Women Fighting Bush

Inside...

• Speak Easy, Speak Free: Sonia Sanchez Talking about Language
• March For Women's Lives
• Reversing the Gender Gap
• The Education Scam
• The Great Medicare Robbery
• Telling It From the Mountain Top
• Book Review - Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis
• Fear and Loathing at the Movies - Oscars 2004
• Marx, Markets and Meatgrinders: An Interview with Bertell Ollman

In Print...

We writers have a passionate love affair with words – words that quite often don’t just get on the page but [actually] jump out at you.

It never occurred to me that if the same situation had arisen about 10 years earlier, my mom would have been facing a much more terrifying prospect. Being born after 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision, I’ve always had a certain set of reproductive rights.
See: March for Women's Lives

“Boys are becoming the second sex” proclaimed Business Week last May in a cover story titled “The New Gender Gap.” Business Week’s article appeared as part of a spate of articles and television news segments on the subject of increased educational opportunities for women.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It is the Bush administration’s education reform plan. Why is NCLB being criticized and labeled a set-up for vouchers and privatization?

Private insurance and pharmaceutical companies 1, seniors 0. Yes, the medical/health monopolistic private sector has prevailed once again. The major focus of the Medicare prescription drug bill has been on the prescription drugs-for-seniors component. An evaluation of this legislation triumphantly signed by Bush last December, shows that its major beneficiaries will be the medical/health monopolies. It does little or nothing for seniors.

If she had been a partisan of capitalism, Louise Thompson Patterson would have been a Horatio Alger heroine, lionized today as a pioneering woman of the Harlem Renaissance and a role model for both African Americans and women.

While the US prison population has surpassed 2 million people, this figure is more than 20 percent of the entire global imprisoned population combined. Angela Y. Davis shows, in her most recent book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, that this alarming situation isn’t as old as one might think.

Resentment, anger and loss are emotions that fuel performances in many of the Oscar-nominated films of 2003.

Editor’s Note: Bertell Ollman is a professor of political science at New York University. He worked in the middle 1960s as an adviser to the Michael Manly government in Jamaica. He invented the board game Class Struggle. He is the author of numerous books on Marxism, most recently, How to Take and Exam…and Remake the World, Ballbuster?: True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman, and Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marxist Methods.