Journalism

David Montgomery, one of the founders of the “New Labor History” in the United States, who inspired a generation of activists and historians, died December 2. He was 84. David lived a remarkable life: blacklisted as a union organizer in the 1950s, twenty years later he was named Farnam Professor of History at Yale. Even as Farnam Professor he remained a deeply political animal, working with local labor activists, black and white, in New Haven and elsewhere.
I’ll never forget David’s story about how he became an academic.
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

The Berkeley Academic Senate voted 336 to 34 on Monday afternoon to “condemn” Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for his administration’s “authorization of violent responses to nonviolent protests over the past two years,” culminating in the police attack on nonviolent Occupy Cal demonstrators on November 9. . . .
. . . . continued at TheNation.com HERE.

On Monday, the Berkeley Academic Senate will vote on a resolution expressing “no confidence” in their chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, because of police violence against Occupy Cal campus activists there on November 9. The chancellor’s defense of police conduct was particularly outrageous: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms,” he declared the day after the police confrontation. “This is not non-violent civil disobedience.”. . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

Two unforgettable videos flew around the world wide web on Saturday, one horrifying, the other inspiring. Everybody knows the first: black-clad cops at UC Davis shooting pepper-spray into the faces of Occupy Wall Street student demonstrators who are sitting passively on the ground with linked arms. More than two million people have watched that video on YouTube—you might title it “the whole world is watching.”  But there’s a second video, shot the next night, that is amazing in a different way . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
He’s Back! cried the headline in The Times of London in fall 2008 as global stock markets crashed and banks failed. The “he,” of course, was Karl Marx, who had written 160 years earlier about the periodic “crises of capitalism.” . . .
. . . continued at the L.A. Review of Books HERE

The cancer danger from the new airport security scanners–which look under a traveler’s clothing–is greater than we had feared.   “Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 Americans could get cancer each year from the machines,”  ProPublica’s Michael Grabell says.  “Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as ‘safe.'”. . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

Only in LA: On one side of Pico Blvd., the Rancho Park golf course, with joggers, dog walkers and of course, golfers; on the other, a hundred “Occupy Fox News” demonstrators outside Fox Studios, chanting “We – are – the 99 per cent!”; in between, a hundred LA cops, many with riot gear at the ready, and an entire city block of TV news trucks, bristling with giant satellite dishes, power cables up and down the street, and news reporters under lights talking earnestly into the cameras. . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

After decades in which “hard hats” were described as enemies of the left, and four decades after construction workers in lower Manhattan attacked anti-war demonstrators on Wall Street, the AFL-CIO on Thursday called on its members to defend Occupy Wall Street from the NYPD as the city moved to arrest and evict protestors in Zuccotti Park.  Hard hats and hippies, together at last!….
. . . . Continued at TheNation.com HERE

When Sarah Palin announced last week that she was not running for president, many wondered, what had she been trying to do during the last three years, when she seemed to be almost a candidate?  Now we know: she was trying to make money.
. . .  continued at TheNation.com HERE

From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic in the Streets, Hollywood was a key arena for the giant U-turn in American politics that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  (Review of  An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman; Dissent, Fall 2011) . . . . continued HERE.