…, on ignorance.”^[1] Now Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, who has …

Former education secretary William Bennett said on his television show that the crime rate would be reduced if black babies were aborted:
If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. [This would be] an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.^[1]

Besides the fact that this is …

The federal government is slowly providing aid to the victims of the four day old tragedy in New Orleans, as if it was something in another country. Click2Houston.com carried a powerful piece on the desperation of New Orleans residents, combined with a scathing indictment of the feds by the city’s mayor:

Ray Nagin went on WWL Radio Thursday night to say the feds “don’t have a clue what’s going on.” He added, “Excuse my French — everybody in America …

The Minuteman Project (Wikipedia) has been dealt a couple of blows in recent weeks. For example, anti-racist demonstrations in opposition to the group have been building up steam. A protest in New Mexico (Associated Press) drew hundreds. (For more on the movement against the MM, see SouthWest Action to Resist the Minutemen). In addition, local and national officials have distanced themselves from the project, if not from its intentions. The chairman of …

We rarely see progressive activists, especially men, deal with the issue of pornography, but they should. One writer who has influenced me on this subject has been Robert Jensen, a friend and colleague who makes the case that pornography is not only sexist and subtly racist, but that it is damaging to heterosexual white males, the primary customers. By purchasing or renting pornography, you become “someone who is willing to buy women for sex, someone who …

Guess who’s upset about the widening income gap…

The New York Times had a good analysis yesterday of the incomes of Americans and their relationship to Bush administration tax cuts. The piece includes a nice set of graphics showing the growing category of “hyper-rich” (the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers by income) that are leaving even the “merely rich” (top 10 percent) behind in terms of their share of the national income and the lower fraction of …

Sonali Kolhatkar asked RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) what they thought of the anti-US protests in Afghanistan, the desecration of the Koran, and the prisoner abuses. The answer of RAWA member Selay is printed below.

This puts Rahul Mahajan and my discussion, and my article, in a little better context. Clearly I misjudged the extent and depth of the anti-US movement: it is long term and …

Friend Rahul Mahajan and I had an extended correspondence on some of the issues I’d raised in my post on the anti-US demonstrations in Afghanistan. Our discussion centered mostly on where one draws the line between accepting fundamentalist religious popular movements as valid expressions of anti-imperialist struggle, despite their reactionary qualities; and criticizing them openly. After this discussion, copied below, and some feedback from the folks at ZNet, I submitted a revised version …