Wednesday, September 26, 2007
“Anger and passion slipped inside a fun cartoon coating.” (4:21 pm)
Mikhaela B. Reid has publishing political cartoons on InTheseTimes.com for some time now. Her work is witty, literate, tenacious—and well-drawn. (One of my favorites involves a fundamentalist bootcamp.) She’s recently published her first book, Attack of the 50 Foot Mikhaela! and was kind enough to answer a few questions for the ITT List.
And if you want to get your mitts on a copy of Attack of the 50 Foot Mikhaela, there’s no better time than now. Just make a tax-deductible donation to In These Times, and we’ll send you a copy of Mikhaela’s book, plus a one-year subscription to our print edition. Click here to contribute!
1.) How long have you been drawing political cartoons?
Since I was an angry, angry toddler! In Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela, I include an early example of an innovative “sticker art” political cartoon about the state of cannibalistic giraffes in a modern capitalist consumer society.
Seriously, I was political from an early age. In my family, not being an angry leftwinger would have been an assault on family values. My parents had marched against Vietnam and were Reagan-hating activists. My granddad Zadie Katler was always lecturing me on labor issues and would give me a pile of In These Times and Nation back issues every time I came to visit.
I drew my first proper political cartoon for my high school newspaper as a protest against an overly-restrictive dress code. I followed that up with attacks on high school homophobes—I was president... read more
posted by Erin Polgreen | start the discussion
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Ways to Fight Unionbusting (4:47 pm)
If you’ve read Art Levine’s article Unionbusting Confidential, and wanted to know what you could do to protect working Americans, here are some resources that will tell you what you need to know about unionbusting and how to support the Employee Free Choice Act. The Employee Free Choice Act would create a level playing field for workers seeking to form a union and strengthens penalties against employers who violate workers’ organizing rights.
AFL-CIO
Change to Win
American Rights at Work
And if you want to hear more from Art, here’s a recording of his appearance on the Thom Hartmann Show.
posted by Erin Polgreen | 6 comments
America: “A Pants-Piddling Mess” (2:54 pm)
After recounting the generous reception that Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev received upon visiting the United States in September 1959, historian Rick Perlstein asks:
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Was the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was confident, mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them. But what progress we have made! Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.
From there, things get a little shrill, as well as hilarious, and 100 percent spot-on. Read it here.
posted by Brian Cook | start the discussion
Monday, September 24, 2007
Akbar Ganji’s Open Letter (5:36 pm)
I’m late on this, but if you haven’t seen it already, you should definitely read Akbar Ganji’s open to Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations. It begins:
The people of Iran are experiencing difficult times both internationally and domestically. Internationally, they face the threat of a military attack from the US and the imposition of extensive sanctions by the UN Security Council. Domestically, a despotic state has – through constant and organized repression – imprisoned them in a life and death situation.
Far from helping the development of democracy, US policy over the past 50 years has consistently been to the detriment of the proponents of freedom and democracy in Iran. The 1953 coup against the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and the unwavering support for the despotic regime of the Shah, who acted as America’s gendarme in the Persian Gulf, are just two examples of these flawed policies. More recently the confrontation between various US Administrations and the Iranian state over the past three decades has made internal conditions very difficult for the proponents of freedom and human rights in Iran. Exploiting the danger posed by the US, the Iranian regime has put military-security forces in charge of the government, shut down all independent domestic media, and is imprisoning human rights activists on the pretext that they are all agents of a foreign enemy. The Bush Administration, for its part, by approving a fund for democracy assistance in Iran, which has in fact being... read more
posted by Brian Cook | 1 comment
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Senate Moves Wrong (12:38 pm)
The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of passing a resolution that condemns MoveOn for running an anti-Petraeus advertisement in the New York Times last week.
According to Talking Points Memo, Hillary Clinton wisely voted against the resolution.
posted by Anna Schneider | 2 comments
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Another Taser Tale (3:59 pm)
ITT has been on the Taser trail for a while now, thanks to the fine investigative reporting of Silja J.A. Talvi. In November, 2006, we brought you Stunning Revelations, which took a critical gander at the non-lethal, for-profit weapons industry. And we covered the protesters who were tasered at a fundraiser for Sen. Rick Santorum in Passive Resisters (please, please excuse the pun). Last, but not least, Silja rounded up the latest evolutions in non-lethal weaponry this January with Non-Lethal Weaponry: The Next Generation. In all of these articles, we’ve been highly critical of the easy-to-abuse nature of non-lethal weaponry—as well as their possible side effects. From “The Next Generation:”
“Non-lethal” is still the operative term with all of these new weapons, but civilian experience with Taser stun guns shows that “non-lethal” means “usually not lethal.” Since 2001, roughly 200 people have died after being stunned with Tasers. Taser International, Inc., attributes all of the deaths to other causes, including acute intoxication and “excited delirium.” The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation to review some of those deaths.
The rapid evolution of electricity-based weaponry raises concerns for abuse by governments and law enforcement agencies that have already demonstrated a propensity to use electrical shock weaponry as a form of torture.
During a March 2005 debate with Taser CEO Rick Smith, Amnesty International USA’s William Schulz pointed out that “stun technology in general is one of the most widely used instruments of torture around the world.”
Human rights advocates... read more
posted by Erin Polgreen | 6 comments
The Militaristic Stepping Stool (3:16 pm)
With the recent unraveling of the U.S. presence in Iraq, it comes as no surprise that the Bush Administration is looking to deal someone (or perhaps everyone) in the Middle East a final and detrimental sissy-punch before withdrawing from the region. It should also come as no surprise that Iran may be the key recipient. The ideology of “When All Else Fails, Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age” has become both an ultimatum and a last resort for American diplomacy.
This wouldn’t be the first time that frustration of this kind was exhibited by the leaders of our great democracy. There are uncanny parallels between the Cowards-in-Chief that reigned during two of America’s major offensives-turned-evacuations, parallels that extend beyond human and civil rights violations. If my memory serves me correctly, borders were crossed via an intense military campaign when the U.S bombed Cambodia just prior to the U.S. evacuation from South Vietnam. While it seems unlikely that an invasion of Vietnam’s western neighbor was among the intentions of the oval office at the beginning of the Vietnam War, one has to wonder just how close Iran came to top-priority during the preemptive strike against Iraq á la Shock and Awe.
Whether friend or foe, if you don’t instantly succumb to the whims of the most powerful militaristic nation in the world you might find yourself becoming a means to an end.
by Davie Williams, Publishing Intern
posted by Anna Schneider | start the discussion
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Risking Everything To Write The Truth (7:05 pm)
US troops who criticised Iraq war strategy killed in Baghdad
· Soldiers’ article claimed Bush’s policy was total failure
· Deaths reported on eve of presidential address
Thursday September 13, 2007
Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian:
Two US soldiers who helped write a critique from the front saying America had “failed on every promise” in the war have been killed in Iraq, it was reported yesterday.
Staff Sergeant Yance Gray, 26, and Sergeant Omar Mora, 28, were among a group of seven soldiers serving in Iraq who wrote a piece excoriating America’s conduct of the war. The piece was published in the New York Times last month.
The men were killed in Baghdad when the cargo truck in which they were riding rolled over, the Associated Press and local news outlets reported yesterday. The Pentagon had yet to confirm their deaths early yesterday.
The criticism caused a flurry of public debate because of the candour with which the men, all serving in the 82nd Airborne, described the situation in Iraq.
There was also speculation they could face severe penalties for being so openly critical of the war. Another US soldier, Private Scott Beauchamp, who wrote a shocking account in New Republic magazine about a soldier treating a piece of a child’s skull as a souvenir, had his mobile phone and laptop confiscated.
Read the rest of the sad news here.
Read their original op-ed in the New York Times here.
posted by Erin Polgreen | 40 comments
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