This past June, I attended the Left Forum at Pace College in Lower Manhattan. I used to love to go to this city. We visited often and moved there twelve years ago, planning to stay…
Night Thoughts
What happened to my mother's dreams? And my father's too? They're gone, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I see all the dead men and women walking arm in arm, talking, around the block near…
The Road Beckons: Excerpt from Cheap Motels and…
[Since Monthly Review Press made my book the special sale feature for September, I thought that it would be appropriate to end the month with an excerpt] The distance between Pittsburgh and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is…
The State of Black America and the Need…
The following essay is adapted by us from our book, Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for…
Memorializing Martin Luther King, Jr.
We often visit the monuments and museums along the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and each time I am surprised at my heightened emotions when we are there. Maybe it is because the museums are…
Socialism and Muhammad's Economic Blueprint
The following is an interview of me (MDY) conducted by Cedric Muhammad (CM), who is an aide to the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, the National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of…
Public School Teachers: New Unions, New Alliances, New…
The U.S. working class was slow to respond to the hard times it faced during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Finally, however, in February, 2011, workers in Wisconsin began the famous uprising that…
Karen’s Cancer
Karen was diagnosed with cancer five years ago, in March 2008. She had surgery, then radiation and chemotherapy. There followed many visits to doctors, first every three months, then every six months. Finally, three weeks…
One Nation, One World
Counterpunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair’s essay, “The Silent Death of the American Left,” succinctly discusses the absence of a left-wing presence and activism in the face of myriad social and ecological disasters.* Somewhat surprisingly, this…