In 1954 the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb. In the summer negotiations between France, Britain, Vietnam, China and the USSR ended the Indochina War. In Chicago, Toward Freedom’s education and organizing mission was taking shape.
The most painful part of this tragedy is that it was completely preventable, but perhaps neither the government, nor Walmart and many others find the issue urgent enough for decisive action to spare poor people a horrible death.
The kind of tragic exploitation of workers in Bangladesh is present all over Africa, where people are denied basic labour rights as part of state efforts to attract and retain foreign investment. Militant and sustained efforts are needed to resist this trend.
From the school cafeteria to rural tomato farms, and all the way to pickets at the White House, people are challenging the ways in which government programs benefit big agribusiness to the detriment of small- and mid-sized farmers.
George Orwell's journals assess events from the perspective of the past looking forward, rather than from the perspective of our present looking back. They thus refreshingly remind us of the uncertainty of the time, the contingency of history, and the moral and political complexity so often lost to the editors of historical volumes.
It is becoming more likely that Americans will one day cast their votes in national elections with just the click of a mouse. What the American public doesn’t know is that sitting at the controls of Internet voting technology is a group of private corporations whose board members and CEOs once worked for the US intelligence community.
In light of Evo Morales' May Day expulsion of USAID from Bolivia, here is a look back to the Harry Truman administration's work to undermine Bolivia's transformative National Revolution in 1952. This history's legacy lives on; Washington’s power is woven into the fabric of Bolivian politics, from the dreams and nightmares of the National Revolution, into the MAS era of today.