I am lying in a meadow high in the Rocky Mountains. The sun is warm and comforting. I watch the clouds, puffy white in the blue sky, but soon pull a cap over my eyes…
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…
Gas "Frackers" Come to a School District's Rescue?
Two schools, one a vocational technical high school and the other an elementary school, sit on tracts of land a few blocks from the house in which I grew up, in Ford City (Armstrong County),…