Vote for Zinn Education Project: Promote A People’s History

By Myla Kabat-Zinn

About three years ago, my father and a former student founded the Zinn Education Project (ZEP). Their goal was to promote “people’s history” in schools across the country.

To support this important work will take less than five minutes and requires no money. CREDO/Working Assets supports a wide field of progressive organizations and has selected the ZEP as one of 40 organizations it will fund.

Vote for ZEP today.

2011: A Brave New Dystopia

By Chris Hedges
TruthDig

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

The Trials of Tony Judt

Even as ALS tightens its grip, the Leftist historian remains outspoken

By Evan R. Goldstein
The Chronicle Review

On a Monday evening in mid-October, the historian Tony Judt appeared onstage at the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, in Greenwich Village. “I hope you don’t mind if I begin by shooting the elephant in the house,” he said, speaking from an electric wheelchair, wrapped in a black blanket, with a Bi-Pap breathing device attached to his nose. “As you can see,” he continued, his voice gravelly and labored, “I’m paralyzed from the neck down, and also use this rather ridiculous-looking tube on my face to breathe.”

YEMEN – THE RETURN OF OLD GHOSTS

Adam Curtis                       BBC Jan 8, 2010

What I find so fascinating about the reporting of the War on Terror is the way almost all of it ignores history – as if it is a conflict happening outside time. The Yemen is a case in point. In the wake of the underpants bomber we have been deluged by a wave of terror journalism about this dark mediaeval country that harbours incomprehensible fanatics who want to destroy the west. None of it has explained that only forty years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners.

But the moment you start looking into that war you find out all sorts of extraordinary things.

FILM: Challenging 500 Years of Globalisation

A Maasai community explains their fights for their traditional land. Credit:Image from “The End of Poverty?”

By Lucy Komisar

NEW YORK, Nov 14 (IPS) – To end poverty, you have to know how it began – with globalisation. No, not the 20th century variety engendered by multinationals and their friends at the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They just codified practices that kept developing countries poor.