We are pleased to offer a groundbreaking and myth-shattering article by Sam Webb on the question of imagining what socialism would be like in the US and how we can get there. Gerald Horne delves further into the crisis of US imperialism and the limits to its global reach. In so doing, Horne helps us imagine ways we can build local and global opposition. Poet Bill Witherup details the dangers of the nuclear power industry and the production of nuclear arms in a memoir of his father who worked at Hanford. In separate articles, David Zink and David Mallisk examine different aspects of the growing environmental crisis and both immediate and long-term systemic ways to protect our planet.
We are also pleased to bring you an interview with Frances Fox-Piven who discusses the political near-term struggle against the ultra right, a review of two new CDs by Bruce Springsteen and Nancy Griffith, a historical reflection on labor’s involvement with the struggle for peace, as well as more poems, book reviews, a movie review, critical commentaries and more.
Please continue to send in your thoughts in letters to the editor.
In Struggle for Peace and Justice,
PA Editors
(illustration by Victor Velez)
Departments
04 July's Letters
08 Commentary
Fearing Faith in Weird Truth
By Steven Laffoley
New Hope for the Empathy Impaired (A Tongue-In-Cheek Rant About Corporate Christianity)
By Pamela Oswald
16 Book Reviews
The Children of NAFTA
Reviewed by Gerald Horne
Secrecy and Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq
Reviewed by Norman Markowitz
Borders and Border Politics in a Globalizing World
Reviewed by Akinbola E. Akinwumi
The Soviet Century
Reviewed by Erwin Marquit
20 July's Poetry
Motown, Arsenal of Democracy
By Marge Piercy
Address
By Adrienne Rich
The Dram Shop
By Michael Shepler
67 Fiction
Redemption
By Ed Stone
Features
40 Cover Story: Our Best Hope
By Sam Webb
While socialism isn’t immediately on today’s agenda, the struggle for it must always be kept in mind and what’s done in the present will shape what the future looks like.
24 Fallout: Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Trinity Test
By Bill Witherup
A father’s search for jobs and security leads west to Washington State and lands him in the middle of the project to build the world’s first atomic bomb, the consequences of which for himself, the world and his family are catastrophic.
30 A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Globalization
By Gerald Horne
The Bush administration and its transnational backers, faced by increased competition from the countries of the European Union, growing resistance in Latin America and the dynamic economy of China, continue to lose ground.
32 The IMF and World Bank for Dummies
By Barbara Jones
Who’s afraid of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund? Why do developing countries never seem to develop? At least part of the answer lies in the structure of the economic relationship set up by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
36 The Burdens of Herstory: Interview with Sonia Khan
By Ari Paul
Poverty, globalization, tradition and modernism, religious belief and secular law shape equal rights for women in India. In this struggle all is not always what it seems.
44 Utopia
By Tom Riggins
"Utopia," literally nowhere, has always been the place we long for, a paradise here on earth. A big factor in socialist thinking, there are good and bad varieties as history has shown. Anyone for a taste of "good" utopia?
48 Protest Politics 101: An Interview with Frances Fox-Piven
Public intellectuals, students and workers are combating the Bush theocrats in a variety of ways: counter-recruitment, bread-and-butter struggles for economic justice and electoral campaigns. The important thing is to keep up the fight.
50 Bees, Bombs and Destiny: An Essay on Natural Selection and Human Nature
By Emile Schepers
Is competition genetically determined making capitalism a natural? If so, what’s a good Marxist to do?
56 Green or Gone: The Fight for a Sustainable Environment
By David Zink
Activists are challenging the legal concept of corporate personhood where business is granted civil rights equal those of real people, making them far more powerful than ordinary mortals.
58 The Pollution Solution: Alternative Energy and
Human Survival
By David Mallisk
The drive for maximum profits is driving humanity and nature to the brink. What will it take to create a sustainable society?
62 Divided We Fall: A Lesson From Labor History
By Ben Sears
Looking at the past may shed light on the present in the fight for labor unity.
