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December 2004, Volume 56 — Number 7 c o n t
e n t s New Political Science, a journal associated with the Caucus for a New Political Science, has devoted its entire September 2004 number to “The Politics of Empire, Terror and Hegemony.” The quality of the contributions to this special issue, some of them by MR and MR Press authors, including David Gibbs, Sheila Collins, Edward Greer, and William Robinson, is remarkable. In particular, Greer’s essay on the use of torture by the United States in the “Global War on Terror” uncovers facts that no one can afford to ignore. The deep impression that this essay and the reporting on U.S. acts of torture by Mike Tanner, writing for the New York Review of Books (October 7, 2004), have had on our own thinking is evident in this month’s Review of the Month. | more |. REVIEW
OF THE MONTH "A new age of barbarism is upon us." These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, and Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the killing of hundreds on a Spanish commuter train and hundreds more in Bali, Business Week declared: "America, Europe, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and governments everywhere are under attack by Islamic extremists. These terrorists have but one demand-the destruction of modern secular society." Western civilization was portrayed as standing in opposition to the barbarians, who desire to destroy what is assumed to be the pinnacle of social evolution. The New
Israel With the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin on November 4, 1995, a long interval of relative openness, liberalization, and attempts at peace and normal relations with the Arab world came to an end. By assassinating Rabin the Israeli right not only seized political power—including inside the Labor Party—but also drove the last nail in the coffin of a certain kind of Israel. That Israel gave way to a new kind of country, with its own particular values and, in the end, a new constitutional framework and set of institutions. How was the transformation to this new Israel accomplished? Mayhem in the
Medical Marketplace Even in the United States, some aspects of life are too precious, intimate or corruptible to entrust to the market. We prohibit selling kidneys and buying wives, judges, and children. How far should such prohibitions extend? In recent years entrepreneurs and their friends in government have privatized many publicly-funded services previously provided by government or nonprofit agencies—including interrogating Iraqi prisoners. Even in liberal Cambridge, our school superintendent proposes enlisting a for-profit firm to set up a new “public” high school. Capital Punishment
Update Following a short hiatus in the 1970s, capital punishment has regained its position as the most reactionary social policy in America. In the Supreme Court case of Furman v. Georgia, the Court ruled that the death penalty, as it had been practiced prior to 1972, was unconstitutional and effectively placed a legal moratorium on executions in the United States. Four years later, that same Court accepted minor statutory reforms and reinstituted the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia. Placing these landmark court decisions in historical perspective and reviewing subsequent developments reveal the political dimensions of capital punishment in the United States during the last fifty years. POETRY A child disappears WINTER
BOOKS SUPPLEMENT A review of Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and The U.S. Global Agenda by Larry Everest. Black Radical
Enigma Reviews of The Essence of Reparations and Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems by Amiri Baraka; Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual by Jerry Gafio Watts; Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka by Harry T. Elam; and A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics by Komozi Woodard. Washed Up on Long Island: Urban Renewal at
the Beach A review of Between Ocean and City: The Transformation of Rockaway, New York by Lawrence Kaplan and Carol P. Kaplan. Scarcity of What
and for Whom? A review of The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment by Michael Perelman. |
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