It was a not-so-happy Halloween in 2008 when the many thousands of his fans and followers heard that Studs Terkel had died. This news was perhaps softened a bit by the fact that he was 96 years old and that his life had been filled with activity: TV star, actor, radio host for nearly half a century on WFMT, author of nearly 20 books (among them such best-sellers as Division Street America, Working and The Good War, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1985), energetic activist and civic symbol. He got it right when some years before his death he crafted his own playful epitaph: ‘Curiosity did not kill this cat.’ | more…

John Marciano has written an absolutely essential book to counter the prevailing myth that the American invasion of Vietnam must be commemorated as a ‘noble cause’ of which all Americans need to be proud. We should not question that everyone who crossed the Pacific to kill and die there, as the embodiment of all that is great about America, has to be honored for their patriotic dedication and sacrifice. At least since Vietnam, if not much earlier, joining the military has been called ‘service,’ a selfless act for a higher good. Marciano points out that the call for honoring participants in the war does not include the hundreds of thousands who protested in opposition. | more…

Alan Wieder, author of Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation, talks to community radio station KBOO’s Gene Bradley on “Political Perspectives,” followed by an interview with Studs Terkel, from the same studio, in 1996. And, if you’re in Portland, Oregon on August 30, drop by Broadway Books, , 7:00 to 8:00pm, 1714 NE Broadway, where Alan will read from his book and talk about Studs Terkel. | more…

Over the last forty years, global capitalism has increasingly been shaped by the core tenets of neoliberalism. The neoliberal counter-revolution emerged as a response to the return of economic crisis in the 1970s, and to the power of working class and anti-colonial movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It was geared towards the interests of wealthy and corporate elites, at the expense of the vast majority of working class and oppressed people worldwide. The divisions between the 1% and the 99% have become ever more acute, with the most extraordinary and ostentatious wealth for a tiny elite alongside hardship, insecurity and poverty for many people. | more…

The struggle over memory and truth about the Vietnam War continues. It reemerged in May when President Obama announced the opening of Fulbright University in Vietnam, and that Bob Kerrey would chair the board of trustees. Fulbright is the first private university in Vietnam, with ties to the Kennedy Center at Harvard and the US State Department. What does this recent appointment and the controversy surrounding it teach us about the War in Vietnam? | more…

Alan Wieder talks to community radio KBOO‘s Desiree Hellegers on the Old Mole Variety Hour about Studs Terkel and the Broadway Books launch—August 30, 7:00 p.m.— of Wieder‘s brand new book, Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation. | more…

On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years—through November 11, 2025—commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, “more than 58,000 patriots,” who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 3 million Vietnamese—soldiers, parents, grandparents, children—also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. | more…

Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, is the author of several books MRP books, including The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. Recently, with Paul Birkett, he wrote Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Brill Publishers), to be released in the U.S. December 13. John Bellamy Foster was interviewed by Christian Stache from the Berlin-based daily, Junge Welt. | more…

Alan Wieder, author of Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation, talks to Rag Radio‘s Thorne Dreyer about Studs Terkel, the great leftist broadcaster, author, and raconteur. | more…

When it was made, Socialist Register’s decision to devote its 2016 issue to the far Right was prescient; when published late last year it was more than timely. Now, both it and this review are in danger of being overtaken by the phenom- enon they’re describing. If the far Right was on the march in 2015, its progress is even more alarmingly visible now. | more…

Marta Harnecker, author of over eighty books and monographs in several languages, including A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism, wrote 12 articles on political activism and revolutionary vision, published in Venezuela in 2004. These articles were revised and updated this year, and now appear, translated by Federico Fuentes, on the Old and New Project website, with an introduction by the editors | more…

Leo Panitch, distinguish professor at York University, Canada, is the author of several books and the editor, with Greg Albo, of The Socialist Register, an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the international independent new left. | more…