By 2008, thousands of middle-class and rich people in Juarez, desperate to avoid shakedowns, murders, and kidnappings by cartel hit men, had begun packing up and fleeing to El Paso, where they bought houses and opened businesses. Their migration kept the northern side of the border economically afloat and turned Juarez into a pariah city—or worse, a ghost city that El Pasoans ceased thinking about. More…
My days are probably least different from yours on occasions of special public horror: another gun massacre, a bombing on American soil, the deadly explosion of a fertilizer plant. And like nearly everyone else I was angry and upset all last week, if not always for universal reasons. On Monday morning I read testimony in the Times from one of the hunger strikers indefinitely detained, so far without trial, at Guantanamo Bay, about his painful force-feeding. More…
Two sets of images bookend our Iraq War. First, there were the photographs of the naked protests of men and women, in what seemed to be the most ineffectual or deliberately trivial dissent, at a time when not even articulate dissent on a mass scale could stop the war. Now, we see photographs of the naked, piled bodies of men, sandbags on their heads, and Americans laughing at them. More…
The latest installment of the n+1 podcast looks back to December 11, to a daylong conference about the ongoing Occupy movement, Occupy Onwards. This, the first of the four panels, was called “The Banks: What Can Be Done?” It featured panelists Julia Ott of The New School, Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer, and Carne Ross of the OWS Alternative Banking Group, and was moderated by n+1 and Occupy Gazette editor Keith Gessen. More…
The purpose of this trial is to have a reckoning with Breivik, to go through his actions and try to understand them. What happened, how, and why? There is also the problem of deciding an appropriate sentence — either sanity and an initial term of twenty-one years in a penal institution (likely followed by many more) or insanity and commitment to a mental ward. More…
In its 1960s contraception rulings and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Court used the language of privacy to identify several relationships that merited special protection from state interference. The Court’s decisions were a substantive victory for women’s access to reproductive health care. But its focus on privacy put legal liberals in the increasingly common position of supporting the retreat of public power. More…
Life in many working-class areas of London has remained difficult. Local groups have reported repeated police raids and a tightening of policing. A friend who attended some of the court cases put me in touch with George, a 44-year-old black man from London who was arrested in a raid on his home some weeks after the riots. I went to his house in East London, and we spoke for a couple of hours in his living room. More…
On August 8, the three members of Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot delivered their closing statements at the Moscow Khamovniki District Court. Charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were first arrested on March 3, a day before the controversial re-election of Vladimir Putin. More…
The Occupy Frankfurt camp has existed for seven months, directly in front of the ECB. Despite the addition of as many as 5,000 on-duty policemen per shift, entry bans for potential rioters, and the fact that Occupy is a peaceful organization in its declared principles, someone suddenly decided that we were a threat to the business of the ECB and other Frankfurt banks, and a “forbidden zone” was established in Frankfurt. More…
That was when the full force of the SPVM riot squad—some 100 armed and armored cops backed by the SPVM mounted unit—charged us. Someone up ahead had thrown a Molotov cocktail at the riot line, and now the police were determined to punish us all. Later the police claimed they had warned us three times that the march was illegal and had asked us to disperse. I never heard them. More…
The next night, at 8 PM, when the music started again, my partner and I took our daughter down into the street. We strolled around the neighborhood, seeing friends and meeting strangers while the music got louder and louder, magnetically bringing more and more people together. Eventually one hundred of us were lined up along St. Viateur. More…
The wife of an activist who died under strange circumstances,/ though more likely than not it was an accident,/ says to me that she literally finds herself shaking/ from everything that’s going on, the arrests and the interrogations of activists . . . / I’m sure you know the story of N, she says./ A labor activist, they planted drugs on him, he got five years. More…
The global justice movement—so inspiring and innovative for a time, and based on a sweeping critique of how global trade agreements were undermining democracy, worker’s rights, and the environment—faded quickly after September 11. A planned mass mobilization for late September 2001 against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund was called off when the meetings themselves were canceled. More…
It is not an accident that the term “IMF riots” has become a social science cliché, or that Cameron’s public sector cuts mirror an IMF structural adjustment program. Gary Younge, writing for the Guardian, noted that serious social unrest was predicted “not just by the left but by, among others, the guardians of global capital.” Nick Clegg, now deputy prime minister, had predicted “Greek-style unrest.” More…
I went down to the courthouse to take a look at him. The younger journalists were camped out on the floor, and the court officers had set up a velvet rope in front of the door. This led to a certain amount of posturing. “Don’t you know who I am?” one of the Newsweek reporters asked a bailiff, unconsciously echoing what Strauss-Kahn is supposed to have asked the maid. More…
If you have been following the news out of Wisconsin—the state that, though I have not lived in it for over a decade, I stubbornly insist on continuing to call “home”—then you probably already know that the recent State Supreme Court election, which pitted incumbent Justice David Prosser against a former assistant state attorney general named JoAnne Kloppenburg, was more than just that. More…
At first the question was whether he was a lone wolf or a Tea Party operative, or at least influenced by the Tea Party, or perhaps just by our culture of hate, the vitriolic rhetoric of our culture of hate, for which either the former vice presidential candidate-turned-reality-television-star or people on “both sides” are to blame. More…
January 25th was warm and sunny, the omnipresent Cairo traffic eerily absent. A few friends and I walked outside and counted the ordered lines of police stationed around Tahrir Square. We had read reports of the prior protests in Cairo: smaller numbers than expected, haphazardly formed, quickly shut down. More…
All the conditions that nurtured a powerful left in California have virtually disappeared. Today, the educational plans of the Sixties administrators read like fables, while California’s legendary liberal consensus has unraveled to the extent that no Orange County conservative would identify with the Ronald Reagan who, as governor, signed into law the largest tax increase in California’s history. More…
In all this the vuvuzela reminds us that soccer is a black and working-class sport in a country whose cricket and rugby teams, among the best in the world, are still very much the extension of a privileged and mostly white sports infrastructure. More…
Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least. From the establishment of FDR’s war economy through the end of the so-called golden age of capitalism in the early 1970s, the US matched other major economies in functioning at close to full employment. More…
There are also large numbers of people wearing green camouflage outfits emblazoned with red armbands. These were recruited via advertisements promising a salary of 1,000 RMB a month (which is more than the average factory worker or high school teacher gets) in return for an ill-defined role in keeping order: most have received little or no training, and in general seem aimless. More…
It was at a conference some twenty-eight years ago, just before the moderator’s opening remarks, that the Rome-born architect and theorist Bruno Zevi pushed back from the roundtable and rose from his seat to declare, “I denounce the presence at this symposium of the fascist Philip Johnson.” The audience members shifted nervously in their chairs. More…
Last week, the Daily Telegraph reported that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Holocaust-denier, Iranian president, was descended from Jews. It was revealed that his family’s original name, abandoned in the early 1950s, was Sabourjian, which the newspaper maintained was a common Persian Jewish surname meaning “weaver of the sabour,” sabour meaning “prayershawl.” More…
Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed. More…
We’ll probably see more unemployment, we’ll certainly see more bankruptcies. We know damage has been inflicted by the credit heart attack; we know damage has been inflicted by the drop in demand, the drop in commodity prices. You know what it’s like? It’s like somebody drops a depth charge onto a submarine, and you hear a big explosion, but you don’t know what’s happening. More…
Despite its austerely philosophical agenda, the conference was haunted by the fact that, as sociologist Alberto Toscano put it, “the Idea of communism cannot be separated from the problem, if not the program, of its realization.” More…
There are people whom capitalism pretends to cherish by never letting them rest; others that capitalism has no use for at all; and the narrow, specialized labors of both groups are pressed into the service of heaping up goods for those who can hardly enjoy them—an arrangement the price of which is global warming. The common term for this collective situation is “freedom.” More…
Hitler lives in Uruguay. Yes. In this eastern republic of South America lives a Hitler Aguirre and a Hitler da Silva. There’s Hitler Pereira and Hitler Edén Ganoso. There’s even a Hitler de los Santos—“of the Saints.” To be called by the surname of the perpetrator of the worst genocide of the twentieth century—that is, Hitler—wouldn’t that give one cause for shame? More…
Hitler vive en Uruguay. Sí. En esta república oriental de Sudamérica viven Hitler Aguirre y Hitler da Silva. Viven Hitler Pereira y Hitler Edén Ganoso. Vive hasta un Hitler de los Santos. Llamarse como se apellidó el mayor genocida del siglo XX, o sea Hitles, ¿no es acaso una razón para vivir avergonzado? More…
We must reject the coercive rhetoric of constant growth, and stop thinking of our way of life (which is so anomalous in the history of the world, and even in the world today) as immutable. This is not a moral challenge, but a practical and philosophical one. Can we think of ourselves sufficiently differently to save ourselves? More…
No social change is possible without a great deal of uncertainty, and even the production of insecurity. While it may seem odd to take aim at environmentalism while the uglier war on terror still presides, it is because we wish to move past the politics of fear that we should subject all the alternatives to rigorous scrutiny. More…
The bad effects of the two-party system, if anyone doubted these, are now undeniable. Since four years ago, and for who knows how many years to come, a large minority of voters is utterly without power at the federal level. The tyranny of the majority is the law of the land, and the scandal is as plain as your face. More…
The Hindu nationalists used the folksy symbols of Hinduism even as they struck deals with big businessmen and multinational corporations. They pointed to various terrorist and Islamic fundamentalist threats to India, and promised to restore the national virility that a “liberal and secular elite” had apparently sapped. More…
