Volume 56, Issue 01 (May)
Although private corporations under capitalism have always been heavily involved in promoting war, the direct role played by the private sector in the prosecution of war has traditionally been quite limited, falling well short of the supply of combat troops. There are signs that this may now be changing. The decade and a half since the end of the Cold War has seen the rapid proliferation of private military firms, hundreds of which are now engaged in combat and combat-support operations in Iraq and throughout the globe. Some of these firms are subsidiaries of much larger multinational corporations. The private soldiers employed in this industry are mercenaries, but not of the traditional kind. They are employees of corporations that have boards of directors, are publicly traded, participate in the open market, carry out mergers, hire and fire in accordance with market criteria—and above all are not directly responsible to any public authority. In other words, these corporations and their employees are fully integrated with capitalist enterprise as a whole. This phenomenon has recently been dubbed “the corporatization of the military” by Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution analyst and author of Corporate Warriors (2003) | more…
Abrupt climate change has been a growing topic of concern for about a decade for climate scientists, who fear that global warming could shut down the ocean conveyer that warms the North Atlantic, plunging Europe and parts of North America into Siberian-like conditions within a few decades or even years. But it was only with the recent appearance of a Pentagon report on the possible social effects-in terms of instability and war-of abrupt climate change that it riveted public attention. As the Observer (February 22) put it, “Climate change over the next 20 years could result in global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.” | more…
Economic theory is not neutral, and the results when it is applied owe much to the implicit and explicit assumptions embedded in a particular theory. That such assumptions reflect specific ideologies is most obvious in the case of the neoclassical economics that underlies neoliberal economic policies | more…
People without a voice are not people in any meaningful sense of the word. Silenced people cannot express their ideas; they can neither consent nor protest. They are reduced to being pawns in the schemes of the powerful, mendicants who must accept whatever is imposed upon them. In order to keep people in a state of subjugation, silencing their voices is essential. Nowhere is this clearer than in U.S. prisons | more…
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002) 411 pages, $17.95 paperback.
This summer I moved into an old house in the Catskills full of the random possessions of those who have used it as a retreat since it was built in the 1920s. With most of my books in storage and no television I entertained myself by reading a stack of Time magazines from the late sixties and early seventies that I found in a trunk in the small attic. Flipping through them nearly every evening, I enjoyed countless articles about the hippies, the Yippies, Richard Nixon, the Black Panthers, and the inevitable revolution on America’s horizon. I read the ongoing coverage of the Chicago Eight (turned Seven) trial, sensational portraits of California’s fringe cultures, and panic-stricken reports of the now too-often forgotten wildcat strikes of the early seventies | more…