Portside

My recent Nobel peace prize win for my contributions in Tunisia shows that giving working people a say is the best path toward a more equal and just world

The recent U.S. deployment of special operations forces to Syria expands a global U.S. battlefield that is at a historic size. This year, special ops have been sent to a record 147 countries—75 percent of the nations on the planet. It’s a 145 percent increase from the days of George W. Bush. And it means that on any given day elite U.S. forces are on the ground in 70 to 90 countries.

While Henry Kissinger is not responsible for the evolution of the U.S. national security state into such a monstrosity, his strategies, the use of bombing as an instrument of “diplomacy” in Southeast Asia, the militarization of the Persian Gulf, and the violation of the sovereignty of neutral countries to destroy so-called enemy “sanctuaries,” has created the conditions for the endless wars started by Bush’s neocons and waged by Obama’s liberal hawks.

Albert Einstein's take on this question was surely influenced by the general crisis of 1914 to 1945, which profoundly shook the faith in inexorable progress and the belief in universal schemes of history. The lessons of that crisis still mark our present moment: historical determinism, outside of the academic cloisters of analytic Marxism, has very few adherents today. The question of why socialism remains as pressing for us as it was at the time of Einstein's writing.

TV ratings are generally lower on Friday and Saturday nights, which probably explains why there has never been a general election debate on a Saturday night. On the flip side, Thursday is king when it comes to debates. Of the 100 debates since the 2000 election cycle, 27 of them have been on a Thursday. The three general election debates on Thursdays garnered an average of 66.5 million viewers per event — by far the biggest number.

Buses, trains, bikes, and walking represent more than an efficient means of getting from one place to another. They move us toward a brighter future because of the many social and economic benefits they foster.

We acknowledge that this was written in June, 2015. However we are posting it because it describes how tangled the lines are when it comes to US and British policy in the Middle East. Unless there is a real turn around in US strategy in the Middle East the only thing that will continue will be more death and destruction, and the repercussions are world wide. This should be a big question for the US presidential debates - but will it?

Alfred Hayes wrote it as a poem in upstate New York at a left wing retreat called Camp Unity during the Summer of 1936. Hayes met Earl Robinson there and upon hearing Hayes recite his poem Robinson instantly put the words to music as part of a campfire session celebrating the trade union icon. By that September the song had been published in The Daily Worker and became a popular song with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting Franco’s fascists in Spain.

Pay attention to your DNA. The idea that you can't go home again assumes a different aspect in California poet Rebecca Foust's rendition: "Kansas one day will turn out to be Oz/and Oz Kansas."