For some time now, I have been searching for answers to a deeply perplexing question: Why is the United States promoting the spread of atomic bombs worldwide? By "atomic bombs" I mean the kind that turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a fiery hell in 1945 -- A-bombs made from plutonium (Nagasaki) or "enriched" uranium (Hiroshima).

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It has now been just over four years since the first group of US students were sent off to Cuba as a part of a training program that was offered by Cuba's Ministry of Health (MINSAP). This was their addition to a school only for foreign nationals that was born out of the turmoil of Hurricanes George and Mitch in 1999 that devastated much of Latin America. At this writing, almost 100 students from the US are underway in their studies.

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The government of President Hugo Chávez was swept to power in Venezuela, an oil-rich country in the northernmost part of South America, through democratic elections in 1999. Chávez's government identified the major problem in the country as being the fact that the country's vast oil wealth was not being used to alleviate poverty, as 80% of the country's 24 million inhabitants continued to be impoverished.

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If the original film insisted on portraying the People’s Republic of China, and communism generally, as the real enemy of America, our modern version offers another reality. This time the Manchurian candidate is the pawn, not of the Chinese, but of Manchurian Global, a powerful multinational corporation, which, as one character states, has in one way or another controlled much of the policy decisions of every president since Nixon.

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WELCOME to the brave new world of "Free" Trade. This is a world that extends beyond the World Trade Organisation. This may be difficult to comprehend, but the fact of the matter is that global capital, led by the US government, seeks more and more to tread where even the WTO did not. The US has now developed a strategy that bypasses the WTO and actually goes much beyond the onerous conditions that the WTO lays down.

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Once the U.S. occupation of Iraq began over a year ago, Iraqi workers lost no time in reorganizing their country’s labor movement. Labor activity spread from Baghdad to the Kurdish north, with the center of the storm in the south, in the oil and electrical installations around Basra, and the port of Um Qasr.

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What would you say to a health care system that provides for primary care physicians, specialists, prescription drugs, mental health care, drug treatment, long term care, and optical and dental care for everybody? That would be the Conyers bill H.R. 676. And it will cost most 95% of us less money than we are now paying. Who would pay more? The answer is easy--the guys who got the big Bush tax breaks.

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ST. LOUIS – Voters here in the Show Me State want George W. Bush to show them one good reason to give him four more years in the White House in the Nov. 2 election. Missouri labor and its allies have seen enough already and are working hard to "show Bush the door in 2004."

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The Employment Equity Report, released by the South African Minister of Labor, shows the extent to which private capital is actually resisting transformation of the racial and gender demographics of middle and top management in South Africa’s companies. It shows the inherent and systemic racial character of South African capitalism. Racial and gender exclusion are not just a past legacy, they continue to be reproduced as an ongoing reality under capitalism. It is an illustration that South African capitalism has, for more than a century, relied on white male middle and top management as its most trusted "lieutenants" for its accumulation needs.

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Samuel Huntington is an ideologue presenting a world model in which imperialism and the different people’s struggle to resist and destroy it have nothing to do with the conflicts in today’s world. For him the conflicts center over cultural values of different "civilizations." Lately Huntington has turned his attention internally to the United States where he attempts to apply a variation of his thinking to the domestic scene. His ideas would deprive the peoples of the US of a powerful weapon for social progress – unity.

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During the last couple years we’ve been hearing a lot about a "global clash of civilizations." We have our own clash of civilizations going on, right here in the United States. Essentially, civilization is the sum total of the expressed dreams of a people. It is their version – and vision – of what life is supposed to be. But in the United States, only one very small group is empowered to dream its dreams – to build its version of civilization.

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Is it any wonder then that the Bush administration has specifically endorsed Wal-Mart as a credit to American capitalism? We cannot vote Wal-Mart out of office this November, but we can change the culture in which Wal-Mart operates by voting out George Bush. Don’t be fooled by soothing music and pictures of smiling workers.

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With over 42 million uninsured Americans, and another 40 million who are under insured, the time has come to change our inefficient and costly fragmented health care system. The United States National Health Insurance Act (HR 676) establishes a new American national health insurance program by creating a single payer health care system.

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By now everybody knows that Martha Stewart has been sentenced to 5 months in prison for lying about a phone call. I think it was Jeffrey Toobin who said, "The government has sent a clear message to all Americans. If you lie, you’re going to suffer the consequences." Isn’t that just rich.

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"The people there are dead because we wanted them dead" was the response of a Pentagon spokesperson to a journalist’s question about the "accidental" bombing of civilians in Chowkar Karez, Afghanistan in late October 2002. In the drive to conquer Afghanistan, Ninan Koshy reports in The War on Terror, the Bush administration and the Pentagon deliberately and indiscriminately bombed enormous areas populated by civilian non-combatants.

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Bush’s AIDS policy is a killer. AIDS took the lives of 3 million people since January of 2003, the majority of whom were in Africa. Nearly half were women. Yet Bush’s spending priorities to fight HIV infections and AIDS have allocated only $350 million of the highly publicized $15 billion he promised in his 2003 State of the Union speech. More interested in pushing a far-right agenda than in saving lives, Bush is presiding over one of the worst atrocities in human history.

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Thomas Frank’s What the Matter With Kansas? is a book with a local focus on an allegedly non-battleground state, featuring a cast of characters few readers outside the Sunflower State will recognize, and offering an analysis that should be read and considered by every progressive, left or working-class activist from Maine to San Diego, and from Seattle to the Florida Keys.

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The world is witnessing, for the last several years, extensive resistance against the economic onslaught of the latest phase of capitalism on the common people, which is popularly known as neo-liberal globalization. Even many of those who welcomed the advent of this globalization as marking a progress for human well-being have turned into its critics and are crying halt to its rampages.

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Speaking with Timothy Pfaff in the Financial Times Magazine sometime last year, anti-war activist and writer Maxine Hong Kingston remarked: "It’s terrible to be in a country that is making war all over the world." Sociology professor and environmental activist Al Gedicks, in this compact, well-researched and urgent volume, concurs, sharing similar sentiments about US – and broadly Western – neo-imperial ambitions, now vehemently militarist.

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The apartheid wall must be dismantled immediately! The CPI calls upon all supporters of peace in Israel and the world to pressure the Sharon government to immediately implement the recommendations of the International Court of Justice in Hague concerning the apartheid wall.

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