How come Ugandan activists are upbeat while so many U.S. activists are glum?
2011
Prospects for the U.S. Left: Not Bad At All
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The growing public anger at capitalism is palpable. When conservative radio hosts play up Marxist websites, things are looking up.
2011
Overcoming Despair as the Republicans Take Over: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky
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How are national initiatives built locally? Can we push Obama leftward in 2012? Chomsky calls for small steps toward confronting global capital.
26.2 Spring 2011
Tunisia, Egypt, and Israel
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U.S. policy in the Middle East keeps opting for stability over morality — and so ends up with neither.
2011
The State of the Spirit, 2011
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Human beings share a deep yearning to live in communities that provide a sense of purpose to their lives. And we have an irrepressible instinct to seek freedom; creativity; artistic expression; higher and higher levels of understanding and consciousness; love and caring for others; the creation and enjoyment of beauty and pleasure; and both joyous celebration of and awe-filled responses to all the wonders of life in this universe.
2011
Justice and Trauma: Reflections on Terrorism and Empire
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How much are we motivated by a natural partiality for our own suffering? And how much by willful blindness and moral laziness? And finally, where do we draw the hard lines of rejecting injustice, no matter how traumatic the source?
2011
Transforming Trade Unions: A Psychotherapist’s Insights
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Since 1972, the Right has set out to build a well-financed, interlocking, loosely coordinated set of institutions that promote their message, train their cadres, and support their public representatives with money and ideas. Similarly, the Left needs interpretive institutions that can creatively link people’s real interests — their needs for economic security, meaning, recognition, agency, and connectedness — with a broader political program.
2011
Healing the Trauma of the Middle Passage
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The roots of present-day disorder are about the inability of the nation’s best economic theorists to untie the Gordian knot to solve the intractable problem of feeding the huge appetite of a large, bloated, and ever-growing economy in which expanding overseas markets cannot contain what was started when human bodies were sold as commodities, as simply material objects that wear out and are replaced.
Articles
Balancing Activism and the Cosmic
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The death of my father last April caused me to reflect anew on where we agreed and where we disagreed. When I was a college student, we would debate capitalism and socialism. Over the years I came to realize that people would be much better off under the capitalist system he envisioned than under any of the capitalist or socialist realities today.
2011
Democratizing the Economy from the Bottom Up
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My own work has been a long, long attempt to answer two questions: First, “If you don’t like corporate capitalism and you don’t like state socialism, what do you want?” Second, “And how can we get from here to there?”
2011
Fighting to Prevent Global Hunger
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Despite its obscurity as a federal government regulatory body, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is making decisions now that could determine whether hundreds of millions of people experience malnutrition, hunger, and perhaps even starvation in the coming years.
2011
Treat the System, Not the Symptom
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“They stop at treating the symptoms of poverty, such as hunger and poor health, with food programs and clinics, without ever asking the obvious question: Why do a few people enjoy effortless abundance, while billions of others who work far harder experience extreme deprivation?”
2010
Latin America’s Rising Left
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Oliver Stone has provided a great antidote to mainstream U.S. media coverage of Latin America with his latest film, “South of the Border.”
2010
Strange Land, New World
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I am the first Jew to live in this cloistered Benedictine monastery. I don’t blend. I wear a kippah everywhere I go, and I observe the Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I’m studying to become a rabbi, and I live here in this remote community of Catholic monks vowed to chastity and obedience.